The Heckler’s Veto Is Killing Universities’ Credibility

On Monday night, UC Berkeley was the stage of a sadly familiar scene, with police struggling to contain fires, vandalism, and assaults outside the final stop of Turning Point USA’s campus tour. If this feels like déjà vu, it is. In 2017, protests over a Milo Yiannopoulos event on the campus also devolved into disruptive rioting. In both cases, the university issued boilerplate statements filled with vague platitudes defending free speech and condemning violence.

UC Berkeley is far from the only university to find itself in this situation over the last decade.  According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) Campus Deplatforming Database, instances of the “heckler’s veto” – efforts to silence speakers through noise, intimidation, or violence – have risen since 2014, with only a brief pause during the COVID pandemic. The number of speakers targeted by “attempted” or “substantial” disruptions climbed from just 3 in 2021 to 79 in 2024.

This surge has coincided with a dramatic decline in the public’s view of higher education. Gallup reports that the share of Americans with “little” or “no” confidence in colleges and universities tripled between 2015 and 2024. Similarly, Monitoring the Future’s long-running survey of 12th-graders shows that the percentage of high-school seniors who think colleges do a “good” or “very good” job for the country fell from 62% to 42% over the last decade.