There’s a growing movement for colleges to enact new policies against bullying, but I worry that these rules endanger free expression—and can make bullying worse by giving administrators a new tool to silence their critics.

I’m quoted in a new Chronicle of Higher Education article that reports, “Academe differs from other workplaces in key ways that can allow bullying to flourish. Its hierarchical structure—think of the many distinctions in status among different types of faculty members, for example—is fertile territory for abuse. Tenure can also make it more difficult to hold a bully accountable.”

It’s hard to imagine that academia is more hierarchical than all other workplaces, which typically have far worse inequities of power. And tenure—which protects professors against hierarchical control from their bosses—isn’t the cause of bullying problems; it’s the solution. We need more faculty to have tenure to prevent them from being bullied, and we need all academic workers to have tenure-like protections of their rights and due process.

At a moment when the state of Oklahoma is banning tenure, and tenure elsewhere is slowly dying, these false smears against tenure can have a real impact at undermining protections for faculty—which will leave workers on campus even more vulnerable to bullying.

The better response to bullying that results from a power imbalance is to give more power to the powerless, not to provide powerful administrators with more arbitrary power to regulate the academic workplace and hope that they will serve the powerless.

To truly fight bullying, we need more freedom of speech in the workplace, and we need to uphold the right to organize. Unions are a key defense against bullies, because they establish rules for fair treatment and protect workers without suppressing expression.

In 2019, I wrote an article for the Journal of Academic Freedom about “The Danger of Campus Bans on Bullying,” and since then the number of bullying policies and their alarming provisions have grown substantially.

Harvard’s new bullying policy can punish “abusive expression directed at an individual or individuals, such as derogatory remarks, epithets, or ad hominem attacks that are outside the range of commonly accepted expressions of disagreement, disapproval, or critique in an academic community and professional setting that respects free expression.”

Banning “derogatory remarks” and “ad hominem attacks” is especially alarming because it’s hard to imagine any criticism that could not qualify as “derogatory,” and anything about a particular person is “ad hominem.” Making “commonly accepted” the only defense for a potential violation puts anyone with unpopular critiques in danger of punishment for their ideas.

Under the Harvard rules, even silence can be considered a specific form of bullying (“conspicuous and unwarranted exclusion or isolation of an individual”). This creates a catch-22. If you disagree with someone, anything critical you say could be considered bullying, but not saying anything to them could also be bullying.

Bans on bullying are a dangerous new campus experiment with expanding censorship. Bullying policies are similar to harassment policies, but they have three terrible differences:

First, bullying is a concept created for protecting children. No college should ever enact a bullying policy because rules designed to protect children should never be transplanted into universities and applied to adults.

Second, bullying removes the requirement for showing invidious discrimination. Instead of restrictions necessary to prevent racist or sexist discrimination, bullying policies punish meanness of any kind, opening a broad new horizon for punishment of speech that has no discriminatory impact.

Third, bullying policies are harassment policies with the free speech guardrails removed. Under harassment law, we have many decades of legal rulings carefully designed to ensure free speech is not discarded in the effort to stop discrimination. Bullying is a legal blank slate that allows colleges to impose potentially vast new restrictions on speech.

I’m skeptical of claims that we face a sudden crisis of bullying on college campuses. Before universities enact broad new policies against bullying, we need better evidence of what the problem is, how frequently it happens and how best to address it. But even if someone did present plausible proof of bullying as a serious problem, it still wouldn’t justify these vague policies. The problem of bigotry on campus doesn’t justify bans on hate speech. The problem of rape on campus doesn’t justify banning sexist ideas or abolishing due process rights. And new bullying policies open the door for conservatives to file charges of political bullying every time someone points out that Donald Trump is a criminal, a sexual abuser and a pedophile supporter.

Policies to ban bullying are a terrible approach to the problem: They endanger free speech and often become a tool used by bullies to attack their victims, as I point out in The Chronicle’s article. The Chronicle included one example, when Chicago State University created one of the first cyberbullying policies to silence a faculty blog that criticized the administration. But there are more. In 2021, Nassau Community College president Jermaine Williams filed bullying charges against faculty union president Faren Siminoff for criticizing the administration. The University of Maryland Eastern Shore found professor Donna Satterlee guilty of violating its bullying policy for harsh criticism of the university’s president.

Even when bullying charges aren’t coming directly from the top, administrators are still controlling the system, deciding which favored people in an interpersonal dispute are the bullies and which are the bullied.

Bullying policies are a bad idea in any workplace, because they infantilize adults and create broad new powers for bosses to control their employees. But bullying policies are especially terrible for colleges, because many cases of bullying amount to accusations of harsh criticism, which is an essential component of intellectual activity.

This doesn’t mean we should do nothing about bullying. The most important response to bullying is counterspeech. We need the bullied and onlookers to have the freedom to speak out against bullies without fear of retaliation, and that means stronger protections for academic freedom and free speech.

Solving bullying requires a culture of respect and a system of fairness created by free speech, academic freedom, union protections, tenure, due process and shared governance. Repressive bullying policies make things worse without addressing the underlying problem.

College administrators already have far too many weapons they regularly use to suppress free speech. Giving them another tool, with unchecked scope and ill-defined meaning, is extraordinarily dangerous. Bullying policies open a Pandora’s box of censorship, and we don’t yet know what the consequences will be for free speech.