Petitions to reject controversial speakers from college campuses would have little effect unless administrators were willing to formally disinvite speakers. So, why are administrators responsive to some movements to exclude certain perspectives from campus and not others? This paper attempts to answer this question through an empirical study of 349 speaker disinvitation attempts on 218 U.S. colleges and universities from 2000 to 2017. I use an original data set with information sourced from the Foundation for Individual Rights and U.S. News and World Report to determine what factors predict a successful formally rescinded invitation. My findings suggest that the forum of the speech, the petitioner type, and speaker type may predict the success of an attempt to disinvite a speaker from college campuses. My empirical results showed that conservative protests are better predictors of success than liberal protests. This paper addresses class bias and complacency with the academic culture in religious institutions as the main influencers causing pundits to ignore free speech politics at less selective, non-secular American colleges and universities.

Beginning in October 2015, student protests erupted at many U.S. colleges and universities. This wave of demonstrations prompted an ongoing national debate over the following question: what caused this activism? Leveraging existing theoretical explanations, this paper attempts to answer this question through an empirical study of the 73 most prominent college protests from October 2015 to April 2016. I use an original data set with information collected from U.S. News and World Report to determine what factors at these 73 schools were most predictive of the protests. My findings strongly suggest that the probability of a protest increases at larger, more selective institutions. I also find evidence against the dominant argument that the marginalization of minority students exclusively caused this activism. Using my empirical results, this paper presents a new theoretical explanation for the 2015-2016 protests. I argue that racial tensions sparked the first demonstration. However, as the protests spread to other campuses, they were driven less by racial grievances and more by a pervasive culture of political correctness. This paper concludes by applying this new theoretical framework to the budding wave of 2017 protests.