For a long time, The University of Chicago has been in the top 5 schools in the “free-speech” rankings of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Last year we were #1, and our average ranking has been #4. This, plus the fact that over 85 schools have adopted a version of Chicago’s “free expression principles,” and some are starting to adopt our “Kalven principles of institutional neutrality”, have been points of great pride for our administrators, for parents who want their kids to go to a free-speech school, and, of course, for me.
But this year things are different: among the 248 schools surveyed in this year’s FIRE survey, we’ve dropped to #13. This is embarrassing and demands investigation. There’s been some vigorous discussion among faculty about this, with many concluding that our drop is due to students not feeling as free to discuss controversial topics as stjudents in other schools, and our FORE speech coding rating is yellow (“caution”) rather than green (“best”).
The rankings are based on a variety of measures, including sanctioning of faculty or students for speech, degree of disruption of invited speakers (as happened with Judge Duncan at Stanford), how comfortable students feel discussing topics like abortion or race (see the criteria here and here, and the rubric on p. 41 of the pdf ), and whether or not the University has a “speech code” with restrictions beyond those hemming in the First Amendment.
Click on the icon below to get FIRE’s “executive summary” of the 2024 rankings. You can also find a press release here, and you can go here to download the whole 85-page document. If you want to check out individual schools, go here.
Chicago ranks 94th in the degree in which students feel comfortable expressing controversial ideas, 123rd in openness to discussing such ideas, and, abysmally, 156th in student feelings about the acceptability of blocking or deplatforming speakers (BAD ranking!) Our overall ranking is 65.95, rated “above average”.
But the most striking aspects of the report are the unexpectedly high ranking of schools you don’t hear much about and, most shocking of all, how POOR the elite colleges, like the Ivies, have done. Harvard, in fact, is at the very bottom of the list, the first school ever ranked as “abysmal”. That’s no surprise to anyone who follows how woke Harvard has become, which necessitated the formation of a faculty-led Council of Academic Freedom.
This is from FIRE’s new executive summary:
This year’s survey includes 55,102 student respondents from 254 colleges and universities.[1] Students who were enrolled in four-year degree programs were surveyed via the College Pulse mobile app and web portal from January 13 to June 30, 2023.
The College Free Speech Rankings are available online and are presented in an interactive dashboard (rankings.thefire.org) that allows for easy comparison between institutions.
Key findings:
- Michigan Technological University is the top-ranked school in the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings. Auburn University, the University of New Hampshire, Oregon State University, and Florida State University round out the top five.
- Harvard University obtained the lowest score possible, 0.00, and is the only school with an “Abysmal” speech climate rating. The University of Pennsylvania, the University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University also ranked in the bottom five.
- The key factors differentiating high-performing schools (the top five) from poorly performing ones (the bottom five) are scores on the components of “Tolerance Difference” and “Disruptive Conduct.” Students from schools in the bottom five were more biased toward allowing controversial liberal speakers on campus over conservative ones and were more accepting of students using disruptive and violent forms of protest to stop a campus speech.
- Deplatforming attempts that occurred at schools ranked in the bottom five had an alarming 81% success rate.
- More than half of students (56%) expressed worry about damaging their reputation because of someone misunderstanding what they have said or done, and just over a quarter of students (26%) reported that they feel pressure to avoid discussing controversial topics in their classes. Twenty percent reported that they often self-censor.
- When provided with a definition of self-censorship, at least a quarter of students said they self-censor “fairly often” or “very often” during conversations with other students, with professors, and during classroom discussions, respectively (25%, 27%, and 28%, respectively). A quarter of students also said that they are more likely to self-censor on campus now — at the time they were surveyed — than they were when they first started college.
- Almost half of the students surveyed (49%) said that abortion is a difficult topic to have an open and honest conversation about on campus. A notable portion of students also identified gun control, racial inequality, and transgender rights, respectively, as topics difficult to discuss (43%, 42%, and 42%, respectively).
- Student opposition to allowing controversial conservative speakers on campus ranged from 57% to 72%, depending on the speaker. In contrast, student opposition to controversial liberal speakers ranged from 29% to 43%, depending on the speaker.
- More than 2 in 5 students (45%) said that students blocking other students from attending a speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 37% last year. And more than a quarter of students (27%) said that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 20% last year.
- More than 1 in 5 students (21%) reported that their college administration’s stance on free speech on campus is not clear, and more than a quarter of students (27%) reported that it is unlikely their college administration would defend a speaker’s right to express his or her views if a controversy occurred on campus.
And a bit more. Poor Harvard (I shed no tears; it’s insufferably woke)! Harvard actually had a negative score, but they cut off the numerical rankings at zero. Not that this will hurt the school: Harvard has a “teflon” reputation, like Trump, so no matter how bad it acts, it’s still on many people’s “top school” list.
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Harvard is by far the worst school in the country for free speech. It is the only school with an “Abysmal” rating.
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Deplatforming attempts that occurred at schools ranked in the bottom five had an alarming 81% success rate.
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Up to 72% of students opposed allowing a conservative speaker on campus, depending on the topic, while up to 43% of students opposed allowing a liberal speaker on campus.
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73% of students said that using violence to stop a campus speech is never acceptable, down from 80% last year. At Oberlin College, only 53% of students said that violence is never acceptable.
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At a time of national dialogue about abortion policy, 49% of students have difficulty discussing abortion on campus. The most difficult topics to discuss on campus are abortion, gun control, racial inequality, and transgender rights.
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Of the 248 schools ranked, 73 have “below average,” “poor,” “very poor,” or “abysmal” speech climates. Just 47 have at least “slightly above average” speech climates. Last year, when 203 schools were ranked, these totals were 64 and 39, respectively.
Now, for your delectation, the top 20, or “best” schools. Michigan Tech is #1, and, surprisingly (at least to me), many of the best schools are in the South. I put a box around Chicago to highlight our shame.
. . . and the worst schools. Note that they include “elite” colleges like Middlebury, Yale, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and Harvard—the first school ever to be rated “abysmal”.
Note that what sets the top schools apart from the bottom ones fall under the category of “student tolerance” of differences. Or, as the report says,
The key factors differentiating high-performing schools (the top five) from poorly performing ones (the bottom five) are scores on the components of “Tolerance Difference” and “Disruptive Conduct.” Students from schools in the bottom five were more biased toward allowing controversial liberal speakers on campus over conservative ones and were more accepting of students using disruptive and violent forms of protest to stop a campus speech.
There’s also this:
More than 2 in 5 students (45%) said that students blocking other students from attending a speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 37% last year. And more than a quarter of students (27%) said that using violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to some degree, up from 20% last year.
It’s horrifying to realize that nearly half of all students (this includes all colleges surveyed) think that it’s okay to block students from attending a speech, and more than a quarter think that using violence to deplatform a campus speech is also okay. Both figures are up 7-8% from last year, and I don’t think that’s an accident. It’s a combination of ignorance (see below) and the increasing political polarization of America attendant on the Biden/Trump split and the ascendancy on campus of “wokeness,” an authoritarian and censorious philosophy. No matter what the cause, speech in American universities (and I suspect in UK schools as well) is getting more and more chilled.
What does this mean? It means that either students are ignorant of the First Amendment, to which nearly all colleges pay fealty, or, less likely, they know how the First Amendment works, and know the few exceptions, but they don’t like the whole free-speech idea. My guess is that that students simply need an education on why the First Amendment is so important, and my feeling is that college orientations for first-year students should include a unit on freedom of speech, one that includes Mill’s “On Liberty” and this wonderful speech from Christopher Hitchens at the University of Toronto. We don’t have to “respect” the other person’s point of view, but students need LISTEN to it. For if you ignore all views that strike you at the outset as offensive, you won’t learn anything, nor will you won’t get the ability to refine and hone your own point of view.
At 3 PM Eastern Time this Thursday, FIRE is holding a free Zoom webinar on the rankings discussed above. Click on the screenshot below to register for the webinar, or go here. You need to provide only your name and email address, and you’ll get registration info.
Oh, one other thing the ranking demonstrate is that the reputation of “elite” colleges is largely independent on the freedom of discourse enjoyed by their members. This strikes me a scary.
Tulane’s bookstore once sold “Tulane: Harvard of the South” t-shirts. [So the students made “Harvard: Tulane of the North” shirts.] Still applicable i see.
The University of Texas has always been liberal; the difference is that back in the day it was a small liberal blip in a conservative world while now the reverse is true. Now the liberals have the power on campus and the conservative minority is afraid to speak.
This chilling willingness to stifle views considered “harmful” is based on the assumption that there are people who are so emotionally fragile that protecting them — making the campus like a welcoming home — is the only humanitarian option. Words cause stress; stress causes damage; what causes damage is violence; therefore words are violence. In their book The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure FIRE founders Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt call it “Safetyism.”
It’s partly a pipeline problem, then. The Universities are mostly escalating what students bring in. When I was a kid I used to chant the line “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me!” when taunted. So did the other kids. I doubt children do this today, it goes counter to the prevailing zeitgeist of victimhood, fragility, and the need for constant adult supervision — which is particularly strong among the affluent families who are likeliest to have offspring at the most elite universities.
Agreed! It’s even worse here in Canada where this chilling effect extends to issues not involving the university.
Tens of thousands of people protested in the streets last week against elementary & high schools teaching gender ideology to students, and against social transitioning of students in school without informing or obtaining consent from parents.
In response, my university president publicly demonized these protests as hatred for gay, lesbian, and “trans” kids. Even worse in some ways, the leadership of the union that represents faculty members at my university issued a similar public statement opposing these protests as hate speech.
These statements have a terrible chilling effect on campus, especially for staff and faculty members who are also parents of children in public schools.
The statements also raise weird questions about why my university’s president (and my union) needs to have a public position on political statements by other people that don’t involve the university. As you said, the justification always seems to be that someone somewhere at the university was “harmed” by such speech.
I suspect what’s going on at least at the senior political level is that somebody in the Liberal Party extended family at Cabinet level has a trans kid who might be causing delight or anguish in his/her parents — we’ll never know but you can be sure all the politicians do. Out of respect for the members of the tribe of politicians, even the leader of the Opposition said not a peep in support of the Million Parent March. (One of the counter protestor’s signs said, “Death to a Million TERFs”.) Yet the Prime Minister (along with his Socialist factotum and cup-bearer marching with the public-service union goons) saw fit to decry the event as the kind of homophobic, biphobic, and transphobic hate that has no place in Canada. “Trans people, know that you are valid and valued.” That weird message was clearly (to me) aimed at some suffering Liberal parent and his/her/their kid, almost like an anonymous Valentine card for the kid who never gets any. I mean I know the man is weird as pickerel-shit but this just seemed uber-personal.
You might find this applies in the wider society. One university HR director has a trans kid, every university in the country will fall into line. One faculty union comptroller, same thing. Helen Joyce describes it in her interview with Peter Boghossian. All these parents are scared to death that they have done something monstrous to their children who will hate them till their dying days and they are counting on support of everyone they know to validate what they’ve done.
Yes I suspect you’re right about federal politicians. IDK about my university administrators. The president is a self-described “queer” person so the explanation might be as simple as that. Agree that Joyce-Boghossian interview was brilliant.
There is another, more pernicious strand to “critical social justice” which doesn’t depend on individuals being “fragile”. In “critical social justice” the “oppressor groups” maintain their dominance by perpetuating the “systemic” ideas that perpetuate that “oppression”. Thus speech by those who disagree is “harmful” and makes students “unsafe” in the sense that it contributes to the “systemic” oppression and “marginalisation” of such students. Hence that speech makes such students “unsafe” and needs to be supressed (regardless of whether any individual student is upset by the speech).
I reckon in most cases it is simply a type of con trick. You claim you are being harmed (or a group on whose behalf you are speaking) in order to silence people you disagree with, in order to get your own way. It’s simple and very effective. It needs to be called out for what it is. Trudeau is a master of this con trick but Canadians are waking up to it.
There a real phenomenon of parents pressuring their children to get admitted to Harvard, Yale, MIT, Standford, et al., because of the value of the school’s name in securing a good-paying, prestigious job after graduation. Whether the school allows freedom of speech or not does not matter to them. They just want to brag that their child is, say, a lawyer who graduated from Harvard.
If I understand the ranking methodology correctly, a school is ranked according to what students have written. If no students write anything, no ranking is given–correct? So the reason my undergrad college, St. Lawrence University, is not ranked is because no student complained about the lack of free speech on campus? What am I missing? I am the first to agree that it’s a party school (it was for me!), but I would think somebody would complain!
Many of these kids will go on to receive a course of instruction heavy with postmodernist clichés, denial of Biology, distorted history, and rejection both of the Enlightenment and of empirical science. Strangely enough, it will be called “Liberal Education”. Even stranger, that set of attitudes is often called the “liberal” side in US vernacular language.
Pinker, Madras, Randall Kennedy, et al. have their work cut out for them! I can only hope they manage to change the situation-perhaps with the help of students.
Given FIRE’s rating of ‘Abysmal’ for Harvard’s free speech ranking, it will come as no surprise that New Zealand’s former PM Jacinda Ardern has been appointed to two Harvard Kennedy School Fellowships:
FORMER NEW ZEALAND LEADER JACINDA ARDERN APPOINTED TO TWO HARVARD KENNEDY SCHOOL FELLOWSHIPS
Some excerpts:
Jacinda Ardern, who earned international acclaim for her leadership as New Zealand’s prime minister, has been appointed to dual fellowships at Harvard Kennedy School—as 2023 Angelopoulos Global Public Leaders Fellow and as a Hauser Leader in the School’s Center for Public Leadership. The announcement was made today by Kennedy School Dean Douglas Elmendorf. The fellowships will begin this fall.
“Jacinda Ardern showed the world strong and empathetic political leadership,” Elmendorf said. “She earned respect far beyond the shores of her country, and she will bring important insights for our students and will generate vital conversations about the public policy choices facing leaders at all levels.”
“I am incredibly humbled to be joining Harvard University as a fellow—not only will it give me the opportunity to share my experience with others, it will give me a chance to learn,” Ardern said. “As leaders, there’s often very little time for reflection, but reflection is critical if we are to properly support the next generation of leaders.”
Ardern also is being appointed to a concurrent fellowship at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, based at Harvard Law School. As a Knight Tech Governance Leadership Fellow, she will study ways to improve content standards and platform accountability for extremist content online, and examine artificial intelligence governance and algorithmic harms.
I visited the Michigan Tech campus. A beautiful campus on Lake Superior in the Upper Peninsula. However, remote, and cold + snowy in winter. As with many schools up there, it pumps out the hockey players.