I got this tweet from Luana, who noted Chicago’s steep fall from grace in FIRE’s free-speech rankings for 2025. (“The College Pulse” also collaborated in the rankings.)
FIRE’s 2025 Campus Free Speech Rankings are out.
Harvard is once again the worst school on the list.
Columbia and New York University join it in the “abysmal” category.
Penn and Barnard are among the four “very poor” schools. pic.twitter.com/fJ5yenYiF7
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) September 5, 2024
Click the screenshot to see all 251 rated schools.
Here are the top ten. Note that the University of Chicago, once #1 for a long time and always in the top five, is no longer at the top. In fact, the top school, the University of Virginia, simply gets a “good” rating and a so-so score of 73.4 out of a hundred.
Where, oh where, is my school? It’s a dismal #43, and rated only “slightly above average.”
The low score appears to reflect a big difference in the campus’s willingness to tolerate liberal vs. conservative speakers, and a high score in the degree of self-censorship that students practice.
This is very sad, for we can no longer even say we’re in the top ten, and Chicago’s reputation for being a bastion of “free speech” has taken a severe hit.
As for the bottom ten, well, Harvard is the worst, but now both NYU and Columbia have joined it with the rare “abysmal” rating:
All I can say is “oy vey!”, and that the administration is going to have to do some fast-stepping, for they used to tout our high ratings and now will have to confect some reasons why the rating system isn’t very good.
I am not a big fan of rankings in general, but I must say that from outward appearances last year both Chicago and Harvard earned their rankings. Interestingly your undergrad alma mater came in at #12 this year.
Many of the top schools in this list have the word “state” or “tech” in them. For non-Americans, many of these “state” universities are massive public institutions that were formed by large land grants from the government. Often, despite not having the cache of the Ivy League or their extreme selectivity, these schools are well funded and able to build world class departments. Perhaps the sheer size and greater degree of economic diversity among students of these institutions inoculates them somewhat from ideological capture from the far left.
By contrast, smaller, private colleges seem much more vulnerable to becoming essentially madrassahs of far left thought. Given this and the often exorbitant amount of tuition costs of these places, I’m not sure why any student would go to one of these small private colleges outside of the Ivy League. And these days, they might even think twice about the Ivy League!
Comment by Greg Mayer
So, to see the rankings, I have to sign up to receive emails from College Pulse, whose motto is “Data-driven marketing and custom research solutions to help businesses and nonprofit organizations better understand and connect with American college students”?
Nein, danke.
GCM
Thanks Greg. I signed in because they only wanted email address and no password, plus I did not take the time to see that it wasn’t the FIRE website. Mea culpa. Hopefully there is an unsubscribe button.
Comment by Greg Mayer
The demand for an email seems to have disappeared– perhaps some negative feedback was received?
After hitting the email road block, I went to FIRE’s website directly, and could access the rankings and pdf report there without any trouble.
GCM
Yeah. I should have thought of that.
Both websites demanded contact information from me (I passed).
I tried the FIRE site but they wanted my email. I’m getting too many emails already! I gave up.
Nice to see my old alma mater CMC ranking at #6, but troubling to see a sister college there, Pomona College, coming in at #242. I hope Pomona’s disease is not catching.
It’s all that they should be so different, as they share a common culture, and, as I understand it, students in each can take classes from the other.
Nice to see my old alma mater CMC ranking at #6, but troubling to see a sister college there, Pomona College, coming in at #242. I hope Pomona’s disease is not catching.
Please stop plagiarizing Douog!
Chicago’s change in the rankings seems to roughly coincide with a change in the University’s top leadership. Any relationship? Do university presidents and their management teams really matter that much internally?
Comment by Greg Mayer
As explained in the report, U Chicago dropped because of two incidents, both initiated by students. Both of these cost UC in its score. In one, intervention by the U Chicago administration mitigated the harm– this got UC some points back, but not enough to offset the fact that the incident had begun in the first place. The report author clearly cast at least most of the blame on the students, not the administration.
GCM