Free speech on campus: Where does your university stand?

Oct 17, 2024 by Casey Mattox

We talk a lot about free speech on college campuses. And if you’re reading this newsletter, I probably don’t have to convince you it’s important. But about two-thirds of us go to one of the 6,000 colleges across the country.

Imagine you’re a high school senior, or the parent of a senior, or just a taxpayer who would like to know how the institutions that your taxes support compare on free speech.

Is the university whose colors you represent on Saturdays better or worse for free speech than the one on the visitors sideline?

Until 2020, there wasn’t good information on this question.

You could point to a bad policy from one school or a speaker disinvitation from another. I did a bit of that myself over the course of my career – pointing out the differences between Alabama and Tennessee speech policies, or even the whole NCAA tournament bracket!

And the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE, then known as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) published reviews of campus speech policies that at least made that job easier.

But it was incomplete. Just because a school fixed its speech policies to technically comply with the law didn’t mean that it was actually creating an environment for free speech.

Then, in 2020, FIRE began to release its annual College Free Speech Rankings to reveal the free speech climate on college campuses, based on surveys of individual campuses, as well as evaluations of both speech policies and the ways the universities actually use those policies when controversy erupts.

These rankings provide students, parents, faculty, and the citizens who support universities with the information they need to know about how colleges compare in protecting or violating the First Amendment rights of their students and faculty and in equipping students with the skills they need to engage productively in a free and diverse society.

The rankings are also just fun. You can compare Alabama and Auburn, Ohio State and Michigan, Texas and Texas A&M, Virginia and Virginia Tech (*smiles knowingly*), Harvard and Columbia (but I wouldn’t do that one, it’s sad).

Imagine if along with our college sports rivalries we also rooted for our favorite school to surpass our rivals in free speech.

In fact, we’ve seen a little of this already, as these rankings have given students, parents, trustees, and citizens tools to distinguish schools in the same state and ask good questions about why one school’s speech culture is so much worse than the other.

FIRE even allows you to sort by conference now, making it easier to compare schools with their rivals.

Universities are responding by working to improve their campus policies to better protect speech and to shift their orientation programs to make clear to incoming students and staff that speech will be protected and efforts to chill speech or drown it out will not be tolerated.

FIRE recently released its 2025 College Free Speech Rankings.

Check it out!

I sat down with FIRE’s Greg Lukianoff for a discussion about the rankings and the state of free speech recently.

Spoiler: It’s not great, but there’s reason for hope! And the rankings are a great tool to that end.

Since this is the time of year when students begin preparing college-applications, I wanted to be sure to highlight the rankings for you.

OK, maybe I also want to brag on my alma mater a little.

That’s right, the University of Virginia took the #1 spot in protecting free speech on campus, for the first time ever in the FIRE College Free Speech Rankings!

Granted, UVA scored 73/100, basically a C average, so that tells you something about how much work still needs to be done if that’s #1.

But I’ll take the W – and keep demanding that UVA live up to its Jeffersonian ideals.

Where does your alma mater rank this year? Are you planning to use the rankings, either to help you or someone in your life choose a college that protects free speech? Or to urge your favorite university to improve its free speech policies and culture?

Let me know by emailing me at freespeech@afphq.org!

 

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