9 Comments
User's avatar
Mo Diddly's avatar

One correlation I am not pleased to notice - the top ranking school is U. Chicago, which also has the biggest Male/Female gender ratio of all major universities. I genuinely hope this is just a coincidence.

Perry Fein's avatar

Unfortunately it may not be. FIRE data analyst Chapin Lenthall-Cleary has written quite a bit about gender differences with regards to free speech tolerance between the genders:

https://eternallyradicalidea.com/p/men-are-more-tolerant-of-the-other

https://expression.fire.org/p/most-people-are-horribly-intolerant

https://expression.fire.org/p/voting-is-tied-to-more-tolerance-591

Mo Diddly's avatar

ugh

D D Wise's avatar

At what point do professors’ free speech rights give them carte blanche to teach harmful ideology that is out of line with campus curricula and viewpoints?

Presumably parents and students choose some campuses over others because they are better fits for *their* free speech and their goals and aspirations.

D D Wise's avatar

Do you have children?

Sunapeewolverine's avatar

That is one scary slippery slope.

Define harmful ideology? A college student should be challenged, made uncomfortable with regard to their preconceived notions. That is harmful ideology thats teaching.

The hard question is if the Professor is not engaged in scholarship but instead simply indoctrinating. That is too complicated and nuanced to quickly decide whether the authority of the University was over the top.

Hopefully FIRE takes time to balance the decision making process.

Michael McCulley's avatar

I often wonder if public university course syllabi constitute government speech. Has any court ruled on that question?

Richard Bicker's avatar

There is something amiss when you down-rate schools for following state law. If you have an issue with the statutes passed by various state governments and agencies thereof, fine. But to punish schools for adhering to actual laws on the books is a bit much, in my book at least.

Greg Stark's avatar

Nothing amiss at all, that's how it should be. Rather than analyze 50 states' worth of vague, speech-impactful laws, analyze how students feel about the freedom of speech and expression climate at the school and how those schools perform on actual controversies. If a state law forces a school to restrict freedom of speech, then it will score poorly, and prospective students will know where they stand.