Sean Stevens:

This past spring, FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey was in the field when the encampment protests began. This gives FIRE the ability to analyze how student attitudes about free speech changed in response to the encampment protests. FIRE also conducted a separate survey on the encampment protests at 30 of the 251 ranked schools during the months of May and June. 

The data from these two surveys offer incredible insight into how students reacted to the encampment protests. Among other things, they reveal that administrators on many campuses across the country have lost the trust of their students when it comes to free speech on campus.

This Year’s College Free Speech Rankings

FIRE launched the College Free Speech Rankings in 2020, surveying almost 20,000 students at 55 colleges and universities. Every year since, we have increased the number of students and schools surveyed. This year, almost 59,000 students were surveyed at over 250 campuses — once again the largest survey of student opinion about free speech in higher education ever conducted. 

The survey responses are broken down into seven components which form the bulk of a school’s score. Schools can gain or lose points based on the outcomes of speech controversies including attempts to deplatform speakers, attempts to cancel professors, and calls to sanction students for their protected expression. The scores are then standardized, so schools are only being measured against what other schools have actually achieved — as opposed to some arbitrary standard any of us might devise. This could also mean that even the best performing schools may not be bastions of free speech, just that they are simply better than everyone else. Finally, schools were given bonuses or penalties based on their campus policies, with good policies adding a standard deviation, ambiguous policies losing half of one, and policies that clearly restrain speech losing one.