This year’s list features:
Mount St. Mary’s University
Northwestern University
Louisiana State University
University of California, San Diego
Saint Mary’s University of Minnesota
University of Oklahoma
Marquette University
Colorado College
University of Tulsa
Wesleyan University
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/greg-lukianoff/the-10-worst-colleges-for_b_9243000.html
Thanks for posting. I hadn’t seen the list before.
It should be noted that the reason Yale is exempted from the list is not for the reasons given by Lukianoff but, rather because he was at the very center of the controversy there. It was his videotape of a confrontation between a Yale student and the faculty advisor of her dormitory that went viral and led directly to demands that the administrator be dismissed. Lukianoff effectively bootstrapped the entire crisis so that his home base - the Koch brothers funded organization with the acronym, FIRE - could write columns and columns of fear-mongering prose about it.
Dang Koch brothers! I knew it was them…it’s always them…
That’s not fair, LSU simply can’t afford free speech, what with the state budget cuts and critical infrastructure improvements like the new lazy river.
The standard for making the list seems to be rather ad hoc.
The article cited above focuses largely on specific incidents, not on systemic obstacles to free speech.
Let’s agree for the sake of argument that at each of those colleges, the administration badly handled one or more incidents. Does that alone really make them among the worst colleges for free speech?
and I personally wonder if free speech at the fundamentalist Christian colleges is really free. Are students allowed to advocate for same sex marriage, for example?
The academics I know who feel most constrained in their ability to speak freely on controversial topics are those employed at religiously affiliated institutions, This isn’t just fundamentalist Christian colleges. Catholic colleges and universities are all over the map on this, but some make it pretty clear that topics like same-sex marriage and abortion rights are off-limits unless the discussion is consistent with Church doctrine. And even at Catholic schools that take a more laissez-faire attitude, speech that conflicts with Church doctrine will often draw a sharp rebuke and sometimes organized protests by groups like the Cardinal Newman Society, which seems to exist primarily to expose and criticize faculty who espouse views in conflict with Church teachings on hot-button culture wars issues–even if they do it on their own time-- as well as the college administrators who tolerate the presence of such heretical views on campus. For tenured faculty I imagine this isn’t much more than a minor annoyance, but for vulnerable tenure-track faculty and contract employees it can be chilling.
How is Wheaton IL is not on this list?
Because it’s HuffPost, which has low and sensationalist reporting standards in some areas.
As I understand it, FIRE is complaining about schools that claim to support free speech but instead have suppressed it (at least in FIRE’s opinion).
Schools like Wheaton or other religious colleges make it perfectly clear to students and faculty before they join that some subjects are verboten. That’s why FIRE doesn’t highlight them.
^ I wonder if some of the highlighted colleges wouldn’t claim their policies also set clear boundaries.
Do we accept that private, religious colleges have a right to ban piercings, very short skirts, or prescriptions for birth control by student health services? If so, should we not accept that private colleges have a right to discipline students for hateful speech or behavior directed at minorities and women?
One difficulty is that the boundary between “thoughtless” and “hateful” isn’t always as sharp as a hemline. Some people seem to delight in meandering over that line then crying “foul” when they are called out.
Is their true purpose to protect free speech, or is it to protect the power to bully other people with impunity?
I was thinking of Wheaton specifically because of the professor forced to resign over her facebook post about the god of the book, not because speech is generally restricted there.
Yeah, Wheaton should be the top of the list!
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-wheaton-college-professor-fallout-met-20160222-story.html
Wheaton College’s Discrimination, Harassment, Sexual Misconduct, and Relationship Violence Policy is found here:
It clearly states:
Wheaton, like other private religious colleges, restricts students’ and faculty from deviating from from church doctrine, and if they do, they can be fired and expelled. Students and employees at these institutions never had full freedom of speech, and they knew that going in.
In contrast, the schools on the list all claim to honor freedom of speech, but then restrict it in various ways once students are on campus. To quote Mandy Lowell from the original link:
@Zinhead what are the issues with Vassar and free speech?
Surprised that the Columbia is not listed. They are so set up in their brains there, that they would not let anybody who thinks differently, speak. I would not be happy to see my kid there at all.
@Snowybuny - Vasser has a speech code.
Yeah but the Wheaton prof didn’t deviate from church doctrine. Or rather, most people think she didn’t including her fellow professors.
From a PR standpoint, the situation at Oklahoma was handled quite well. I know a number of national merit freshmen (aka those who had plenty of other choices) who decided to go to OU because of President Boren’s response to the SAE chant.
But interestingly, most of the people who lost their jobs last year due to free speech issues were liberal professors on liberal campuses. Anecdotally, this seems to fit with the professor who wrote an article on Vox last year titled “I’m a liberal professor, and my liberal students terrify me”: http://www.vox.com/2015/6/3/8706323/college-professor-afraid