As U.S. colleges grapple with how to respond to anti-Israel protests and counter-protests stemming from the Israel-Hamas war for a third consecutive academic year, facing defunding from the Trump administration and payouts to students in court, are they becoming more protective of free speech or just more ambiguous on what’s punishable?
For the first time in nearly 20 years of evaluating campus speech codes, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found more schools with policies that “do not seriously imperil free expression” (73) than those that “clearly and substantially restrict free speech” (72) for the 19th edition of its “Spotlight on Speech Codes” released this week.
“This marks a substantial improvement” from last year’s report “and the reversal of a concerning trend,” FIRE said, with the number of schools earning the highest rating jumping by 10 and the number with the worst rating plunging by 26.
Dartmouth College is the only school in the Ivy League to earn FIRE’s “green light” rating, which it lost in 2015 for setting up a “bias incident reporting” protocol that made “joke telling” punishable. It got back the rating in this report after a new administration worked with FIRE to stop investigating protected speech and change its harassment policy.
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Author: Ray Hilbrich
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