The 10 Worst Colleges for Free Speech

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If you're choosing a college to go to, these are places you might want to avoid. The full list is at the link below, courtesy of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, one of the best civil rights organizations in the US.

The 10 Worst Colleges For Free Speech: 2017

There isn’t a week that goes by without a campus free speech controversy reaching the headlines. That’s why it’s as important as ever that we at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) review the record each year and shine a spotlight on the 10 worst schools for free speech.

Since FIRE’s first “worst of the worst” list was released in 2011, the number of colleges and universities with the most restrictive speech codes has declined. However, 92 percent of American colleges still maintain speech codes that either clearly restrict—or could too easily be used to restrict—free speech. Students still find themselves corralled into absurdly-named “free speech zones,” taxed when they invite speakers deemed “controversial” by administrators, or even anonymously reported on by their fellow students when their speech is subjectively perceived to be “biased.”

The average person muzzled on a college campus is often an everyday college student or faculty member: someone who wants to chat about politics, a student who confides in a friend about their own mental health concerns, or a group of students that simply want to discuss free speech controversies with their peers.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/58a ... 7c4066c2f1

You might want to avoid colleges that have "bias response teams" too:

Hundreds of campuses encourage students to turn in fellow students for offensive speech

Universities are the cradle of free speech, where ideologies and ideas clash, where academics and activists can agree, disagree, or be disagreeable. This is particularly true in the United States, where the First Amendment zealously guards against government surveillance and intrusion into free speech.

Yet at hundreds of campuses across the country, administrators encourage students to report one another, or their professors, for speech protected by the First Amendment, or even mere political disagreements. The so-called "Bias Response Teams" reviewing these (often anonymous) reports typically include police officers, student conduct administrators and public relations staff who scrutinize the speech of activists and academics.

This sounds like the stuff of Orwell, although even he might have found the name "Bias Response Team" to be over-the-top.

Over the past year, I surveyed more than 230 such reporting systems for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education and asked dozens of schools for records about their Bias Response Teams. What I found is detailed in a new report describing how universities broadly define "bias" to include virtually any speech, protected or not, that subjectively offends anyone. On many campuses, administrators are called upon to referee whether speech is polite.

The threat to expressive rights isn't confined to speech from the Left or the Right. Bias reporting systems are being used to report all kinds of speech.

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/stude ... le/2615405

Isn't the point of college for your ideas to be challenged and changed? Seems like people have forgotten these days.

When people talk about "SJWs" I usually roll my eyes, but college campuses are one place where PC censorship really is an issue. Like Betta said, universities are where people's ideas should be challenged. Trying to shut people up from either side is fundamentally undemocratic and wrong.

There is a move against this by schools like the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia, who both have "protection of free speech" policies. More schools should adopt this.

That said, while I do recognize that PC censorship is a problem on campuses, I think this study's methodology is really flawed. It seems to rank schools on major public incidents, and on anti-bigotry clauses. I think a study should be done on how often students are reported, how severe punishments are, how comfortable students feel expressing themselves, etc. to get a more accurate idea of what campus censorship is really like at these schools.