College students are less free than ever under campus speech codes to express controversial opinions about international conflicts, race and gender, according to an annual report published Wednesday.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression flagged anti-discrimination policies at 418 out of 489 institutions for infringing on constitutional free speech protections.
Some colleges revised their codes toward opposite extremes last year as they awaited proposed changes to federal Title IX rules governing equality between men and women in sports, said report author Laura Beltz, FIRE’s director of policy reform.
Others “doubled down” on repressive policies, she added.
“I’d say schools have taken a polarized approach, with some improving, but more getting worse,” Ms. Beltz told The Washington Times. “Overall, policies are getting worse compared to years past.”
From last year to this year, the Philadelphia-based nonprofit found the percentage of four-year colleges with severely restrictive “red light” policies increased from 19.3% to 20%. That marked the second straight year of increases, reversing a 15-year trend.
Over the same period, the share of “green light” campuses that did not restrict free expression swelled slightly, from 12.3% to 12.9% of policies studied.
The report comes as college campuses have become hotbeds for antiwar protests, transgender rights clashes and debates over racial preferences in faculty hiring, which the Supreme Court ended last June.
University administrators approved the speech codes noted in this year’s report before student protests erupted in October over the conflict between Israel and Hamas, a Palestinian militant group.
Ms. Beltz noted the Biden administration has repeatedly delayed releasing the new Title IX rules, now due in March. Higher ed watchers expect they will replace biological sex with gender identity in anti-harassment language, requiring schools to let transgender athletes born male compete in women’s sports and use women’s facilities.
According to FIRE, four schools worked with the group to eliminate all restrictive speech codes, bumping them from yellow to green lights: private DePauw University, public Georgia Tech, the private University of Tulsa and public Radford University.
In a statement shared with The Times, DePauw President Lori S. White said it has “never been more important” to promote open conversation at the small liberal arts campus in Greencastle, Indiana.
“College campuses, particularly those that are residential, are one of the few places where people are invited to live, learn, work, and develop community together across a range of differences,” Ms. White said.
Several colleges also improved from red to yellow in this year’s report. They included private Amherst College, which FIRE said became more transparent about its policies, and public Boston University, which tweaked its computing policy in consultation with the advocacy group.
Peter Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University and president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, expressed “mixed feelings” about the report.
“On one hand, the ratings provide a quick summary of how far colleges and universities are willing to go to constrain the expression of political views by students,” Mr. Wood said. “On the other hand, a university that attempts to steer its students to an ethic of civil discourse by prohibiting vile epithets is just as guilty of speech-coding [in the report] as one that prohibits students from debating transgenderism.”
On the negative side, FIRE blasted Massachusetts’ public college system for adopting an overly broad harassment policy that moved five schools from yellow to red: Bridgewater State University, Fitchburg State University, the Massachusetts College for Liberal Arts, Salem State University and Worcester State University.
The policy states that examples of “discriminatory harassment” include “derogatory comments,” “unwelcome jokes,” and displaying “derogatory” symbols or objects.
Additionally, FIRE moved public Western Colorado University from green to yellow for adopting a vague anti-harassment policy and changed public West Chester University of Pennsylvania from yellow to red for imposing more severe restrictions.
While most schools criticized in the report did not respond to emails seeking comment, West Chester defended itself as a “forum for free speech.”
“West Chester University promotes dialogue in the context of healthy and civil exchanges,” a. spokesperson said.
Several California schools also earned poor ratings. That included the private University of Southern California, which moved from yellow to red after adopting a sweeping internet use policy barring students from “forwarding chain letters or offensive jokes.”
Speech codes in California colleges have long exhibited a liberal bias, said Lance Izumi, an education policy analyst at the right-leaning Pacific Research Institute.
“College is a place for free debate of ideas, not a place for the arbitrary enforcement of an authoritarian ideological party line,” said Mr. Izumi, a former state higher education official under former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, a Republican.
According to FIRE, private colleges have traditionally restricted free speech more severely than public campuses. Just 15.2% of public campuses earned a red light rating this year, compared to 36.3% of private schools.
Among 376 public universities and 113 private colleges, 98 got a red light from FIRE this year for substantially limiting student opinions on controversial topics. Another 320 earned a yellow light for imposing vague or narrow restrictions.
Just 63 colleges earned a green light for maintaining policies that did not seriously restrict students.
Another eight colleges received a “warning” for not promising any free speech rights. They included Hillsdale College, a conservative Christian school that FIRE has long dinged for refusing to recognize student groups at odds with a policy upholding “morally responsible sexual acts.”
On Wednesday, officials at the Michigan campus referred The Times to an Oct. 19 column in which Hillsdale president Larry Arnn pushed back on the FIRE ratings.
“There are thousands of colleges and hundreds of liberal arts colleges,” said Mr. Arnn, writing in the Wall Street Journal. “Anyone at Hillsdale is free to go elsewhere at any time. More fundamentally, everyone who studies and works at Hillsdale knowingly chose it.”
FIRE started rating university speech codes with green, yellow or red lights in 2006 when just 2.4% of schools earned a green and 97.6% received a yellow or red.
In December, the presidents of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, two Ivy League institutions, resigned after Republican-led congressional hearings probed their reluctance to crack down on antisemitic rhetoric at their campuses.
The fallout from student protests over Israel and Palestinians suggests it’s time for more schools to reject speech codes, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor in the history of education at Penn, which drew a “yellow light” from FIRE.
“Critics have correctly noted that the same universities that restrict racist speech have allowed statements like ’from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free,’ which some listeners call antisemitic,” Mr. Zimmerman said in an email. “But the remedy for that inconsistency is not to establish even more elaborate rules and restrictions.”
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the University of Southern California as a public institution. It is private.
• Sean Salai can be reached at ssalai@washingtontimes.com.
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