FIRE Ranks Harvard Dead Last for Free Speech
“What’s more, granting Harvard a score of 0.00 is generous. Its actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings”
People tend to think of Harvard as the best, the gold standard of higher education. Yet they just got rated as the worst in one of the most important aspects of education: free speech.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) monitors and defends free speech and has given Harvard the worst rating possible in its annual rankings.
The New York Post reports:
Harvard is named worst school for free speech — scoring zero out of possible 100
Harvard University is officially 2023’s worst school for free speech.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) released its annual college free speech rankings on Wednesday, which dubbed the state of free speech at the Ivy League school “abysmal.”
“I’m not totally surprised,” Sean Stevens, director of polling and analytics at FIRE, told The Post. “We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom.”
Despite being the most acclaimed academic institution in the country, Harvard received a 0.00-point free speech ranking on a 100-point scale — a full 11 points behind the next-worst school.
Here’s more, directly from FIRE:
Harvard gets worst score ever in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings
Harvard is consistently ranked one of the best universities in the United States. But FIRE frequently finds itself in the odd position of giving this all-star academic school failing grades.
Simply put, Harvard has never performed well in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, finishing below 75% of the schools surveyed in each of the past four years.
In 2020, Harvard ranked 46 out of 55 schools. In 2021, it ranked 130 out of 154 schools. Last year, it ranked 170 out of 203 schools. And this year, Harvard completed its downward spiral in dramatic fashion, coming in dead last with the worst score ever: 0.00 out of a possible 100.00. This earns it the notorious distinction of being the only school ranked this year with an “Abysmal” speech climate.
What’s more, granting Harvard a score of 0.00 is generous. Its actual score is -10.69, more than six standard deviations below the average and more than two standard deviations below the second-to-last school in the rankings, its Ivy League counterpart, the University of Pennsylvania. (Penn obtained an overall score of 11.13.)
FIRE offers specific examples as reasons for the low score:
For each of these seven incidents, Harvard was penalized in the rankings:
- From 2019 to this year, Harvard sanctioned four scholars, three of whom it terminated.
- In 2020, Harvard revoked conservative student activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance over comments he made on social media as a 16-year-old, for which he had since apologized.
- In 2022, Harvard disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from an English department colloquium on campus over her views on gender and trans issues.
- In 2019, Harvard was the site of a substantial event disruption when protesters interrupted a joint talk featuring former Harvard President Lawrence S. Bacow and Graduate School of Education Dean Bridget Terry Long by occupying the stage and refusing to leave.
Harvard’s new president, Claudine Gay, just posted this new welcome message:
Featured image via YouTube.
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Comments
Ironic their motto is “Veritas”….
Harvard is probably delighted by this honor. It will brag that a negative rating from this “right wing hate group” is akin to receiving a negative rating from the NRA.
My first reaction. They likely regard this as an affirmation of their success.
My thought exactly. The same way that Arizona gun owners crow when our state is labeled with the “worst gun laws in the nation” by Brady, or Giffords, or whoever runs that annual scam now, followed by being voted the #1 state for gun owners for the 8th consecutive year by Guns & Ammo.
Harvard is typical of any institution captured by the Dem left. The essence of totalitarianism: the demand to control reality..
It continues to be the model for current leftist zeitgeist.
What has everyone’s attention is the contrast between Harvard’s image as the nation’s foremost university and the hard evidence, including survey data, that it is “the worst” in terms of free speech. That is important.
There will never be improvement in higher education without accountability and hard data. Look at the US News “rankings” and how once they became popular, colleges started to make policy changes to raise their rankings.
I hope that public opinion reaches the point that they will trust the FIRE rankings more than the rhetoric of President Gay on the free expression / academic freedom arena.
The study is fascinating in its proof that the so called most prestigious universities, the so called Ivies are the most militant in suppressing freedom of speech and especially conservative viewpoints
It started when they let women in.
Go you hell you sexist. Please post your comments on Alex Jones and the Gateway Pundit where they will be welcomed.
There’s nothing necessarily sexist about that comment. The comment is either correct or incorrect.
Harvard is the American Vatican. Hardly surprising.
Just remember: Barack Obozo attended Harvard. And Michelle attended Princeton. Neither school can ever live that down.