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 100Harvard 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 RankingsHarvard 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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