According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s (FIRE) annual college free speech rankings released on Wednesday, Harvard University is officially 2023’s worst school for free speech.
FIRE calls 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 New York Post. “We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom.”
From The New York Post:
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.
FIRE says the dismal score was “generous,” considering Harvard’s actual score was a -10.69, according to their calculations.
Harvard’s score was dragged down by the fact that nine professors and researchers at Harvard faced calls to be punished or fired based on what they had said or written — and seven of the nine were actually professionally disciplined.
“I thought it would be pretty much impossible for a school to fall below zero, but they’ve had so many scholar sanctions,” Stevens said.
The score is calculated based on factors including how strong the school’s policies in favor of free speech are and how many professors, students, and campus speakers have been targeted by authorities for their speech.
Bonuses are applied if the school’s administrators stand up for the rights of those whose free speech was threatened.
More over at The New York Post:
Harvard is named worst school for free speech — scoring zero out of possible 100 https://t.co/PJyBjt5bW5 pic.twitter.com/qM4KEKFKZ0
— New York Post (@nypost) September 6, 2023
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