September 29, 2026 · Episode 331
FIRE's 2027 College Free Speech Rankings: What Actually Moves a School's Score
37 Min · By Dr. Drumm McNaughton
What moves a college's free speech ranking? FIRE's 2027 data shows leadership outweighs written policy. Here's what presidents and boards can do about it.
Texas A&M University holds a green light rating for its speech policies, meaning the rules on its books pass muster as written. It has typically ranked in the top 50 of the College Free Speech Rankings, sometimes the top 25. This year it fell from 47th to 192nd, making it the lowest-ranked green light school in the country. Harvard University, the lowest-ranked school for two consecutive years, climbed to 71st out of 261 without changing a single policy.
Those two results point to something boards and cabinets tend to underweight. Written policy sets a floor. What moves an institution up or down is how leadership behaves when a speech controversy lands, and whether students believe the administration will defend expression when the rubber hits the road.
In this episode of the Changing Higher Ed® podcast, Dr. Drumm McNaughton speaks with returning guest Dr. Sean Stevens, Chief Research Advisor at FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Stevens, a social psychologist specializing in political psychology and survey methodology, directs the College Free Speech Rankings. The conversation covers the seventh annual rankings, what drove the largest declines and recoveries, and what presidents and boards can do to shape campus speech climate.
The Change Leader works with colleges and universities across the political spectrum and does not endorse the political views expressed by its guests.
Quick Overview
- A green light policy rating does not protect a school’s ranking; Texas A&M fell from 47th to 192nd after punishing faculty speech
- Harvard rose from the bottom of the rankings to 71st out of 261 with no policy reform, driven largely by gains in student trust that the administration will defend speech
- Recovery usually follows a sequence: policy reform and the decay of past penalties come first, and student survey responses follow
- Major penalties such as firing a tenured professor or expelling a student can weigh on a school’s score for four to five years
- Schools that handle demands to censor an event well earn points, not just avoid losing them
- Syllabi review and course cancellations in Texas and other states reflect boards and administrators insulating themselves from a feared federal crackdown on DEI
- The national average score is the highest in seven years and a passing grade, yet still sits around 61
- A 30-minute to hour-long First Amendment module at orientation shows some evidence of improving student understanding
Written Policy Sets the Floor, Enforcement Sets the Ranking
The steepest declines this year came from institutions that punished speech, regardless of what their policies promised. Texas A&M’s drop traces to the firing of senior lecturer Melissa McCoul after a student complained that material presented in class violated the university’s new DEI policies. A second faculty member was demoted from a dean position, and an administrator was removed from their role. Those two faculty punishments pulled A&M’s score down.
Syllabi review compounded the damage. Texas A&M drew national attention for censoring Plato, but Stevens noted the practice extends to a number of other Texas schools. Altering syllabi, changing syllabi, or outright canceling courses is happening primarily in Texas, with a handful of other states following. In some cases these actions respond to state DEI laws. In others, Stevens observed, it appears boards of trustees or administrations are getting out ahead of what they fear could be a federal crackdown for violating the DEI executive order.
Texas State University illustrates how quickly a middle-of-the-pack school can fall. Last year it sat near the middle of the rankings. This year it dropped 147 places to a bottom-three finish, largely because of campus controversies involving DEI, event cancellations, and student and faculty speech.
The lesson Stevens draws is direct. Having it on paper looks good, but an institution that does not follow its own principles will see the impact in the rankings.
How the Rankings Actually Score an Institution
Most leaders see a single number. The score is built from several distinct inputs, and knowing which ones an institution can influence changes how a cabinet should respond.
The student survey is a psychometric instrument of roughly 20 questions. Stevens separates two components that are easy to confuse. Self-censorship asks how often students conceal their views out of fear of consequences in conversations with peers, professors, administrators, and in the classroom. Comfort expressing ideas asks, more broadly, how comfortable students feel sharing controversial political views in settings such as the classroom, social media, and the dining hall. In Stevens’ reading, the comfort questions capture contextual climate, while self-censorship is more trait-based and dispositional. Some students are shy no matter how open the campus is. For leaders, that means comfort scores are the more direct signal of what students think about the environment the institution has built.
Political tolerance is measured with a method borrowed from the General Social Survey and Samuel Stouffer’s research: students are asked whether controversial speakers should be allowed on campus. The speaker list is deliberately balanced, with some offensive to conservative students and some offensive to liberal students. The survey also asks about the acceptability of using violence to stop a campus speech and how much students trust the administration to protect free speech during a controversy.
Beyond the survey, schools receive points for strong written protections, based on the policy rating assigned by FIRE’s policy reform team. Then there is the component institutions most directly control: outcomes of speech controversies, tracked in three databases.
The deplatforming database covers campus events and publicly displayed material, primarily invited speakers. A school loses points when speech is censored, but it earns points when it faces demands to censor an event and responds with a strong defense of the First Amendment and its role in the functioning of a university. The Scholars Under Fire and Students Under Fire databases track punishment after the fact, for something a faculty member, student, or student group has already said or published.
Penalties are graded by severity. A violent disruption, firing a tenured professor, expelling a student, or firing a non-tenured professor carries more weight than opening an investigation, requiring training, or removing someone from a class for a week. Milder penalties expire after a year. Major ones can linger for four or five years, decaying over time as the memory of the incident fades. A single mishandled controversy is, in effect, a multi-year liability on the institution’s score and a reputational risk that outlasts the news cycle.
The Corporate HR Model of Managing Speech Controversies
Why does the overall state of campus speech remain, in FIRE’s words, grim? Stevens pointed to the censorship impulse, which never goes away and has shifted into subtler forms since the speech code battles of the 1990s. As institutions grew and added managerial administrative staff, many adopted what he describes as the corporate HR model of managing controversies.
Speech controversies are inevitable on a college campus. When the operating goal becomes making potential bad press go away by placating whoever is upset at the moment, the institution sends mixed messages to its community. When it clearly favors some kinds of expression over others, the message is not mixed at all. Students learn exactly what is welcome and what is not. Stevens sees both patterns across campuses, and both show up in the data.
He also noted the political context. Campuses have long leaned left of center, drawing what he called the overly watchful eye of conservatives, and over the past decade state and, more recently, federal efforts to reform higher education have intensified. That pressure explains much of what is happening in Texas and in DEI-related actions elsewhere.
Harvard Improved Without Policy Reform
Harvard’s climb from 245th last year to 71st this year came without any policy changes. The gains showed up most clearly in student trust that the administration will protect free speech and defend people’s rights during a controversy. That improvement was visible in last year’s data and continued this year.
McNaughton connected the shift to Harvard’s public opposition to the Trump administration. Stevens was careful to say the rankings are not a causal experiment, and he would not draw that link directly. The timing does coincide, however, and he credits President Alan Garber with more than opposing federal pressure. Other changes during Garber’s tenure appear to have started shifting the culture on campus.
For presidents, the Harvard result carries a specific implication. Student perception of administrative resolve is a scored component, and it can move substantially within two survey cycles.
Recovery Follows a Predictable Sequence
The University of California, Davis posted the largest improvement this year, and it did so in the way schools usually improve first. It reformed its speech code policies and firmed up written protections of free speech. At the same time, several past penalties expired or decayed, and the university incurred no new ones. In Stevens’ observation, policy reform and clean controversy outcomes tend to come first, and survey responses follow.
Barnard College, ranked last a year ago, and Columbia University, ranked second to last, both improved noticeably. Barnard’s gains came from policy reform and better student survey results. Columbia’s came from improved survey components and the decay of earlier penalties. Neither is doing well yet, but both moved.
The sequence matters for change management planning. A board expecting student attitudes to shift the semester after a policy rewrite will be disappointed. A board that pairs policy reform with consistent handling of every subsequent controversy is positioning the institution for the survey gains that follow.
Leadership at the Top Is the Common Thread
After seven years of data, Stevens sees a consistent pattern among schools that perform well. It is not the only factor, but most share very strong leadership at the top on free speech and academic freedom. The president, provost, or chancellor makes it clear where they stand: this is an open campus where truth and knowledge are pursued openly. That does not mean ignoring people who say certain speech bothers them. It means the institution will not censor, and it will have the difficult conversations.
That stance filters down. Schools that brought in new leaders who pursued this approach during the life of the rankings, including Dartmouth College and the University of South Carolina, changed their culture fairly quickly. Barnard’s new president may become the next example.
This is a leadership development question as much as a policy one, and one that boards should weigh in presidential onboarding and evaluation.
Violence Acceptance Dipped, but Remains Concerning
FIRE released last year’s rankings on September 9, 2025. Charlie Kirk was assassinated the next day, which drew unusual attention to the survey question on the acceptability of using violence to stop a campus speech. Last year that measure hit a record high. This year it dipped, though Stevens would have liked to see a larger decline and still considers the level concerning.
Both the survey data and students’ open-ended comments on self-censorship show the assassination had a measurable impact nationwide. It was most acute at Utah Valley University, where it occurred, and affected some campuses more than others.
Cautious, Tempered Optimism in the National Numbers
Stevens described the national picture as a reason for cautious, tempered optimism. The average overall score is the highest FIRE has recorded in seven years, and it is a passing grade on the traditional scale, which has not been true in every year. Of the schools surveyed last year, 189 improved their score, though Stevens noted improvement ranges from a hundredth of a point upward.
The caution comes from the same numbers. The average is still around 61, which McNaughton placed in D-minus territory. A number of schools still fail, and several national trends in how students respond remain concerning even where they show improvement.
Faculty Voice Is the Next Frontier
Faculty currently enter the rankings mainly through the Scholars Under Fire database. FIRE would like to factor in more faculty elements, and its research agenda is moving that direction. Researcher Nathan Honeycutt’s recent work surveyed law faculty from most ABA-accredited law schools. A general faculty survey launching this fall is expected to reach the largest pool of campuses and faculty FIRE has sampled; prior general surveys reached roughly 1,500 and then 6,269 faculty members.
FIRE also surveyed about 200 faculty from the Scholars Under Fire database on what it was like to go through attempts to punish them for their speech or academic work. A University of Pennsylvania researcher conducted in-depth interviews with 25 to 30 of those participants, with a report due this fall. FIRE has also launched a survey of international students on their experience with free expression on campus, and plans a survey focused narrowly on college administrators’ views of free speech, something Stevens says existing studies of presidents and provosts touch on but do not center.
Three Takeaways for University Presidents and Boards
The following recommendations reflect the perspective of Dr. Sean Stevens.
- State the institution’s position clearly, then act on it. Schools that consistently perform well have presidents, provosts, or chancellors who make their stance on free speech and academic freedom unmistakable. That clarity filters down and can change culture quickly. A policy that is not followed when a controversy hits will cost more than having no public commitment at all, as Texas A&M’s decline shows.
- Stand up to pressure to censor, including from government. Stevens acknowledged this is harder for institutions without Harvard’s endowment. His view is that when individuals, state officials, or federal authorities overstep in pushing an institution to censor speech, leadership should dig in and stand up for its students and faculty. Boards will weigh that against their own institutional exposure, but the rankings data rewards resolve.
- Build the capacity for difficult conversations deliberately. Faculty can model productive disagreement in how they interact with students and facilitate dialogue. Administrators can support that through events and orientation. Stevens cited some evidence that a substantive First Amendment module at orientation, 30 minutes to an hour covering what is protected, what is not, and how to protest without getting into trouble, makes a difference. McNaughton added that faculty development on moderating difficult classroom conversations has been largely absent and is overdue.
About Our Guest
Sean Stevens directs FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings and the National Speech Index, and also manages the Campus Deplatforming Database. Prior to joining FIRE in 2020, Sean was the Research Director of the Social Perception Lab at Rutgers University in New Brunswick and then later a Postdoctoral Fellow there (also in affiliation with the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University). In 2016, he then joined Heterodox Academy as its first Director of Research where he developed the Campus Expression Survey.
About the Host
Dr. Drumm McNaughton is the founder, CEO, and Principal Consultant at The Change Leader, Inc. A highly sought-after higher education consultant with 20+ years of experience, Dr. McNaughton works with leadership, management, and boards of both U.S. and international institutions. His expertise spans key areas, including accreditation, governance, strategic planning, presidential onboarding, mergers, acquisitions, and strategic alliances. Dr. McNaughton’s approach combines a holistic methodology with a deep understanding of the contemporary and evolving challenges facing higher education institutions worldwide to ensure his clients succeed in their mission.
Read the Podcast Transcript →
Transcript: Changing Higher Ed podcast 331 – with Dr. Sean Stevens
Introduction to Changing Higher Ed®
Welcome to Changing Higher Ed®, a podcast dedicated to helping higher education leaders improve their institutions. With your host, Dr. Drumm McNaughton, CEO of The Change Leader, a consultancy that helps higher ed leaders holistically transform their institutions. Learn more at changinghighered.com. And now, here’s your host, Drumm McNaughton.
P331 – Sean Stevens –
[00:00:31] Intro and Disclaimer
[00:00:31] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you, David.
[00:00:32] My guest today is Dr. Sean Stevens, FIRE, the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expressions, Chief Research Advisor. Sean obtained his PhD in social psychology from Rutgers. Since then, he’s continued his work with Rutgers and other places as well. In 2016, he became the Heterodox Academy’s first director of research, where he developed the Campus Expression Survey, and then five years later in 2020, joined FIRE as their senior research fellow to run the College Free Speech rankings.
[00:01:07] For two decades, Sean’s research has been focused on the understanding of how moral convictions produced motivated reasoning within the political domain, how this motivated reasoning can distort research in the social sciences, and how motivated reasoning can lead to political intolerance and create obstacles to political compromise. And he joins me today to talk about the free speech on campus, the latest survey of students, and what higher ed leaders can do in today’s political environment.
[00:01:38] One note: whether you lean left or right, free speech is part of the First Amendment of our Constitution and is a critical portion of the education for our youngest generation. To that end, The Change Leader works with colleges and universities from all spectrums, and as such, does not endorse any political leanings and comments expressed by its guests. They’re theirs alone. Let’s get to it.
[00:02:02]
[00:02:03] Meet Sean Stevens
[00:02:03] Drumm McNaughton: Sean, welcome back to the program. It’s great to see you, my friend.
[00:02:07] Sean Stevens: Great to see you again too, my buddy.
[00:02:09] Drumm McNaughton: We always have a lot of fun when we do these things. But for those of you who don’t know you or what FIRE’s about, give the listeners a little bit of your background. I mean, for me it’s fascinating. You’re just a regular provocateur. No, I’m just kidding. You’re not a provocateur. You do a really good job introducing difficult information. So please give us your background.
[00:02:32] What FIRE Does
[00:02:32] Sean Stevens: Yeah, sure. So I’ll start with FIRE. I think that’s a little easier. Founded in 1999 as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. Was effectively the way, I think the best way and easiest way to describe it is, was an ACLU for students and faculty on college campuses defending their speech rights and academic freedom.
[00:02:53] Drumm McNaughton: Okay.
[00:02:54] Sean Stevens: And then about four or five years ago in mid-2022,the organization expanded those efforts to include all Americans. So we rebranded as the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, and now we work to protect the First Amendment rights of all Americans.
[00:03:12] Drumm McNaughton: Thank you for that.
[00:03:13] Sean Stevens: So that’s FIRE.
[00:03:14] Pretty simple. That’s FIRE, fire.org if you wanna learn more. Myself, I have a PhD in social psychology from Rutgers University. My background in terms of area is political psychology, survey design, methodology and development. I did a postdoc at Rutgers and Stanford University, worked at, affiliated with the Center for Advanced Studies in Behavioral Sciences, out in California there.
[00:03:41] With that postdoc, I worked with Professor John Krasnik, one of the leading, like, survey methodology people out there. So that’s where that strength comes from in my background. And then after that, I started as the first research director of Heterodox Academy. And then in 2020, I moved over to FIRE to spearhead the College Free Speech rankings, which is what we’re here to talk largely about today.
[00:04:05] But that has expanded rapidly to include a lot of other things and we have a lot of other research that we’ll probably get a little bit into. And some of these now include off-campus efforts, which we might not necessarily get into ’cause it’s not relevant, we’ve kinda grown a lot in the last seven years.
[00:04:22] Drumm McNaughton: Well, thank you. I didn’t know a lot of that information. I appreciate you going into it.
[00:04:26] Rankings Project Overview
[00:04:26] Drumm McNaughton: Sean, we’re here to talk about your annual report. Give us a little background. You guys have been doing this now for seven years, but this year you’re starting to see some new stuff. So please give listeners a little bit of background.
[00:04:40] Sean Stevens: Yeah. So in 2020, FIRE launched the College Free Speech Rankings as a ambitious project. We didn’t necessarily know where it was gonna go, at first. That year we surveyed students on 55 campuses across the country. The survey, it’s built as a psychometric survey, so it has about 20 questions or so that feed into a school’s overall score.
[00:05:07] Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
[00:05:07] Sean Stevens: Within those 20 questions, there’s subcomponents, so we’re asking students about their levels of political tolerance, frequency of self-censorship, comfort expressing controversial political views, things like that. We’re trying to get a pulse of what their attitudes about free speech are like and their experiences with it are on their individual campus.
[00:05:30] Drumm McNaughton: Big stuff. Big stuff. And of course, in this last year, there have been some significant events that have impacted that, Charlie Kirk assassination being one of those. Harvard and going against the Trump administration. Let’s dig down to some of those details, may we?
[00:05:51] Sean Stevens: Yeah, sure.
[00:05:52] Violence and Kirk Impact
[00:05:52] Sean Stevens: So last year we put the rankings out on September 9th, 2025, and the Charlie Kirk assassination occurred the next day.
[00:06:02] Drumm McNaughton: Horrible.
[00:06:03] Sean Stevens: Yeah, it was a little, little jarring. Well, pretty horrible. It drew, in a weird way, like, lots of attention to one of our survey questions, which we ask students about the acceptability of using violence to stop a campus speech.
[00:06:19] And last year we reported a record high in that. I’m happy to report that dipped this year. Probably would have liked to see it dip a bit more, still at a level that you would consider, you know, pretty concerning, but it did drop this year, and so that’s a good thing. But it’s very clear from both the survey data and then we get open-ended comments in response to a follow-up question about self-censorship on campus. It’s very clear both from the, the data itself and the student comments that the assassination had an impact across the country.
[00:06:52] Drumm McNaughton: Yes
[00:06:53] Sean Stevens: Certainly was most acute at Utah Valley where it occurred. You would think so. And it impacted some campuses more than others, for sure. But nationwide, there was a measurable impact.
[00:07:07] Drumm McNaughton: Let me ask you, I’m curious, how many institutions do you survey?
[00:07:12] Sean Stevens: Yeah. So we try to add some every year, so each year the number kinda goes up a little bit. So this year we did two hundred and sixty-one, and so we’ve ranked two hundred and sixty-one institutions in all 50 states, and also includes the District of Columbia.
[00:07:26] Drumm McNaughton: Okay. So let’s dig down.
[00:07:29] Sean Stevens: Yeah
[00:07:30] Survey Components Explained
[00:07:30] Drumm McNaughton: You said earlier there’s still lots of student self-censor, censor, easy for me to say, censoring that’s going on. Let’s dig down into the components. This is fascinating. I’m a, a frustrated researcher sometimes.
[00:07:45] Sean Stevens: Yeah. So the rankings in terms of the survey, so we have– there’s the survey, which gives us student experience and perception components, and then we have a couple other forms of research that feed into a school’s overall ranking that we can get into, but we’ll start the, with the survey first.
[00:08:04] The survey, like I said, it’s a psychometric survey, about 20 questions. Self-censorship is one component, so we ask about four questions about that, the frequency that students self-censor in conversations with each other, conversations with their professors, with administrators, and in the classroom. A related and similar component is comfort expressing ideas, and this assesses their comfort or discomfort expressing controversial political views in different settings on campus.
[00:08:37] So, it’s slightly different. It’s not asking how often you conceal your views. We give a very clear definition of self-censorship. We make it clear that you’re afraid that you’re gonna face consequences for saying what you might wanna say.
[00:08:51] Drumm McNaughton: Sure
[00:08:52] Sean Stevens: So the comfort questions are a little different. They’re kind of broader. It’s just, “Eh, would– how comfortable or uncomfortable are you expressing controversial political views in the classroom, on social media, in the dining hall?” Things like that. So it’s kind of a more general comfort assessment. I think the comfort questions get more at contextual climate and what students feel about the campus, and the self-censorship ones are a little bit more trait-based and dispositional. So it’s not like that students are fixed.
[00:09:22] But let’s be honest, some people are shy, some people are open books. Right? No matter how open a, a campus community is, like, someone who’s very shy isn’t gonna share their views very often, ’cause that’s just who they are. And so I think the self…
[00:09:36] Yeah, I think the self-censorship component gets a little more at that, and the, the comfort one gets more at what they think about the environment.
[00:09:44] Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:45] Sean Stevens: We have two components that get at political tolerance. One is asking about whether controversial speakers should be allowed on campus. We borrow this from the General Social Survey research by Samuel Stouffer. So our method is borrowing from those sources, but it’s effectively you ask about offensive speakers and whether they should be allowed or not allowed to come and voice their opinion. And so some of these speakers are offensive to conservative students, some are offensive to liberal students. So that’s our political tolerance component.
[00:10:16]
[00:10:16] Drumm McNaughton: So this is interesting. You’re looking at a broad range of different topics, a lot of it around self-censoring, but you also go into policy.
[00:10:28] Why Campus Speech Feels Grim
[00:10:29] Drumm McNaughton: One of the things that I read as part of the statement put out by FIRE was the overall state of free speech on campus is grim.
[00:10:38] Sean Stevens: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:39] Drumm McNaughton: Why? I’m sorry, I think your survey probably doesn’t cover that so.
[00:10:44] Sean Stevens: The survey doesn’t, doesn’t fully cover that, but there’s broader reasons why. You know, FIRE was founded over 25 years ago now in response to a number of speech controversies that occurred in the 1990s. A lot of these were in response to the imposition of speech codes and policies that were ultimately ruled unconstitutional in the courts. But the censorship impulse doesn’t, you know, go
[00:11:13] away. It’s ever-present, and so there’s more subtle ways to engage in this, and I think it’s like, it’s a long thing that’s occurred over time, but as colleges and universities have expanded and enrolled more and more students, and then hired more and more managerial level administrative staff to manage all of this and expanded efforts there, a lot of things that have occurred is there’s kind of an adoption of almost like the, corporate HR model of managing controversies.
[00:11:46] Drumm McNaughton: Sure.
[00:11:47] Sean Stevens: And speech controversies are inevitable on a college campus, I think.
[00:11:53] Drumm McNaughton: You think?
[00:11:55] Sean Stevens: Yeah. So, when you start, if your way of managing these is, “we just want the potential bad press to go away, so we’ll placate who’s ever upset right now”, there’s the potential there to send a lot of mixed messages to the community. Or, on the other hand, if you very clearly like favor some kinds of expression over others, It’s not a mixed message, you’re sending a pretty clear message of what’s welcome and what’s not welcome on campus. And so I think both of those things have occurred, you know, differs campus to campus, but I think both of those things have occurred over the years. And campuses are always, you know, students, faculty, the things they pursue, the ideas they pursue are always a bit more progressive, left of center, things like that. So they’ve long drawn the maybe overly watchful eye of conservatives out there. And I think over the last decade, there’s been an increased effort at state and local level– state and federal levels, and more recently federal level to increasingly get involved in reforming higher education. And we’re especially seeing that over the last few years.
[00:13:05] Drumm McNaughton: And we’re definitely seeing that. DEI is a real good example of that, and how things have changed. I think you and I talked before about the biggest declines that you saw have been in real conservative states, Texas, other southern states, as part of this higher education reformation.
[00:13:31] Sean Stevens: Yeah.
[00:13:32] Texas DEI Crackdowns
[00:13:32] Sean Stevens: So some of the, the biggest drops were Texas State is now in the bottom five
[00:13:38] Drumm McNaughton: Shoot.
[00:13:39] Sean Stevens: Last year they weren’t necessarily in the top tier, but they were like slightly below 100 out of like 255 schools ranked. So they were in the middle or slightly above the midpoint even, you would say. They have dropped a lot due to different campus controversies, yes, largely involving issues around DEI. Some of these are cancellation of events. Some of these involve student or faculty speech. Texas in particular, and so it’s not limited to Texas State, a number of schools dropped due to punishing faculty speech.
[00:14:18] And so by punishing faculty speech, I mean we have Texas A&M is maybe the most salient example that, that pops out to me because they generally have been well-ranked in our rankings, and they have a green light rating from our policy reform team, which means their– the speech policies they have on the books pass our muster and say there’s nothing here that really threatens expression, that can be employed in a way to threaten expression.
[00:14:51] And so they’ve generally been a, a fairly good performer in the rankings, usually in the top 50, even top 25. This year they’re ranked 192nd.
[00:15:03] Drumm McNaughton: Ooh
[00:15:05] Sean Stevens: They are the lowest ranked green light policy school.
[00:15:10] Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:10] Sean Stevens: And primary reasons for this decline are there was, again, the w- right before the Charlie Kirk assassination, a news story I think a lot of people at FIRE thought was gonna kinda be a, a big deal, and then it kinda got subsumed by the assassination was the firing of Melissa McCoole at Texas A&M over a student complaint for presenting material in class that the student then complained to the university violated the new DEI policies. And as then in addition to this, another faculty member was demoted from their position as a Dean, and a third non-faculty member but employee or administrator was also, I think, removed from their position.
[00:15:55] So the two punishments of the faculty members caused a decline in A&M’s score. But then also what’s gone on there is syllabi review of courses. And that’s not just limited to Texas A&M. That’s a number of other schools in Texas, so the syllabi review, which some of the more famous ones have occurred at A&M, censoring Plato.
[00:16:18] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:16:19] Mm-hmm.
[00:16:21] Sean Stevens: So either, either altering syllabi, changing syllabi, or outright canceling courses is happening primarily in Texas, but in a handful of other states too, that have either passed state laws in terms of DEI or it seems like board of trustees or school administration is getting out ahead of or insulating themselves from what they fear could be a federal government crackdown on violating the DEI executive order.
[00:16:51] Drumm McNaughton: Sure. And then I recently read about a law professor at West Point who sued to be able to… And I don’t know the specific details on it, but I believe he sued and he was granted the judgment that the West Point officials could not review articles that he published prior to them being published, that it infringed on his First Amendment rights.
[00:17:17] Sean Stevens: Yeah. I mean, that’s a– there, there’s a lot with the service academies that have gone on also in the past, like year or two. We don’t include them in the ranking survey because as service academies, they actually don’t necessarily promise First Amendment rights in their speech policy. So they get what our policy reform team would give to a handful of schools, which is a warning rating.
[00:17:41] But there have been a number– most of these service academies, though, still have civilian faculty who have First Amendment rights. There’s been a number of kind of controversies at the West Point, at the Naval Academy, over the past few
[00:17:58] Drumm McNaughton: Yes, I was sorry to even hear that affected my alma mater, the Naval Academy. But we’ll save that for another day. Let’s flip this on its ear.
[00:18:08] Schools Making Progress
[00:18:08] Drumm McNaughton: You saw some schools with some great improvements over this last year.
[00:18:13] Sean Stevens: Yeah, so the biggest improvement was University of California, Davis, primarily due to two reasons, and these two reasons are usually the primary reasons why schools initially improve. And so kind of these happen first, and then the survey responses, it wags a little bit, but they usually follow.
[00:18:36] So at UC Davis, what happened is they engaged in policy reform efforts to kind of change their speech code policies and firm up their written protections of free speech, which we give schools points for. We think that’s important. It’s of course, it’s on paper, so it’s only good as if you’re gonna follow it once the rubber hits the road.
[00:18:59] We just discussed Texas A&M as an example of a school not necessarily doing that this year, even though they have good policies. But the other thing that helped Davis improve was, we factor in the outcomes of speech controversies on these different campuses that we rank. We have three different databases that track these things.
[00:19:21] One is our deplatforming database It tracks campus events, like events open to the public or things publicly displayed, so artwork that’s publicly displayed could also be in there too. Primarily the entries are invited speakers to campus. What we’re tracking here is the outcome and if speech was censored in some way. Right? So if speech is censored, a school can lose points. But if there’s demands to censor an event and the school handles it well and gives a very strong response defending the First Amendment, emphasizing why it’s, you know, essential to the functioning of a school and a university, they’ll earn points for that. So lose points for censorship, gain points for handling it well.
[00:20:09] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. So an example of censorship would be disinviting a guest speaker because his or her political agenda doesn’t align with somebody else’s.
[00:20:21] Sean Stevens: Yes, that would be an example of that. And then the other two databases are scholars and students under fire. So it’s kinda like what it sounds like. They’re slightly different from the deplatforming database because it’s effectively the speech has happened.
[00:20:39] Drumm McNaughton: Okay
[00:20:40] Sean Stevens: Like, the student, student group, or the faculty member has said the thing or expressed the thing, or it could be a faculty member’s research, et cetera. But it’s more attempts to punish you for something you’ve already expressed and not what you’re going to express. So it’s like punishment after the fact versus, like, a preemptive attempt to censor. And so within these different things, a violent disruption of an event, firing of a tenured professor, expelling a student, firing a non-tenured professor. These are heavier penalties than, “Oh, we’re investigating the issue. We’d like you to undergo training. We removed you from the class for a week while we’re investigating.” Like, those are more milder penalties. And so the idea is some of the penalties last for more than one year, but some expire. Like, they only impact a school for a year. So the more major ones can linger for four or five years, and they decay. So they decay over time, the idea being the memory of it, you know, kind of slowly fades.
[00:21:55] Drumm McNaughton: Got it.
[00:21:56] Sean Stevens: But it can still have a… Some of these things that are very prominent can have a lasting impact. The other way UC Davis improved was they had a number of those expire, or decay, and they haven’t incurred any new penalties.
[00:22:08] Drumm McNaughton: Okay.
[00:22:09] Sean Stevens: So they did policy reform, and then they haven’t incurred really anything new. Few other schools that improved that are notable, there’s three others. Two of them were the bottom two schools last year.
[00:22:24] Drumm McNaughton: Oh!
[00:22:25] Sean Stevens: Barnard College, who was the worst, and the sister university right across the street in Columbia University.
[00:22:33] Drumm McNaughton: Okay.
[00:22:33] Sean Stevens: They both are still not “well”.
[00:22:37] Drumm McNaughton: Air quotes, yes
[00:22:39] Sean Stevens: But they did have a noticeable improvement. Barnard was policy reform and improvement in some of the student survey components. Columbia was improvement in student survey components and the decay of some penalties that were impacting it.
[00:22:56] Drumm McNaughton: You mentioned there were three.
[00:22:57] Sean Stevens: Yeah.
[00:22:58] Harvard Turnaround Story
[00:22:58] Sean Stevens: So the third one that I think, and this one’s particularly notable, is Harvard University.
[00:23:04] Drumm McNaughton: Okay.
[00:23:05] Sean Stevens: Famously. Infamously,
[00:23:08] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah, lately.
[00:23:09] Sean Stevens: For two years they were the lowest ranked school in our rankings.
[00:23:14] Last year they got out of the bottom 10 and were ranked around 245. So there was improvement, and some of the improvement that was evident last year continued this year and we should dive into that.
[00:23:28] But this year they had a significant improvement to their score overall and their ranking. They’re now ranked number 71 out of 261 schools, so in the– they’re in the top 75. And they did this without any policy reform.
[00:23:44] Drumm McNaughton: Okay.
[00:23:47] Sean Stevens: Yeah. There are significant improvements, and I noted that one of these, you started to see this in the data last year, is we got onto the more compelling stuff before we finished getting into all the components of the rankings. But, we also assess what students think of their administration, how much they trust that it’s gonna protect freedom of speech on campus and defend people’s rights during a controversy. So both last year and this year, Harvard has very significant gains on that component of student survey.
[00:24:22] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah. No, no surprise that we’re– they’re in the news so much about opposing some of the things coming out of the Trump administration.
[00:24:31] Sean Stevens: Yeah, I wouldn’t– You know, we have survey data that happens to be in the field while some other things are going on, so I’m not running a causal experiment. We’re not running a causal experiment here, so I wouldn’t draw that link. But yes, it very much seems to coincide with that, and I think the broader shift, initially, it was Interim President Garver, but now he’s had the interim tag removed.
[00:24:56] I think he’s done, not just opposing Trump, there’s been other things that have been put in place during his tenure that have started to shift the culture there a little bit it seems.
[00:25:05] Drumm McNaughton: Of course.
[00:25:07] Overall Trends and Outlook
[00:25:07] Drumm McNaughton: So this is fascinating stuff, but I think the bottom line is, what are you seeing from an overall perspective? Are we improving? Are we digressing? Are we staying the same? What’s the verdict?
[00:25:23] Sean Stevens: I think there is some reasons for cautious, tempered optimism.
[00:25:30] Drumm McNaughton: Can we parse that a little more?
[00:25:33] Sean Stevens: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I’d say the, the reasons for optimism are we have the highest average overall score that we’ve recorded in seven
[00:25:41] Drumm McNaughton: Oh, excellent.
[00:25:42] Sean Stevens: That’s notable. It is also on our traditional grading scale, a passing grade
[00:25:49] which is also good, cause some years the average has not been a passing grade overall. There’s always schools that obviously pass, but it’s not been so great in some years. So I think those are positive signs. The new schools ever received, a C or better, so I think that’s positive. And about 190 overall improved their score, and so I’ll temper improvement there with improvement is anything from like 0.01 improvement in your score to whatever the high end is here.
[00:26:28] But, 189 out of the schools that we surveyed last year did improve their score, and so I think those are all reasons for some optimism. The reasons for being tempered and cautious are the average is still like a 61,
[00:26:46] Drumm McNaughton: In my grading scale, that’s a D minus
[00:26:49] Sean Stevens: Yeah, it’s a D, D-minus area here. There’s still a number of schools that fail, as noted. Those are some of the reasons where it’s like, let’s temper this a little bit and then a couple of the trends overall while maybe showing some improvement are still concerning, like in the broad national data in terms of how students respond to things. Yeah
[00:27:11] Faculty Research Plans
[00:27:11] Drumm McNaughton: So, with that, when does your survey come out for faculty? ‘Cause I know you do that as well.
[00:27:18] Sean Stevens: Yeah, so we’ve actually– we don’t survey faculty as frequently as we do students. One thing we’d love to actually figure out how to factor in more to the rankings is more faculty elements. The way that feeds in right now is really only through the Scholars Under Fire database and whether or not they get punished or defended for things that they’ve said. But we’ve done a handful of faculty surveys over the years. We have a, a great researcher on staff, Nathan Hunnicutt, who that’s basically his specialty, is, research on faculty attitudes, political attitudes, their views, what they think about academic freedom, things like that. And so his most recent one was a, a survey of law faculty. We got law professors from most of the accredited ABA universities, across the country.
[00:28:12] And then we’re, this fall, about to launch another just general faculty survey, where we’re gonna try to reach, probably the most campuses and the most faculty members that, that we’ve been able to sample before. Our prior surveys, one was about 1,500 faculty members. The more recent one when we did general faculty was a little over 5,000. And then we also did do– I think you and I talked about this a little bit the last time we chatted, we did survey about 200 faculty from our Scholars Under Fire database on their experience with what it was like going through these attempts to be punished for your speech or your academic work. And so we put that out, I think about a year ago, we put the results of that out. But we’ve been continuing to dig into that. We’ve been working with another researcher out of the University of Pennsylvania, who’s a more qualitative scholar. He interviewed about 25, 30 of these, these participants in the survey and got more in-depth, look at that. And so we’ll be releasing a report in the fall on those interviews.
[00:29:26] We did post a recent article on our Substack expression that zeroes in on some of the initial findings of this. That’ll be coming out also in the fall. it’s a more in-depth look at some of the experiences these faculty members had in going through a campaign against them like that.
[00:29:41] Drumm McNaughton: That, sounds like we need to make a date for to have you come back on the show.
[00:29:46] Well, as always, Sean, this has been a fabulous episode. I really appreciate your coming on.
[00:29:52] Advice for Leaders
[00:29:52] Drumm McNaughton: Three takeaways for presidents and boards. What have they got to know about the latest survey and how it could potentially impact their institution?
[00:30:02] Sean Stevens: Yeah, I think the first one is, especially for presidents and boards or chancellors, maybe some schools have those. The leadership at the top, I think we’ve been doing this now seven years, and there’s certain schools that consistently do well. It’s not the only thread as to why they do well, but a common thread between most of these schools is that they have very strong leadership at the top on the issue of free speech and academic freedom. And by that I mean the president, the provost, the chancellor, whoever is kind of the main person at the forefront of this issue. They make it very clear where they stand and that this is gonna be an open campus environment where we pursue truth, knowledge openly. This doesn’t mean, like, we’re not hearing people when they’re saying, “This speech bothers me,” or that, but we’re not gonna censor things. We’re gonna have these difficult conversations
[00:30:55] Drumm McNaughton: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:56] Sean Stevens: This seems to filter down.
[00:30:59] Drumm McNaughton: Yes
[00:31:00] Sean Stevens: Schools that have gotten new leadership while we’ve been doing the rankings and the new leaders have kind of pursued this, they’ve been able to change the culture in ways that it can happen fairly quickly, it looks like. So Dartmouth is an example of this. The university of South Carolina is another example of this.
[00:31:24] I’ll note that I brought up Barnard before. Barnard has a new president, so maybe they will become an example of this in the future. So I think that’s number one is you have to be clear on your stand on this. You need to be strong on the issue, but you also then have to stay principled. Right? Like saying it on paper, it looks good, but our conversation about A&M and some of the other schools maybe that might fall in that bucket, I think show you where it’s like, “well, yeah, you got it on paper, but you don’t follow your principles”, it’s gonna have an impact. So that’s number one. Number two is I think it might be harder for some schools. Harvard’s unique in its way. they’ve got their big endowment, so they might be able to go it on their own a little bit more. But yeah, that’s related. It’s like stand up for those principles. Don’t be afraid to stand up to people that are trying to get you to censor speech, or even worse, the, the state or federal government’s trying to reform the higher education system. If you think they’re overstepping dig in, oppose them, stand up for your students and faculty.
[00:32:39] The third one is, I think it’s just we’ve gotta continue to encourage having difficult conversations and this might be more for faculty and not necessarily for administrators at the level, but, faculty can really model the way to do this stuff in the classroom, in how they interact with students, in how they facilitate dialogue.
[00:33:01] I think administrators can help with this. That can happen at events. That can happen at orientation. We do have some evidence that teaching students about the First Amendment at orientation in a, at least a, you know, not like an, “Oh,” like just mention it in passing, but it’s like a 30-minute, hour-long module on it. Here’s what’s protected. Here’s when isn’t. Here’s how you can protest. Here’s not how to protest. This would actually get you in trouble if you did this. All of those things can help. So I think there needs to be a more proactive effort at those things
[00:33:36] Drumm McNaughton: I completely agree with you on that. There has been, up to this point, very little training on that type of thing, whether it be student orientation, whether it’s faculty development on how to moderate difficult conversations in the classroom. We need to be doing more of that because free speech, at least in my mind, has to be tantamount, and it’s not free speech that I have the right to hurt you or anything like that. It’s like, how do we do it in a healthy way where everyone can learn instead of people getting hurt or even worse, retaliating?
[00:34:14] Sean Stevens: Yeah, and, the campus is the ideal place for this because it’s a teaching environment. There is, like we got into a little bit there, there’s faculty there that can facilitate these conversations. But there also needs to, yeah, there needs to be a recognition and acceptance from students, administrators, and faculty that the difficult conversations are gonna be had. They need to be had. There might be some upsetting elements of these things, but we can get through.
[00:34:45] Drumm McNaughton: Absolutely.
[00:34:46] Whats Next for FIRE
[00:34:46] Drumm McNaughton: So what’s next for you? What’s next for FIRE?
[00:34:49]
[00:34:49] Sean Stevens: Next for FIRE is we’ve just literally today launched a survey. We’re gonna survey international students who think,on their experience with things going on and, on campus with free expression recently. I think that might be a timely topic that will produce some interesting and notable results we imagine.
[00:35:11] Drumm McNaughton: Yeah.
[00:35:12] Sean Stevens: We also, as I mentioned, we’re gonna launch another faculty survey soon where we’re gonna be targeting, I think, our largest pool of faculty. So both of these reports will probably come out early next year, and then by the end of the year, we also hope to get out a third survey, which is gonna be focused on college administrators.
[00:35:34] Drumm McNaughton: Really? Wow!
[00:35:36] Sean Stevens: There’s long-running studies run by like Inside Higher Ed and some other outlets that look at college presidents, college provosts And there’s always questions on those surveys that deal with free expression and free speech and what they think of that or their attitudes about it. But we wanna do one focused more narrowly on that and kind of be maybe like the first one that kinda does that. And then of course, next year’s ranking survey will launch in January. You know, the hamster wheel never ends. It’s just, it keeps, it keeps going on that one.
[00:36:07] Drumm McNaughton: So, well, lot more opportunity for us to get together.
[00:36:12] Sean Stevens: Yeah.
[00:36:12] Drumm McNaughton: So thank you my friend for coming back on the show. Always enjoy it and look forward to the next time.
[00:36:19] Sean Stevens: Yeah, me too. Always happy to chat.
[00:36:21] Drumm McNaughton: Cheers, my friend
[00:36:23] Closing Thanks
[00:36:23] Drumm McNaughton: Thanks for listening today, and a special thank you to my guest, Sean Stevens from FIRE. Sean, it’s always a pleasure to chat with you about your surveys and other things. I look forward to the next time we get a chance to get together and talk.
[00:36:37] To my listeners, thanks again for tuning in, see you next week.
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