“This is not an anomaly: Free speech in higher education is getting worse,” said Laura Beltz, director of policy reform at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Former University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Chancellor Joe Gow has been let go of his duties as chancellors after the academic community discovered pornographic content online featuring him and his wife. Gow and his wife accuse the university of violating his free speech.
Free speech advocates' calls to uphold open debate on college campuses is intersecting with a rise in verbal and physical violence against Jewish and Muslim students. Who can leaders rely on to help revive civil dialogue?
Harvard University, currently ranked 9th and 6th on Forbes' and The Wall Street Journal's latest college rankings, is the only institution to have received an "Abysmal" speech climate rating in FIRE's 2024 College Free Speech Rankings.
Only two institutions have named a full-time successor since, leaving a considerable chunk of the Magnolia State's colleges and universities with vacant seats in executive leadership.
Political, race-related and gender-related expression surrounding major national headlines has catalyzed a surge of sanction attempts from 2016 onward. Almost two-thirds of sanction attempts resulted in sanction, including 225 terminations.
FIRE's recent report of almost 1,500 discovers faculty are more likely to self-censor their academic publications more than social scientists feared writing something controversial in the 1950s.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Freedom (FIRE) selected these institutions based on some of their head-scratching decisions such as circumventing a teacher's academic freedom, removing funding from a LGBTQ+ events, instating policies that would streamline firing tenured professors, and others.
