The Good, the Bad, the Ugly about Free Speech on College Campuses

, Spencer Irvine, Leave a comment

From Reason:

The group has just published its new Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges that rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Report) ranking them according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity. The rankings are based on four sources including whether they’ve endorsed the University of Chicago Principles on Free Expression; the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education rating; Intercollegiate Studies Institute’s Choosing the Right College Guide; and reports in 2014 of relevant events that suggest support or lack of support for free inquiry on the rated campuses. They assign each of the four criteria a value between 0 to 1, add them up, and then multiply the result by 25 to create a “Heterodoxy Score” for each school that ranges from 0 to 100.

A few highlights are University of Chicago which achieves the highest score (most open to viewpoint diversity) at 93.75 followed by Purdue University at 87.5 points. The lowest scores at 0 points are achieved by University fo Missouri at Columbia and University of Oregon at Eugene. Next tier of intellectually conformists schools with scores of 6.25 is occupied by Rutgers University, Northwestern University, New York University, Harvard University, and Brown University.