FIRE has released its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings. FIU is 53, despite being in a state that limits what professors can teach and write and tried to ban SJP from campus. Northwestern is 120, Wesleyan 127, and Bryn Mawr (where my wife went) does not make the list.
I had toyed with the idea of teaming with a quantitative researcher to question the methodology and the usefulness of the study. Ryan Enos (Harvard) took a shot in the Chronicle of Higher Ed in 2024, describing many problems (low response rates, the absence of meaning behind the numbers, strange weighting of numbers). FIRE responded with a letter to the editor insisting, essentially, that numbers don’t lie. Which is non-responsive to the complaint that numbers can be true but meaningless.