Nation's Top Schools Get Horrendous Free Speech Grades, Harvard Gets Negative Score
Even Karl Marx was a proponent of free speech.
He also believed the enemies of the communist revolution needed to be killed. In other words, for Marxists, speech should be free so long as it aligns with their ideology.
Marxism is alive and well in America, and it has corrupted our flagship universities.
Harvard University is the most vaunted institution of higher education in the country. It is also officially the worst school for free speech, according to the New York Post.
The 2023 college rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression came out on Wednesday. FIRE designated the state of free speech at Harvard as “abysmal.”
Sean Stevens, FIRE’s director of polling and analytics, told the Post, “I’m not totally surprised. … We’ve done these rankings for years now, and Harvard is consistently near the bottom.”
This time, however, Harvard wasn’t only near the bottom; it was actually below it. Its official score of 0.0 out of 100 was “generous,” according to FIRE, and its real score was -10.69.
“I thought it would be pretty much impossible for a school to fall below zero,” Stevens said, “but they’ve had so many scholar sanctions.”
He was talking about the nine professors and researchers who dealt with calls to be “punished or fired based on what they had said or written,” the Post reported. Seven of those nine did end up being professionally disciplined.
“You will conform or else,” the Marxists said.
Harvard’s dismal free speech ranking stuck even though more than 100 of its professors teamed up to form a Council on Academic Freedom earlier this year.
In April, Janet Halley, a Harvard Law School professor and member of the council, told the Post, “We are in a crisis time right now. Many, many people are being threatened with — and actually put through — disciplinary processes for their exercise of free speech and academic freedom.”
It sounds more like a gulag than a university.
The University of Pennsylvania received the second-worst ranking, followed by the University of South Carolina. Next came Georgetown University and Fordham University.
These are big-name universities that serve as incubators for the future leaders of our country. The squashing of free speech doesn’t bode well.
Columbia University took the bottom spot on the list last year, though it ranked 214th out of 248 this time around. I guess any which way is up if you’re on the bottom.
The No. 1 school for free speech was Michigan Technological University, which earned a score of 78.01. That means the top free speech school in the country received a C+ on a traditional grading scale. That doesn’t bode well, either.
There is no doubt our colleges and universities have been infiltrated by progressives seeking to indoctrinate the young people who will then take over the other institutions that shape civilization — public schools, law, government and all the rest.
Progressives probably think they are on the verge of victory and one-party rule is in their grasp.
They shouldn’t celebrate too soon. According to Fortune, undergraduate college enrollment dropped 8 percent from 2019 to 2022. That decline is the steepest on record.
“It appears those who passed on college during the pandemic are opting out for good. Predictions that they would enroll after a year or two haven’t borne out,” Fortune reported.
Is this a signal that prospective students are losing faith in institutions of higher education? Could be.
At this point, I’d say give the progressives enough rope to hang themselves. Instead of killing the enemies of the revolution as Marx envisioned, they’re killing themselves.
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