[Editor’s note: Make sure to read Joseph Klein’s contributions in Jamie Glazov’s new book: Barack Obama’s True Legacy: How He Transformed America.]

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse just released their fourth annual College Free Speech Rankings of the free speech cultures of 248 of America’s largest and most prestigious campuses.  “Students entering college this fall can expect new friendships, all-night study sessions, dining hall food — and a culture of conformity and censorship,” FIRE said in announcing the rankings. “A new survey of more than 55,000 students across the country shows that most attend colleges that don’t value free expression.”

FIRE Director of Polling and Analytics Sean Stevens warned that with every passing year, “the climate on college campuses grows more inhospitable to free speech. Some of the most prestigious universities in our country have the most repressive administrations. Students should know that a college degree at certain schools may come at the expense of their free speech rights.”

FIRE’s rankings put Harvard University at the bottom of the list. In fact, “Harvard is by far the worst school in the country for free speech. It is the only school with an ‘Abysmal’ rating.” The University of Pennsylvania ranked as the second worst institution of higher learning on the list from a free speech perspective. The University of South Carolina, Georgetown University, and Fordham University rounded out the bottom five, with ratings of “Very Poor” or “Poor.”

The factors examined in determining the free speech rankings included student responses, the school policies that regulate student expression, disciplinary procedures, and “how schools responded to deplatforming attempts, which seek to prevent speakers from expressing themselves.”

Alarmingly, at the schools ranking in the bottom five, attempts at deplatforming had a disturbing 81% success rate. This means that these schools were quite willing to tolerate disruptive and even violent tactics as acceptable forms of protest to stop controversial speakers, particularly conservative ones, from proceeding with their campus speeches.

At Harvard, student activists rose up against a preceptor named David Kane, after he had been teaching a government course at the university for three years. They were offended by Dr. Kane’s invitation in 2020 for Charles Murray, whose controversial books included “Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class,” to speak as part of an optional lecture series for Kane’s students. The student activists went on the warpath when Dr. Kane was accused of posting allegedly racist, sexist, and homophobic posts under the pen name “David Dudley Field ’25” on a Williams College alumni website that he had founded in 2003.

Harvard’s Government Department did not renew David Kane’s contract after the 2020-2021 academic year.

The tyranny of strident activists triumphed over free speech at one of the country’s most prestigious universities.

A law school graduate at Georgetown University, which ranked in FIRE’s bottom five, claims that he was suspended from the school and required to undergo a psychiatric evaluation back in 2021 for questioning his school’s COVID and masking policy.

“While ostensibly this was about COVID, it was really part of a much larger cycle of events at Georgetown Law,” the former law student explained in an interview. “We had people like Sandra Sellers and Ilya Shapiro, who were thrown out of the institution just for being willing to question campus orthodoxies. And it was part of an ongoing double standard where if you’re progressive and you regurgitate the proper slogans, then there’s an indemnity built into shouting down speakers.”

The orthodoxy of woke administrators triumphed over the freedom to express dissenting viewpoints at one of the nation’s top law schools, where reasoned debate of issues should be the norm, not cause for punishment.

The FIRE report observed that many students on campus did not feel free to discuss certain hot button topics such as abortion, racial issues, and transgender rights on campus. Nearly 70 percent of the students surveyed said that they were very uncomfortable or somewhat uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic.

Self-censorship for fear of retaliation undermines free speech on the nation’s campuses.

The chill on academic freedom also extends to scholarly publications, even in scientific journals where empirical evidence and critical thinking should be valued whether they are in line with the current “consensus” or not.

Patrick T. Brown, a top climate scientist and lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, has exposed the games that must be played to get an article published in prestigious academic scientific journals regarding a controversial issue like climate change.

Dr. Brown explained in an article he wrote, entitled “I Left Out the Full Truth to Get My Climate Change Paper Published,” the dilemma facing academic scientists who are trying “to be published in high-profile journals.” These journals, he wrote, serve in many ways as the “gatekeepers for career success in academia.” Dr. Brown noted that “the editors of these journals have made it abundantly clear, both by what they publish and what they reject, that they want climate papers that support certain preapproved narratives—even when those narratives come at the expense of broader knowledge for society.”

“To put it bluntly,” Dr. Brown added, “climate science has become less about understanding the complexities of the world and more about serving as a kind of Cassandra, urgently warning the public about the dangers of climate change. However understandable this instinct may be, it distorts a great deal of climate science research, misinforms the public, and most importantly, makes practical solutions more difficult to achieve.”

Honest research and truthful publication of findings in the academic scientific community are being sacrificed at the altar of political correctness.

In sum, academia, both on campus and in the scholarly publication arena, has succumbed to what the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression accurately called “a culture of conformity and censorship.”