Freedom of speech represents a principle that supports the freedom of a community or a person to articulate their ideas on opinions without fear of censorship, retaliation, or legal sanction. This right is recognized as a human right in International Human Rights Law and the Universal Declaration of Human rights by the United Nations.
And most countries have constitutional laws that protect free speech. The terms like freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and free speech are used in political discourse, although in a legal sense, the freedom of speech includes any activity of receiving, imparting, and seeking pieces of information or ideas.
So, you may wonder why is freedom of speech important, especially in colleges. Well, restricting free speech in academia can lead to large losses in the students’ research potential. Many of the freedom of speech free essays and paper examples that you can find on gradesfixer.com/free-essay-examples/freedom-of-speech/ explain that restricting freedom of speech is a violation and abuse of human rights.
Free speech on college campuses basically means that any opinion can be evaluated and voiced. And the most important function of it is to protect the voice of those who have unpopular opinions and those with opinions disliked by the people who have the power.
This applies on the campus level, where no one’s opinion should be silenced or prohibited, and the national and state government should prevent attempts to silence any opinions. Free speech is closely related to peaceful protest because the protests are also a form of expression.
So, in order to help students and parents choose the right college, there are rankings designed. The first-ever College Free Speech Rankings were released by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, RealClearEducation, and College Pulse. And the rankings are based only on the voices of around 20,000 students from 55 different colleges.
And in 2021, the biggest survey was made and based on the opinions of 37,000 students from 154 largest campuses, experts were able to summarize the answers in order to provide the feature students with colleges where they can have the ability to think, discuss and speak freely on challenging titles such as gender dynamics, race, geopolitical conflicts, etc. So, let’s see which are the best colleges for free speech.
Top Ranked Colleges for free speech.
The ranking of the college is based on seven main components: tolerance for liberal speakers, openness to a discussion of controversial topics, tolerance for conservative speakers, comfort expressing ideas publicly, administrative support for free speech, FIRE’s speech code rating, and wheatear the students support disruptive conduct during speeches on campus. Although 154 colleges were ranked, the list is long. So, we are going to share just the 30 best colleges for you.
1. University of Chicago
2. Kansas State University
3. Texas A&M University
4. University of California-Los Angeles
5. Arizona State University
6. University of Virginia
7. Duke University
8. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
9. Brown University
10. University of Arizona
11. University of Tennessee
12. Yale University
13. University of Missouri
14. Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey
15. University of Washington
16. University of Colorado
17. Northwestern University
18. Indiana University
19. University of Iowa
20. University of Utah
21. Columbia University
22. University of Oregon
23. Washington State University
24. University of California-Davis
25. Pennsylvania State University
26. University of Arkansas
27. University of Minnesota
28. University of California-Berkeley
29. Princeton University
30. Ohio State University
And the following 5 were ranked lowest, which makes them the 5 worst colleges for free speech.
150. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
151. Boston College
152. Louisiana State University
153. Marquette University
154. DePauw University
Conclusion
Many examples of research on this topic show that every student has questions that they want to be answered before choosing the perfect college for them. And the value of higher education comes exactly from that. Students can only understand everything right by asking questions that are challenging to the status quo, So a college that won’t protect your rights to ask those kinds of questions is probably a bad choice. And believe it or not, in these rankings, public schools performed better than private ones.
