Thanks for this thoughtful review of, and improvement suggestions for, FIRE's campus free speech ratings!
"I probably could have reached out to FIRE ... If by some chance FIRE finds this article ..."
If you're interested in their having a look at this post, it probably wouldn't take too long to tag Adam Goldstein (@AdGo) on Twitter, FIRE's VP of Research.
In mid-August 2022, he responded forthrightly when @PNWSelina noted that FIRE's ideological scale characterizations of at least three speakers and their audience pushback at campus events could bear re-evaluation, and I shared her takes with Adam. See, for instance, https://twitter.com/AdGo/status/1560831788209119232.
I studied at a large Chinese university for a semester. Students who had VPNs (and/or students from HK), told stories about their peers being reprimanded and even disappeared for talking about certain issues such as feminism. The other students never told such stories. I wonder if the non-vpn students would rank their university highly on a FIRE survey.
This is an interesting point. If things get really bad, will students underreport threats to speech? Hard to say whether this might be the case for some American campuses, but Yeonmi Park compares Columbia to North Korea and they show up at the end of list.
I would almost be inclined to worry more about students on campuses where the speech climate is so good that they don’t know what bad is. Some of the schools I looked at had student comments that didn’t seem to even know what a censorious environment looks like. One of my favorites said,
“Just when there is a lot of people in a classroom arguing already, I don't want to add more conflict”
I don’t know what numerical answers they gave, but it seems like there’s so much free debate going on that this person can’t get a word in edgewise lol.
Thanks for this thoughtful review of, and improvement suggestions for, FIRE's campus free speech ratings!
"I probably could have reached out to FIRE ... If by some chance FIRE finds this article ..."
If you're interested in their having a look at this post, it probably wouldn't take too long to tag Adam Goldstein (@AdGo) on Twitter, FIRE's VP of Research.
In mid-August 2022, he responded forthrightly when @PNWSelina noted that FIRE's ideological scale characterizations of at least three speakers and their audience pushback at campus events could bear re-evaluation, and I shared her takes with Adam. See, for instance, https://twitter.com/AdGo/status/1560831788209119232.
Really appreciate this! I may do exactly that.
I studied at a large Chinese university for a semester. Students who had VPNs (and/or students from HK), told stories about their peers being reprimanded and even disappeared for talking about certain issues such as feminism. The other students never told such stories. I wonder if the non-vpn students would rank their university highly on a FIRE survey.
This is an interesting point. If things get really bad, will students underreport threats to speech? Hard to say whether this might be the case for some American campuses, but Yeonmi Park compares Columbia to North Korea and they show up at the end of list.
I would almost be inclined to worry more about students on campuses where the speech climate is so good that they don’t know what bad is. Some of the schools I looked at had student comments that didn’t seem to even know what a censorious environment looks like. One of my favorites said,
“Just when there is a lot of people in a classroom arguing already, I don't want to add more conflict”
I don’t know what numerical answers they gave, but it seems like there’s so much free debate going on that this person can’t get a word in edgewise lol.