A staggering 88% of four-year colleges and universities restrict the free expression of their students, reversing a 15-year trend, according to an annual report on campus speech codes.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) flagged 426 of 486 institutions for having at least one policy restricting student speech.
The Philadelphia free-speech advocacy group also downgraded 12 schools from “yellow” to “red” on the report’s traffic-light scale, marking the first time since 2007 that the number of worst-rated schools has increased.
Schools slipped this year because they adopted more sweeping harassment, bias reporting and social-media posting policies limiting what students can say publicly, said report author Laura Beltz, FIRE’s director of policy reform.