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121 American Colleges Scored an F. Yours Might Be One. · CLUB NORMIE

• 0:00
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The bottom five, the worst school this year was NYU, New York University.
• 0:04
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They were also in the bottom five last year.
• 0:06
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They're the worst for freedom of speech.
• 0:08
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Start considering why confidence in higher education is at record lows right now.
• 0:15
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So you've cheapened the degree.
• 0:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: At the same time, you've sold people a bill of goods that, hey, all you gotta do is get this degree and your earnings are gonna go up.
• 0:40
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What colleges promise around free speech and what they deliver are actually two different things.
• 0:45
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: You're about to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars potentially.
• 0:49
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So let's get this right the first time.
• 0:51
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: The people who speak truth around free speech in college in American schools is an institution called FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
• 1:08
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: FIRE Surveys, 261 schools and over 63,000 students.
• 1:14
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: My guest today is the man who wrote the school report card for FIRE, Dr.
• 1:20
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Sean Stevens.
• 1:22
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: This is Club Normy.
• 1:29
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'm your host, Jennifer Weisman.
• 1:31
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Sean, welcome.
• 1:33
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Thanks for having me.
• 1:34
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Good to be here.
• 1:35
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: All right.
• 1:36
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: 121 schools scoring F.
• 1:38
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: That is a shocking, shocking statistic.
• 1:41
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Tell us about that.
• 1:43
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Fire is a free speech organization.
• 1:44
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Close to half the schools we surveyed, receiving a failing grade.
• 1:49
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Many of these are due to policies that these schools have on the books that we think are either blatantly unconstitutional in their language or are written in ways that they're vague enough that they can be arbitrarily applied or applied in ways that aren't viewpoint neutral.
• 2:05
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: You survey 63,000 college students in America.
• 2:10
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Give me an example of some kinds of questions that you would be asking the students.
• 2:14
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Our survey is about 30 questions long each year.
• 2:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Within those, there's five that ask students about how comfortable they are or uncomfortable they are expressing controversial political views in different campus settings.
• 2:28
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So one of these is how comfortable or uncomfortable are you expressing controversial political views during a class discussion.
• 2:34
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We also ask about frequency of self-censorship.
• 2:37
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: You fear social repercussions, career repercussions, maybe even physical repercussions.
• 2:43
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: You're not concealing your views because you're shy or you don't know a lot about the topic.
• 2:48
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It's because of the possibility of retaliation.
• 2:51
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So we ask about the frequency of that in different settings, like how often you do it with students, how often you do this with professors, with administrators.
• 3:00
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We have some questions that get at political tolerance, whether a speaker should be allowed on campus or not.
• 3:07
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I want to talk about the things that really shocked you.
• 3:09
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So what is the most shocking statistic that you found around students and political tolerance?
• 3:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: On tolerance, what's troubling to me is what we've seen over time is just tolerance declining across the board.
• 3:24
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: For the past two years, we've had over 50% of students oppose all of the speakers, whether they're liberal or conservative.
• 3:31
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So that's really concerning, I would say.
• 3:34
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What schools have you seen that are truly politically intolerant?
• 3:40
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The bottom five, the worst school this year was uh NYU, New York University.
• 3:44
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They were also in the bottom five last year.
• 3:47
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They're the worst for freedom of speech in our rankings.
• 3:50
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: A main reason that NYU is at the bottom was how they've handled a number of speech controversies involving expression about Israel and Palestine pretty poorly.
• 4:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The University of Washington, also in the bottom.
• 4:04
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Third worst was Texas State.
• 4:06
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Wow, that's a surprise.
• 4:08
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah, they dropped from having a decent ranking last year, and both them and a few other Texas schools saw big declines this year due to there's a lot of faculty speech coming under fire in the state of Texas right now.
• 4:24
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There's been syllabi review, course review.
• 4:27
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: This is coming from the state government and even following fear of running afoul of federal executive orders, limiting diversity, equity, inclusion things in higher ed.
• 4:39
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Texas State, Texas AM, Texas Tech, a number of other schools there have placed a number of courses in syllabi under review.
• 4:46
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They've altered some of them, they've canceled some courses.
• 4:50
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So that's bringing a number of schools in that state down.
• 4:54
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: That's a really big surprise.
• 4:56
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Texas AM, I can't believe that.
• 4:58
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: A lot of their drop is due to things with faculty speech.
• 5:02
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Wow.
• 5:02
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So that's three.
• 5:03
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Give me four and five.
• 5:05
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Northeastern, also second year in a row that they're near the bottom.
• 5:09
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Bottom five is Rutgers, where I got my PhD.
• 5:14
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Ah wow.
• 5:15
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What happened at Rutgers?
• 5:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Incidents involving Israel, Palestine, heavy Jewish population, and also heavy Arab popul.
• 5:22
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Rutgers is one of the most diverse campuses in the country.
• 5:25
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: While we're talking about the Israel topic, it's really, really exploded as the topic.
• 5:32
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: It seems like it's getting hotter and hotter and hotter.
• 5:35
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And we have DSA mayors and potentially senators.
• 5:41
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: They don't make any bones about sheer dislike for the state of Israel.
• 5:47
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And you have to say to yourself, what's going on?
• 5:50
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And it starts with early thought, right?
• 5:52
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: College is such an incredible part of our kids' process.
• 5:56
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 5:57
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Um, the question of does this normalize at some point?
• 6:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The first year we ran the survey, it was 2020.
• 6:05
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It closed the day after the George Floyd death.
• 6:09
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So we didn't really pick up on much of it in 2020.
• 6:13
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: But in 2021, racial inequality, race, this was like the most difficult topic for students to discuss.
• 6:20
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That was a big thing at that time.
• 6:22
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: But that started to fade.
• 6:24
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That one has kind of normalized back to maybe where you would think it would be.
• 6:29
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Like, I think that's always going to be a topic that's difficult for people to discuss.
• 6:33
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: But are you saying that you're optimistic?
• 6:36
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So we saw a similar thing with abortion after Roe v.
• 6:39
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Wade was overturned.
• 6:40
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That spiked up, but then that has kind of fallen back down to previous levels.
• 6:44
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: In 2024, it was the highest percentage of students ever saying the topic for any topic that was difficult to discuss was Israel-Palestine.
• 6:53
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It was 56%, 57%.
• 6:54
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It's declined slightly the last two years, but it's still at 50-51% now.
• 7:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And I'm not as confident predicting that it will continue to slide because the difference here is George Ford happened, time passes, nothing new happens here, really.
• 7:15
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Roe v.
• 7:15
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Wade is overturned, time passes.
• 7:18
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There's an end, it dissipates.
• 7:19
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: With Israel-Palestine, the conflict is ongoing.
• 7:22
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There's new things for people to get upset about almost every day.
• 7:27
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I'm less confident we'll see it normalize as quickly.
• 7:30
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Heavy presence of student groups that organize around this issue on both sides.
• 7:36
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What kind of groups?
• 7:38
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: You have the campus Hillels and more pro-Israel groups that organize, and they're going to be the ones bringing IDF soldiers to campus so you can hear about their experiences.
• 7:48
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: You have other groups, like say students for justice in Palestine.
• 8:01
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'm not sure that the Students for Justice in Palestine is as innocent in terms of the funding.
• 8:09
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: A lot of dark money.
• 8:11
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 8:11
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We've found correlations between, you know, the more dark money that comes in from places like Qatar, other countries in the Middle East, et cetera, the more deplatforming attempts there are on a campus, the more attempts to sanction faculty members there are.
• 8:27
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The performance on some of our survey questions goes down.
• 8:31
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There's a lot of smoke there for sure.
• 8:33
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I understand that.
• 8:34
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: You talked about the bottom five.
• 8:36
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Give me the top five schools.
• 8:38
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah, top five.
• 8:39
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And I'll mention a few others outside the top five because we do have a handful of schools that perform consistently well year over year, and people should know about them.
• 8:47
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'd love to hear something good about colleges because it's pretty bleak out there.
• 8:53
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Top five, uh, University of Chicago for the third time in seven years was the top-ranked school this year.
• 9:00
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Well, for free speech, top-ranked school.
• 9:03
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 9:03
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I will say, even though they're the top-ranked school, and we think they do a very good job.
• 9:08
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Last week there was some controversy there.
• 9:11
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There was a fireside chat scheduled with Tim Poole, a podcaster, and Jack Basobiat, former Navy intelligence officer and political commentator.
• 9:21
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It was arranged, it was booked.
• 9:23
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: About 10 days after the booking, the organizing group was contacted and told that the event cannot be held because they did not inform the venue that it was potentially controversial.
• 9:34
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Are you serious?
• 9:36
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yes, the university overturned this decision.
• 9:38
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So the event actually was held on Friday.
• 9:41
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That actually will wind up being a penalty to them next year in the rankings.
• 9:45
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They'll lose a point because of that.
• 9:47
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Well, pointing this out because to say even the best school still has its issues.
• 9:51
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Ud schools worried about their ranking.
• 9:53
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Do they wait for your ranking to come out and say, okay, what did Sean do this year?
• 9:58
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Where did we score?
• 9:59
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We've been in touch with a number of universities.
• 10:03
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Some have reached out with the desire of improving and asking what it is they can do to improve.
• 10:09
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The first step is usually policy reform.
• 10:11
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So we put them in touch with our policy reform team and they work with them.
• 10:15
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So what's number two for the top five?
• 10:18
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That was closely behind UChicago, was last year's top-ranked school, Claremont McKenna College.
• 10:25
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Oh, great school.
• 10:26
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 10:27
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So who's number three?
• 10:28
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Number three is Georgia Tech.
• 10:30
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Also been a consistently fairly good performer in our rankings over the years.
• 10:35
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Number four is a school that may not be as widely known.
• 10:40
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It's Michigan Tech.
• 10:42
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And then top five is rounded out with Vanderbilt University.
• 10:46
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Vandy.
• 10:47
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Yeah.
• 10:48
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Who does not love Vanderbilt?
• 10:49
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Okay, Vanderbilt.
• 10:51
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Wow.
• 10:52
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Uh some other strong performers that I will note include Dartmouth College.
• 10:58
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They're number six this year.
• 11:00
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: That's a surprise.
• 11:01
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: That's a big surprise.
• 11:02
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: George Mason in Virginia, also consistently good performer.
• 11:07
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And so is the University of Virginia.
• 11:09
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So the common thread that we see at a lot of these schools that do well is strong leadership from the presidents, the provosts, the chancellors.
• 11:18
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The University of Chicago has had strong presidential leadership, um, freedom of speech for well over a decade.
• 11:25
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'm sorry, but what in the heck is going on at Harvard?
• 11:30
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So Harvard is an interesting case, and I think another reinforcing point for strong leadership making a difference.
• 11:38
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They were the lowest ranked school two years in a row, and it wasn't even particularly close.
• 11:44
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What happened?
• 11:45
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Um, so October 7th, 2023 happens.
• 11:49
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What was the Harvard ranking the year before and then after the 23 October 7th massacre?
• 11:57
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: In 2023, we released the rankings about a month before the October 7th attack.
• 12:02
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That was the first of the two years that Harvard finished dead last.
• 12:07
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They were the lowest ranked school in 2024 and 2025 rankings.
• 12:12
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They pulled out of the bottom five last year, but they still were ranked pretty poorly.
• 12:19
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: This year, though, they are ranked 71st.
• 12:22
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They did improve a considerable amount.
• 12:24
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The main reason for this is the students' perception of the school administration's stance on free speech and whether or not they're likely to protect it increased significantly.
• 12:36
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: This coincides with new presidential leadership at Harvard.
• 12:40
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Leadership is so important, and that's what makes the difference.
• 12:43
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Those three presidents were an embarrassment, an embarrassment.
• 12:48
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They failed completely.
• 12:50
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: They went in with a legal argument, which they were right on the law, but they didn't realize that this wasn't a legal debate.
• 12:57
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: This was politics, and you made yourself look very bad.
• 13:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Alan Garber was named interim president.
• 13:03
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: He's been able to shift the culture and improve it.
• 13:05
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: But so again, pointing to leadership, I think he's been much stronger on the issue.
• 13:10
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Private schools, those are pretty expensive schools to attend.
• 13:14
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There's a number of state schools that do very well in our rankings.
• 13:18
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Oh, I can't wait to hear.
• 13:20
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What are your favorites?
• 13:21
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: UVA does well.
• 13:23
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: George Mason does well.
• 13:25
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Pretty much all the state schools in Arizona do well.
• 13:28
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: All the state schools in North Carolina tend to do very well.
• 13:31
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There's a handful of larger state schools in the South where the student body identifies as slightly more conservative than it does liberal.
• 13:39
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Places like Auburn, like University of Mississippi, those schools tend to do well in our rankings too.
• 13:45
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: If you were going to send your kid to a school in the Northeast based on the fire ranking, where would you send your daughter or your son?
• 13:52
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: If we're going off the rankings, it'll be Dartmouth, right?
• 13:55
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: If you've got the grades and the means to do it.
• 13:58
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: If you can drop $100,000 a year on Dartmouth, do you have anything else that's maybe a state school?
• 14:05
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So best performing state school in the Northeast tends to usually be the University of New Hampshire, actually.
• 14:13
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That's probably the one I'd flag as your best option.
• 14:18
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: My pivot is now to Charlie Kirk, because we cannot talk about free speech college campuses without talking about the assassination of the one man who wanted to debate free speech, and I'm preaching to the choir.
• 14:31
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'm literally not over the assassination of this man.
• 14:34
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Your rankings came out, and the next day he was assassinated.
• 14:38
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 14:38
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So in 2025, 34% of students said that using violence to stop a campus speech was acceptable.
• 14:45
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: 34%.
• 14:47
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 14:48
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: This was prior to his assassination.
• 14:50
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yes, this is prior to the assassination.
• 14:52
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So it dipped this year, which Thank God.
• 14:54
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I expected to see, but it's I would have honestly expected more of a drop given the assassination aid.
• 15:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: What was it?
• 15:02
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: 29, 30% around there.
• 15:03
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So it only dipped a few percentage points.
• 15:06
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So you're saying that 34% of students found that violence is acceptable to stop someone speaking on college campuses, something that that student doesn't like.
• 15:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Last year, yeah, to stop.
• 15:19
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And then this year it's 29%.
• 15:21
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And then he was executed on TV and now it's 29%.
• 15:24
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yes.
• 15:25
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So I would have liked to see that drop.
• 15:27
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That's grim.
• 15:28
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I would have liked to see that drop a lot more for sure.
• 15:30
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 15:31
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Yeah.
• 15:31
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: When I saw the video of the shooting for fire, turned our world basically upside down.
• 15:37
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And we definitely saw evidence that it's still impacting campuses this year.
• 15:43
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: When you say it's impacting, are you saying students?
• 15:46
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Students and faculty being impacted.
• 15:48
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: One of the other research projects we have is we maintain these databases that track speech controversies on campus.
• 15:56
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And the outcomes can feed into the rankings, and schools can have positive impact or negative impact depending on what they do.
• 16:03
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: One of these databases, we call it scholars under fire.
• 16:07
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Usually it's punished faculty for speech after they've expressed it.
• 16:12
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It can also involve some instances where they're being preemptively censored, but it's usually more in response.
• 16:18
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We recorded 90 examples.
• 16:22
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Is that high?
• 16:23
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yes.
• 16:23
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: This is in the three months following Charlie Kirk's assassination, 90 examples of faculty being targeted for speech they made about Kirk, usually on social media.
• 16:34
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: But which side?
• 16:35
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: This was mostly faculty who are were critical of Kirk.
• 16:40
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: There were some that were defending him, positive towards him.
• 16:45
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So it wasn't one size fits all, but it was mostly more liberal left professors saying things like, I don't think we should be honoring this man, things like that.
• 16:54
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Right.
• 16:54
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Some of them probably going a little further.
• 16:56
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: My recommendation would be don't you have some friends you could get a couple beers with and say this to at the bar instead of putting it out on uh social media for millions and millions of people to see, but your speech is protected, we'll defend it.
• 17:10
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: But yeah, we recorded 90 attempts to get faculty punished.
• 17:14
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: About 20 of them got fired.
• 17:16
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: You talk about free speech and you talk about anti-Semitism and you put them together, and what you get is parents' culling list of schools, even if they have great reputations.
• 17:28
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Nope, not gonna send my kid here.
• 17:30
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Jew hating.
• 17:31
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Nope, not gonna send my kid there.
• 17:33
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Can't say what he thinks.
• 17:34
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And this list is getting smaller and smaller and smaller and smaller.
• 17:38
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And by the way, the tuition is going higher and higher and higher and higher.
• 17:42
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And it's a weird thing because you know, you say to yourself, what is going on here?
• 17:46
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So I want to ask you, if we're sitting here in a few years, Dr.
• 17:50
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Sean, do you feel that we are going to be coming back to some level where parents are proud and excited and students are excited to go to a college to learn and not a be ripped over the coals either for what they think or for the price that they're paying, the monetary price, because there is very little return on investment at a half million dollars to send your kid to a school, especially with AI coming.
• 18:18
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I mean, I'm preaching to the choir here, but I have to ask where are the outcomes?
• 18:23
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I wish I could be more optimistic.
• 18:25
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I think there are encouraging signs of things happening now.
• 18:30
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I do.
• 18:31
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: My worry is I think a lot of these signs that we're seeing that are encouraging aren't the result of schools reflecting the problem that they have with these related issues, free speech and anti-Semitism.
• 18:46
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I think a lot of them are digging in and standing up for free speech now because of who's in the White House, and most of them don't like him.
• 18:55
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: And so I worry that this newfound vigor around the issue could very quickly dissipate if circumstances change.
• 19:05
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: A president AOC, you can imagine the backsliding.
• 19:09
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah, there would it immediately, I think, go back to business as usual now because there isn't the big orange ogre in there coming after us right now.
• 19:20
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Right.
• 19:21
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We have a lot of issues with government, state, and federal level trying to influence higher education.
• 19:28
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We're not fans of the heavy-handedness.
• 19:31
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: So overall, the rankings in America pretty grim.
• 19:35
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: And Dr.
• 19:36
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Sean's trying to be an optimist here.
• 19:38
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'm trying here.
• 19:39
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I'm trying, yeah.
• 19:40
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: I know.
• 19:41
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What are you hoping?
• 19:42
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What are you hoping?
• 19:44
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So, my hope, I really do hope that some of that schools get a little more self-reflective, start considering why confidence in higher education is at record woes right now, and it's just been going down consistently over the past four or five years.
• 20:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It is people responding to what they are seeing in the news and on the ground, and higher education institutions need to reflect on that and reckon with it.
• 20:10
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The way technology is rapidly developing today, people can find knowledge, information, learn things, learn skills sitting right where we're both sitting right now.
• 20:23
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: If you know how to prompt AI very well, you can become incredibly productive.
• 20:29
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That doesn't require necessarily a degree.
• 20:32
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: I think schools are gonna have to grapple with people might, hey, I might come here to take a class to learn this skill I need for what I do, but I'm not enrolling for four years for a degree from you.
• 20:44
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Colleges have way, way overstepped in terms of how they try to influence what kids think without allowing them to have their own freedom of thought and to ask a half a million dollars a year for a kid to graduate with zero experience and a credentialing degree, which doesn't get you very far.
• 21:05
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: You used to have a significant edge if you have a bachelor's degree, right?
• 21:08
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 21:09
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: That used to give you a pretty significant edge.
• 21:11
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Now you've made it so that really to get ahead, you probably need at least a master's degree, if not more.
• 21:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Right.
• 21:18
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: To really get that boost.
• 21:20
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: So you've cheapened the degree.
• 21:22
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Yeah.
• 21:22
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: At the same time, you've sold people a bill of goods that, hey, all you gotta do is get this degree and your earnings are gonna go up.
• 21:29
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: At the end of the day, they're kind of duped, right?
• 21:32
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: They take out these loans, they get out thinking that they're promised some nirvana opportunity, and then they're stuck with these massive student loans.
• 21:42
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: Now you can understand why this younger generation is just so bitter and are saying, well, you know, maybe socialism is the way to go.
• 21:50
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: What is the weirdest thing, socially or politically, that you've experienced this week?
• 21:56
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Oh, this past week.
• 21:58
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Um weirdest thing.
• 22:01
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: The vitro, to go back to some of what we've been talking about, um, given that the past week, the October 7th anniversary happened, there's groups out there celebrating the anniversary of the attack because they're happy with the attack.
• 22:17
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: We don't celebrate the August, whatever date of dropping the atomic bomb, and Germany doesn't celebrate remembrance of the Holocaust here.
• 22:26
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It's disappointing and it kind of gets you right in the gut there.
• 22:30
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It's the same thing with like the Charlie Kirg assassination.
• 22:33
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: It's this is an innocent life that has been ended.
• 22:36
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: Regardless of what I may or may not think of people, you don't want to see that.
• 22:42
  HOST: Jennifer Weissmann: You don't want to see that.
• 22:43
  GUEST: Sean Stevens is FIRE's Chief Research Advisor.: No.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Dr.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: Sean, we covered a lot today.
• 22:46
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: See you again.
• 22:48
  Speaker: Yeah, thanks for having me.
• 22:52
  Speaker 1: If you've ever wondered why so many people stop saying what they really think, a lot of this stuff started way back in college.
• 23:00
  Speaker 1: So this is important.
• 23:01
  Speaker 1: What FIRE's doing is very, very important because these people become our coworkers, our neighbors, our city council people, even our presidents.
• 23:11
  Speaker 1: You're not crazy.
• 23:12
  Speaker 1: This is Club Normy.
• 23:14
  Speaker 1: Hit subscribe.