The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, based in Raleigh, North Carolina, announced yesterday the release of its report on the state of free speech on North Carolina's college campuses (PDF). The report, titled Do North Carolina Students Have Freedom of Speech?, examines the publicly available speech policies and regulations at each of the public and private universities in North Carolina to reveal which institutions provide their students with the same freedom of expression to which they are entitled in society at large and which ones fall short of doing so. For the report, the Pope Center relied on FIRE's Spotlight ratings for North Carolina's institutions of higher education, as well as additional research performed by FIRE for those colleges in North Carolina that are not in our Spotlight database. In grading schools on the extent to which their policies provide or deny freedom of speech, the Pope Center's report uses the very same rating system that FIRE employs in Spotlight.
This week, Adam Kissel, Director of FIRE's Individual Rights Defense Program, will speak at California State University-Sacramento, California Polytechnic State University (Cal Poly), and Merced College in California about the threats to liberty at California's colleges specifically, and on American campuses generally. Of the thirty-eight California institutions of higher education rated in Spotlight, not one of them has a green light.
The hits just keep coming for Southwestern College (SWC) President Raj K. Chopra. First, SWC was placed on probation by its accreditors, who cited among other things a "culture of fear and intimidation" on the Chula Vista, California, campus. Now the results of a Faculty Senate Survey give even more weight to the accreditors' report, showing a devastating lack of confidence in Chopra by the SWC faculty and giving him failing grades across the board.
FIRE is accepting applications for its 2010 undergraduate summer internship program. Rising sophomores, juniors, and seniors of all majors with an interest in defending individual rights in higher education are invited to apply.
