A new study says that less than 5 percent of colleges and universities surveyed have policies in place that respect the First Amendment right to free speech, while more than half are violating either the First Amendment or free speech promises made by these schools.
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education is an educational nonprofit that reviews 437 college and university speech codes every year in an effort to "defend the individual rights of students and faculty members at colleges across the country," said Azhar Majeed, director of FIRE's Individual Rights Education Program.
FIRE puts schools into three categories: red light, yellow light and green light. Red light ratings are for schools that have at least one policy that violates student and faculty freedom of expression, and in the group's 2015 poll, 55.2 percent of these schools got the red light. That's a slight improvement from the 58.6 percent of schools that got a red light rating in the prior survey,according to FIRE's website.
Green light ratings are for schools whose policies uphold the First Amendment, but only 21 of the 437 schools evaluated this past year received a green light, Majeed said. That's just shy of 5 percent.
"Red light policies are clearly unconstitutional," Majeed said. "Yellow light speech codes are a little bit more ambiguous, often times they are vague in the way they are worded, and so they do encompass some protective speech, but it's not as clearly restrictive as a red light speech code."
FIRE works with schools to be sure their policies do not infringe on faculty members' or students' rights. While public schools are bound by the First Amendment, private institutions are not. However, FIRE examines the promises private schools make in their handbooks on free speech, and then evaluates the supporting policies to make sure they uphold those promises, Majeed said.
Todd Zywicki, foundation professor of law at George Mason University, spent five years trying to improve GMU's speech code rating before finally receiving a green light rating.
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