https://www.realcleareducation.com/articles/2021/10/20/elite_universities_are_the_worst_for_free_speech_110653.html
Inside the 2021 College Free Speech Rankings
One of the great values of an American collegiate experience is that students have the chance to engage deeply with differing opinions. To this day, I am grateful for the cornucopia of people, traditions, views, and cultures that I was able to engage with two decades ago when I, then a fairly conservative Jewish teenager, left the East Coast to go West and to college at Stanford University.
I would be lying if I said that there were no evenings when I felt hurt, misunderstood, shocked, and angry when my ideas were challenged and came into conflict with others. But there were far more nights where I was able to connect, learn, and grow in ways unimaginable to me in high school. I certainly remember the frustrations and agony of being challenged, but I remember more powerfully the ecstasy of having my mind opened up to new ideas and changing my opinions when I heard someone or something new. My old dorm even hosted a speaker’s series where huge turnouts were common for guests on both the left and the right and no one shouted down anyone; we even hosted the frequently-protested Dinesh D’Souza without incident.
While I, along with significant numbers of other students, did not like nor agree with the ideas shared by many of the speakers we heard, their perspectives were always worth hearing and then debating late into the night. Sadly, my undergraduate experience of being able to hear, respond to, and then reject or accept a plethora of views is under threat. Today, cancel culture runs rampant on our college campuses, and viewpoint diversity is no longer considered a sacred, core value in higher education.
Thanks to the largest data set ever compiled on student’s views toward free speech, we now know that students who attend the nation’s elite schools – those that purportedly thrive in the world of research, innovation and discovery – are actually more likely to try to cancel speech than their peers who attend lower-ranked educational institutions.