Harvard University and the University of California at Berkeley are used to being ranked among America’s top colleges, but a ranking issued by a campus watchdog on Monday isn’t much to write home about.
Both schools are included on the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education’s annual list of the 10 worst colleges for free speech.
The foundation’s executive director, Robert Shibley, said students, faculty and administrators are going to “greater and greater lengths to justify muzzling expression on campus.”
“This type of censorship makes for a sterile environment where lively debate and discussion can’t thrive,” Mr. Shibley said in a statement. “The public deserves to know which colleges will defend free expression — and which ones will go to seemingly any length to silence it.”
Rounding out the top 10 in no particular order are Fordham University in New York City; Albion College in Michigan; Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington; Drexel University in Philadelphia; Northwestern University in Evanston, Illionis; Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York; Los Angeles Community College District; and Texas State University in San Marcos. – READ MORE
[give_form id=”79809″] [divider][/divider]Last year, Harvard University took the unprecedented step of banning on- and off-campus single-gender organizations. The ban targeted sororities and fraternities, but also “unrecognized single-gender social organizations” called “Finals Clubs” that served as gathering places for the school’s legacy students.
In early February, after several rounds of appeals, the school finalized the ban — but, because of a campus-wide outcry from feminists, only leaders and members of “male-focused” single-gender clubs will face repercussions from Harvard’s administration.
According to Harvard, the single-gender clubs “propagated exclusionary values” and maintained “forms of privilege” that the school found distasteful and outdated. Those who remain in such clubs, reports Reason Magazine, risk being barred “from leadership positions, athletic teams, and scholarships.”
In December, Harvard finalized the policy, but women at Harvard immediately protested because the single-sex ban was supposed to come down only on those organizations that represented “privilege” — and there’s no way an eternally oppressed, female-only organization at an Ivy League school, made up entirely of the gender-underprivileged, could ever be a place of exclusivity, elitism, and classism. – READ MORE
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