On September 5 the Bloomington Herald-Times reported that, in a ranking of free speech environments at US universities published this fall by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), IU was listed 243rd among 251 schools, above only one other public university. What are the specific reasons for IU’s low rank and how significant is it?
Background: What is FIRE? Established in 1999 as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE’s mission is to hold universities and other institutions to account for violations of free speech rights, both through public advocacy and in legal filings. In this respect, its mission includes elements in common with the AAUP. It is a non-profit supported by donations, and its major donors include groups on both the Left and Right sides of the political spectrum. Because many of its early cases defended students and faculty whose conservative views were not supported by school administrations, it initially attracted most support from conservative groups, though it is now more generally perceived as ideologically neutral.
IU’s Ranking Plunge: FIRE has published rankings for college and university free speech environments for over a decade. Although there is good reason to be skeptical of simplistic rankings, the assessments that underlie FIRE’s results often reveal important information that can signal trends or abrupt changes. For example, consider IU’s rankings in recent FIRE reports:
Report Date* |
Schools ranked |
IU’s rank |
% above IU |
145 |
75 |
52% |
|
203 |
80 |
39% |
|
248 |
225 |
91% |
|
251 |
243 |
97% |
The 2024 report reviews the 2023-2024 academic year, and IU’s ranking did indeed fall, primarily as a result of the administration’s unprocedural suspension of a tenured colleague; its cancelation for unspecified ‘security concerns’ of a long-planned exhibit, in order to censor on campus a controversial alumni artist; and its sniper-backed police raids on Dunn Meadow protesters. But IU’s ranking fell only slightly compared to the year before, when it plunged from middle-of-the-pack to the worst ten percent among all schools, public and private. What happened then set the stage for our current situation.
What Caused the Plunge in 2023? A FIRE rank consists of two elements. The first is the result of a poll of students concerning general campus free-speech atmosphere. As in previous reports, IU’s 2023 rank remained in the middle in those survey results. But the second element includes a FIRE staff analysis of the degree to which school administrations support or stifle free expression, and in 2022-2023 only one school’s record was worse than IU’s.
Two major actions by IU administration in 2022-2023 were the chief reasons for FIRE’s negative reassessment:
#1 The Whitten administration declared itself free at its own discretion to violate university policies protecting academic freedom.Here are details of these two matters:
#2 The Whitten administration sanctioned elected faculty governance leaders for addressing their faculty constituents on a politically contentious issue affecting IU campuses.
Administration Action #1: Disclaiming Academic Personnel Policies: In April 2023, responding to a lawsuit filed by a colleague whose tenured appointment had been abruptly terminated without a prior hearing, the Whitten administration filed a brief that included the following claim:
While few IUB faculty were aware of this case because it occurred on the IU-Northwest campus, FIRE took note of this sweeping threat to academic freedom and free expression. None of the protections that IU policies provide for faculty rights have legal standing in the eyes of the current administration. This applies to all IU campuses, including Bloomington. The administration's claim is based on the fact that on one page of the University Policies section of the IU website there is a statement disclaiming that policies create contract rights. And precedent shows that Indiana courts will back this position. (See Ken Dau-Schmidt’s detailed analysis in our Fall 2024 AAUP Report.)
Administration Action #2: Sanctioning Elected Faculty Leaders for Speech to Their Constituencies: The previous summer, in August 2022, the presidents of the faculty councils on every IU campus joined in sending an email message to the faculty they represent expressing concern about the impact that pending legislation restricting abortion would have on IU faculty, students, and staff. The message included criticism of IU’s tepid response to attacks on a faculty colleague by the Indiana Attorney General over this issue.
The IU Office of General Counsel sent the council presidents a letter claiming that under IU policy they were not permitted to speak to their constituents on issues concerning pending legislation in their capacity as elected faculty leaders. Council presidents were warned that their message should have been submitted for preapproval by the administration and that they would be subject to sanctions if they violated this policy again. (The speed with which IU acted is reflected in the fact that the faculty leader email was blocked on some campuses before reaching the faculty to whom it was directed.)
As Steve Sanders, a Maurer School of Law colleague, has argued convincingly and in detail, General Counsel’s response represented a fundamental misreading of the policy it cited (GR-01), which was written to provide guidelines for IU community members concerning participation in political campaigns for a political candidate or party and personal contact with government officials or governmental agencies. The extension of this policy to forbid elected faculty leaders from addressing their faculty constituencies--and to threaten them with personal sanctions if they did--created an unprecedented restriction on both academic freedom and faculty governance. It has, in practice, had a chilling effect.
[An additional consequence of these two actions is detailed in a note below.]
For its 2024 report on free speech environments FIRE has applied a discount to the ranking impact of these earlier administrative actions. But the better-known events of this past year—the Sinno suspension, Halaby cancelation, and Dunn Meadow raids—are now part of IU’s free speech record and have pushed IU even further towards the bottom. But note that IU's new and clearly unconstitutional policy on expressive activity (UA-10) was implemented after data for this year’s FIRE report was collected and is not considered in the report. We will not see the impact of UA-10 until next year's FIRE rankings are published. So far about twenty faculty members, as well as students and staff, have already been sanctioned for their participation in the candlelight vigils protesting the policy, a number of personnel actions far exceeding those of the prior two years. Faculty should expect to see FIRE’s ranking of IU’s free speech environment fall still further next year.
* * *
Additional note: In February 2024, as the Education Committee of the Indiana House of Representatives held hearings on the then-proposed Senate Bill 202 on “intellectual diversity” (ultimately enacted as SEA 202), Representative Jake Teshka (R-District 7) invoked the FIRE rankings to justify his advocacy for SB 202 (a bill that FIRE itself publicly opposed). He claimed that the report, based on student surveys, demonstrated that IU, and Bloomington in particular, tolerated a campus atmosphere that inhibited conservative free speech, noting that the CEO of FIRE was a self-identified liberal, adding validity to the report results.
Rep. Teshka was in error, both in his understanding of the FIRE report and in its findings on campus openness to conservative speech. The FIRE survey component measuring student perceptions ranked the Bloomington campus #78 out of 248 schools in “toleration of conservative speakers,” among the top third in that category. It was administrative attacks on academic freedom and shared governance, not general campus environment, that skewed the ranking low. The IUB AAUP leadership wrote to Rep. Teshka the following day, with copies to all members of the Education Committee, providing detailed documentation to correct this misuse of the FIRE report, but the damage had already been done. (And—no worries!—our letter was forwarded to IU administration to demonstrate that it was compliant with policy GR-01.)
Previous posts in this series:
#1 Does IU's New “Expressive Activity” Policy Strengthen IU's Commitment to Free Speech?
#2 Why Are Colleagues and Students Meeting by Candlelight at the Sample Gates Being Threatened with Sanctions?
Originally posted November 14, 2024
Alterations and updates will be noted below