Report: Florida State, South Florida lead six in top 100

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(The Center Square) – Florida State and the South Florida led six institutions in the top 100 of the 257 schools analyzed in the largest annual review of free speech for colleges and universities.

Both schools earned a C-minus letter grade, with Florida State scoring a 71 and the University of South Florida a 70. Also scoring in the top third of the nationwide rankings were Florida (45th, 64, D), Florida International (53rd, 63, D), Florida Atlantic (68th, 61, D-minus), and Central Florida (80th, 60, D-minus).

FIRE, the acronym for Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, based the rankings on 68,000 students at 253 colleges and universities.

Claremont McKenna College, in Claremont, Calif., scored an 80 for a B-minus to lead the rankings. Purdue (76, C) and the University of Chicago (76, C) were next. On the other end, Northeastern (47, F), the University of Washington (44, F) and Indiana (44, F) were the bottom three.

Florida State fell 17 spots from the previous year. The report says students attempted to disinvite Charlie Kirk, a national leader in debate killed on Wednesday in Utah. Kirk was in Tallahassee on Feb. 28.

The report says Florida State is bottom 25 for openness, and it “could strengthen its speech culture by adopting an official commitment to institutional neutrality.”

South Florida is down seven spots from a year earlier and also encouraged to adopt “an official commitment to institutional neutrality.”

The University of Miami was the only other school from the state analyzed, coming in at No. 229 with a score of 52 and an F letter grade.

FIRE bills itself as “nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience – the most essential qualities of liberty.”

It works to produce the rankings with College Pulse, a “survey research and analytics company dedicated to understanding the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of today’s college students.” It has custom “data-driven marketing and research solutions,” utilizing a panel of “850,000 college students and recent alumni from more than 1,500 two- and four-year colleges and universities in all 50 states.”