FIRE to Fordham: You’re wrong about our College Free Speech Rankings

Pick a year in the last decade and you’re likely to find an open FIRE investigation into some kind of speech repression at Fordham University. We’ve sent the university numerous letters about their incursions into the expressive freedoms of students and faculty and even filed an amicus brief in court supporting a student we believed the university had wronged. We’ve even reached out and offered to help them revise speech-restrictive policies.

Despite our best efforts, Fordham never got its act together and currently sits near the bottom of FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings. The campus survey, conducted with College Pulse, is the largest in the country, representing the voices of more than 55,000 students at 248 colleges and universities. Fordham ranks 244.

Fordham’s abysmal track record on free speech is well established. As FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley wrote back in 2021: “Students, faculty, alumni, and the general public now know — if there were any doubt — that Fordham’s promises of free expression aren’t worth a dime.”

Which is why we at FIRE were more than a little surprised to hear Fordham President Tania Tetlow last week on the “Freakonomics Radio” podcast, where she responded to criticism of Fordham’s campus speech climate by raising questions about FIRE’s rankings. 

“First of all, those FIRE rankings,” she said, “We don’t really understand how they come to them.”

The factors that contribute most to Fordham’s low rankings are its policies, which receive our worst “red light” rating for free speech.

This is more an indictment of Fordham than of our rankings. Our commitment to open and transparent science compels us to make our methodology publicly available, and we make the data upon which we base the rankings available to anyone on request. Not a single factor of our rankings is unknowable to anyone motivated to look into them.

The factors that contribute most to Fordham’s low rankings are its policies, which receive our worst “red light” rating for free speech, including one policy that bans use of IT resources (such as campus internet) to “insult” or “embarrass” others. Fordham also ranks poorly in a number of components from our survey of students, including in Tolerance for Conservative Speakers (211th of 248), Mean Tolerance (213th of 248), support for Disruptive Conduct (189th of 248), and perception of Administrative Support for free expression (180th of 248).

Fordham additionally received penalties for instances of censorship against students and student groups, which Tetlow raises.

At Fordham, we famously — and it got litigated — suspended a student who, after a verbal argument with fellow students, went and bought an assault rifle and then posted that on social media. If he had shot up the campus, we would have been reamed if we had not done anything. It was so obvious a warning. But by suspending him, we got really attacked by some free-speech purist group saying, “How dare you? It’s just because you’re against guns.”

While we do penalize Fordham for its treatment of Austin Tong, Tetlow misrepresents the case in a number of key ways. Tong wrote an Instagram post holding a gun off campus, with the popular libertarian phrase “Don’t tread on me,” an American flag and a Chinese flag, and a hashtag recognizing Tiananmen Square on the 31st anniversary of the massacre. For this, Fordham sent security officers to visit Tong, who concluded he was not a threat but later asked him to take down the post. Fordham then found him guilty of assertedly violating university policies on “bias and/or hate crimes” and “threats/intimidation.”

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This was an egregious violation of Tong’s free speech rights, which Fordham purports to “guarantee” in its mission statement. Fordham went on to argue in court on Tong’s lawsuit for Fordham’s “prerogative to limit a student’s free expression rights” and, unfortunately, went on to prevail in the case.

And what I find really a shame right now is those who push for more speech on campus have suddenly flip-flopped on a lot of those issues, right? Now they’re yelling at us because we don’t suppress speech more. This would have been a moment to really stand up and say, we find some of these protests to be anathema and disturbing, but this is what it looks like to put up with speech that you disagree with. But instead we’re just being called hypocrites because we don’t suppress it. And they’re being hypocrites in accusing us of hypocrisy. So it’s very head-spinning, because what remains is the question of: Are you for this freedom or are you not?

This accusation of hypocrisy is confusing, and we are not sure how it could apply to FIRE. We have been steadfastly nonpartisan and defended countless students and faculty on both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict throughout our history, and especially since the October 7 attack. While some have called for restrictive speech codes in response to changes in the campus climate following October 7, FIRE has consistently opposed those calls. Nor have we called for Fordham (or anyone else) to suppress protected speech. This is a red herring, and an attempt to tar us with criticisms applicable to others.

We will release our 2025 rankings in early September, but without serious improvements on the ground, Fordham should not expect to fare much better.