MIT Tumbles in Latest College Free Speech Rankings

September 18, 2024

In the most recent College Free Speech Rankings, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and College Pulse, MIT was ranked 164th out of 251 institutions surveyed. This marks a sharp decline from last year’s rankings, in which MIT was ranked 136th of 248 institutions surveyed.

While MIT outperformed its peers in a number of measures of student perception of the climate for free expression – a key component in calculating the rankings – it performed notably poorly in others. Among other deficiencies, this year’s rankings found:

MIT ranked 201st when measuring students’ difference in tolerance for the free expression rights of liberal versus conservative campus speakers.
MIT ranked 220th in the survey’s measure of how clearly students believed their institutions would protect their right to free expression, including the rights of controversial campus speakers.
MIT ranked 243rd – near the bottom – in the measure of students’ comfort expressing their views on controversial topics in a variety of settings, including among their peers, in their assignments, on their social media accounts, and in classroom discussions.

The FIRE/College Pulse survey rated its climate for free speech “slightly below average,” the same as last year. While MIT ranked in the top half of the Ivy Plus schools with which it is often compared, it ranked second to last among STEM focused universities.

“We’re disappointed to see MIT move backward in the rankings, but we’re not surprised, given how inconsistently MIT stated and enforced its free speech policies last year,” said Wayne Stargardt ‘74, MFSA’s President.

Stargardt further noted: “We hope this serves as an additional wake-up call for the MIT administration about the importance of clear, consistent, principled guidance on free expression, and on the importance of continually communicating its values and policies, such as through orientation for incoming students.”

The rankings data show the extent to which this is needed. 73% of MIT students, for instance, replied that it was at least sometimes acceptable to shout down speakers with which they disagreed, and 57% said it was at least sometimes acceptable to physically prevent others from attending a campus speech. Alarmingly, 24% of MIT respondents said that using violence to stop a speech could sometimes be justified.

Despite regressing in FIRE’s rankings, MIT is making improvements on free expression elsewhere. For example, this past spring, MIT President Sally Kornbluth ended the use of mandatory DEI statements for faculty hiring, arguing that “compelled statements impinge on freedom of expression, and they don’t work.”

Earlier this year, MFSA presented MIT with a series of additional suggested reforms to improve the campus climate for free expression for the long term. Chief among MFSA’s recommendations was to provide explicit orientation and training on its free speech values and policies to students and staff, and to embrace institutional neutrality on political issues, as several other universities have recently done.

The 2025 College Free Speech Rankings are the result of FIRE and College Pulse’s survey of more than 58,000 undergraduate students nationwide; an explanation of the survey’s methodology can be found here.

The MIT Free Speech Alliance (MFSA), with over 1,100 members, was founded by MIT alumni in 2021 following the cancellation of Dorian Abbot’s Carlson Lecture. MFSA is a member of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance, whose more than two dozen affiliate groups include organizations at Cornell, Harvard, Stanford, and the University of Virginia, among other institutions. MFSA is a nonprofit 501(c)(3) organization and is independent of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

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