The Daily Signal - How Virginia Campuses Flunked Free Speech Rankings

Episode Date: September 25, 2025

The other day we published an abstract of the Virginia Universities’ ranking in the latest report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Today we catch up with Sean Stevens, Chief Research advisor at FIRE to get into HOW the schools get ranked and what can be learned from the higher ranked ones. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. I'm your host, Joe Thomas, Virginia correspondent for The Daily Signal. Before we dive into today's interview, I want to thank you for tuning in today. If you're a first-time listener, The Daily Signal, brings you fact-based reporting and conservative commentary on politics, policy, and culture. And I hope you join our band of regular listeners to our podcast. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe and also take it. a moment to rate and review us wherever you get your podcast.

You can find additional content at DailySignal.com. Now, let's get started with today's conversation right after this. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans. We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear-off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do. business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today.

We'd love to talk, business. We told you about the scorecard, the annual scorecard that comes out from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Fire.org is where you find them. And Sean Stevens is on with us from Fire. One of the folks worked on that paper and thank you for taking a little time out with us. But more overly, on a grand scale, thank you for doing this every year. I'm sure it's very busy right now with the assassination of Charlie Kirk bringing this, you know, hatred of open discourse to the four. But this is what you guys, since, you know, first time I ever met Greg and tried to butcher his last name first time he was a, that, and he laughed.

about that. He's like, eh, it's close enough. But from the first moment I met Greg years ago, you guys have been standing out there saying free expression, especially on these college campuses, is one of these things that if we can't fix this, we're not going to fix anything. Yeah. Well, thanks for having me first. And thanks for praising our work. But yeah, there's a, there's a growing problem. It's getting, I think, worse year over year in our college. and universities. Is the essence of the problem, Sean, that we have allowed people to, and I know, because I lived through the riots in Charlottesville in 2017, that we've allowed this idea that words are weapons and it's not just from some in excess song. Your parents, ask your parents,

they'll tell you who in excess was. But we've allowed words to be treated like weapons. that if I say something that you disagree with that even might even hurt your feelings because I don't agree with you, that you can claim that I've done violence to you? Yeah, I think that is a major part of it. It's not the only component. You know, I'm a background in social psychology, so I favor multiple determinations of people's behavior. But yeah, I think that is a big, it's a big component and a big problem, this concept that words are violence or even the absence of words is also violence because there's the silences violence line that gets thrown around too. Oh, yeah.

Yeah, and as someone who's played ice hockey since I was five years old and I'm now 43, and I've experienced actual violence. I very much disagree with those phrases. No, I understand that without question. And maybe that's the problem is we've gotten to a point in our society where we don't know what actual violence is anymore. and then we're horrified when it actually metastasizes and we see it and we realize maybe maybe it's a good wake-up call for it. Do you think, before we get into the nuts and bolts of the survey, as a social scientist?

Yeah. I said this with tongue-in-cheek the Monday after the, no, the Thursday after Charlie's assassination. I was on the air at 5 in the morning. And I said it reminded me of that first day I came back on the air and I'm. October of 2001. What do you say? Or that Monday, August 14th, 2017, after the deadly riots in Charlottesville, what do you say? People are looking to me to have some words for this. And it struck me that, you know, as this assassination of this somebody who was doing everything that we were told we're supposed to do more of, which is listen to somebody who doesn't agree with you and

have a conversation with him and killed him for it is that maybe if something good is going to come out of it, it's this awakening. James Madison University, for all irony, carries the name of the founder of the Constitution. No Turning Point USA chapter until September 14th. They now have 500 members because they, there was such a pent-up feeling of, I can't say anything. I get, and then all of a sudden there's a chapter and they say, oh, well, okay, now I feel safer about saying something. Sort of the abstract point behind turning point USA was to give you that, quote, safe space

to say something. Is this a moment where maybe we wake up from our fugue as tragic as it is? I think there's a lot of potential for that. I mean, I've seen, we've seen over the past. two weeks or so, like you just mentioned, a surge in the creation of TPUSA chapters across the country. I mean, the volume of attendance at the funeral on Sunday, I think shows how revered, how respected, important, and maybe even revered he was among a lot of people. So I think there's definitely potential for a turning point here. But then there's also a lot of, yeah,

there's another side to this, and there seems to be a lot of people doubling down on their criticisms of Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA. And, you know, I have certainly some concerns going forward of, you know, speaking events on campuses, and it's just not me, it's fire as a whole. We're very concerned that schools may use security fees as a way to make it difficult, to invite certain speakers to campus. We've seen them do this before. And I also have some concerns that, you know, while it's a small portion of people that generally do these things on campuses,

a number of conservative voices have basically picked up the mantle and said they're going to continue the tour that Charlie Kirk was on this fall. And I think there's potential there for additional disruptions, shout downs, et cetera. So we'll see what happens. Well, as I said, years and years ago, the first time I spoke to Greg Lukianoff, and I say, I did it again. I believe the subject matter was that very thing, Sean, was the establishment of these things called free speech zones on college campuses. And that, oh, it sounds great. The colleges are going to make sure there's – but then it was managed by, in many cases, the university government.

In some cases, it was the student government that was running them. But in any case, you had to prove that, you know, you had a statement to make and that you were going to, you know, stay with all these and rules. And that's a free speech, Sean. And I mean, that's as far back as I go with fire. Yeah. I mean, that to me is, it's similar to, I've always found it funny where it's like if you want to protest the government, you have to file a petition with the government. With the government. Yeah.

So it's like the same thing on a college campus here with the free speech zone. It's like, well, I have something to say. And it might be critical of you. But now I have to get this approved before I can actually do it. And what are the odds you approve? Yeah, exactly. So it's an abysmal scorecard when the absolute best school in the nation gets a B minus. I mean, this is like I went to New York City public schools in the 70s.

And maybe I had some classes like that where I. oh, he's the valedictorian. He's got an 85 average. And that's Claremont, correct? Is Claremont McKenna is the number one school, right? Yeah. And, you know, I, yeah, I mean, love their score to be better,

but I actually would, I really would highlight Claremont McKenna. I think that they're a place to look potentially for solutions. Again, it's a small liberal arts college, so it might be hard to scale up some of the things that they're doing to bigger schools. But, you know, when you dig into our survey metrics on this, you know, we have a number of different components from the survey that go into the rankings. Carmine McKenna's in the top 50 on basically all of them and in the top 10 of most of them. Okay.

And this is the second year in a row that that's happened. They've long been a leader on policy. They've had a green light, you know, speech code rating from our policy reform team for a long time. They adopted institutional neutrality, like a stance of it. it well before most other schools jumped on a bandwagon. It's basically them in Vanderbilt are the only ones who did it before October 7, 2023. Wow. So I, you know, it's, yeah, could they be better? Yeah, but I would highlight and say that I do think, you know, out of all these schools, they're certainly one of the ones at least doing a better job. So, you know, when you

talk about these policies and institutional neutrality and things like that, that certainly seems like, it doesn't matter how big your university is, you can scale that up. And if Vanderbilt, Vanderbilt's an SEC school, it's a pretty big school. Although, you know, I guess when you have a mock-up of the Parthenon on your campus, you probably feel a little careful about stepping on somebody's free speech, that it certainly doesn't seem like you have to be a small little school to have protection. Yeah, you don't. I was just more saying, like, you know, some of what they're doing,

maybe that makes students feel more comfortable in, like, a classroom and things like that might be harder to scale up. Because they're going to have, you know, probably at most 20, 30 people in a class. And, you know, UVA is going to have, like, a couple hundred. Right, right. And they hope anyway. So let's get into the Virginia score. So Virginia is, University of Virginia is the top Virginia school. And I was like, I was like.

looking back, I guess in 2024, it was actually number one and it slipped to 21 the last two years. Yeah, they were number one in our rankings last year. I'd say UVA, I mean, again, like the same thing with Claremont McKenna. Would we like that score to be in the mid 80s to the 90s? Yes. But we've been doing this for six years and UVA's been in the top 25 all six years. And I kind of, you know, now that we've got that amount of data, I tend to look at, where I don't get so hung up on exactly where a school ranks each year. Like to me, that shows me that UVA is better than most schools out there. It's kind of like, it's kind of like an NCAA top 25 in football. You're not going to be number one every year.

But if you're in the top 25, top 15, top 10, very consistently, you're, you're better than most of the other places. Yeah, no, I understand that. Yeah, just get us into the playoffs. That's what we want. Yeah. So what does the University of Virginia do? And I'll note that in a previous column at the DailySignal.com, I go down the, I think it's five schools in Virginia that made the top 257 schools or bottom 257. And some weren't there, and we'll poke around into that for a second.

but Virginia George Mason, thank goodness, there's a namesake, and William and Mary are the top 50 finishers in this ranking. What is it that UVA does that got them to the top spot and that they still do or that they've stopped doing that backslid them a little bit? So I would also point out, because you mentioned George Mason, Everything I basically just said about UVA also applies to them. They are generally a consistently, you know, stronger performer in this compared to other schools. Let's go back to UVA.

A lot of their drop this year in the rankings, essentially, like their score is relatively similar to last year's. Oh, okay. There's not like, like we kind of, we got, we changed, we were doing standardized scores for a while and so we changed that because it seems like that. was harder for some people to follow and understand. So we went back and re-scaled the scores. And, you know, based on that, they dropped like a point and a half from last year. Um, but not a lot. Yeah, not a lot. And, you know, probably the main reason, um, that they then, you know, what they do well, I think is they have good policies. They, they have the green light spotlight rating, as I mentioned. There's a stance of institutional neutrality like Climbled McHenna. They've

adopted the Chicago statement for freedom of speech, which is this strong support for academic freedom and free expression on campuses. So they lead well on that. Controversities when they happen typically are handled well, although I believe in the past year they did get a slight. Yeah, they have one ding for sanctioning a student. Right. And that's that's actually responsible for the majority of their drop. like in the score right there. Okay.

You know, their track record on that, though, overall has been fairly strong. And that's a consistent thread that we see at all of the schools that, you know, consistently land in the top 25. It's not that they don't have controversies on campus, but when they do, they actually tend to resolve them in ways that, you know, defend speech rights and they don't sanction people very often compared to school. The flip side is the school. schools at the bottom, like when this controversies happen, they're restricting speech.

So when, you know, and I know that people compare the post-October 7th protests in favor of Hamas to the Nazis that were here in 2017. And I'll call them out David Duke walk right past me in the middle of the rally while I was broadcasting. So I know who was here and I know who was doing it. And they weren't. And when David Duke's involved. It weren't no bunch of conservatives.

But that Friday night march on grounds with the Tiki torches. And a lot of folks at UVA compare the two events saying, well, one is anti-Semitic and the other is anti-Semitic. Why was one allowed to go on for days and days? And the other one brought a whole bunch of new rules and regulations is one, an example, as you said, of an overreaction to speech that we like. to claim now is hate speech versus now where it's more permissive. Is that what you're talking about? A little bit. But on those two incidents in particular, I think you've got, you know,

the unite the right rally in 2017. I mean, it's like unite the right. And as you said, these were pretty, these are white nationalists who are not like your typical conservatives, they're far right extremists. those people are very unpopular on college campuses. I don't think we even need to go into any evidence for that. I think that's pretty well known. And unfortunately,

unfortunately, it is metastasized into anyone who's conservative becomes like that. Or even, like, moderate or even like center left, even center left at this point. And then, you know, the flip side of that is with October 7, 20, 23 in Hamas, Like there's a, there's a significant portion of both students and faculty that, you know, because of, I think, their ideology and their politics, it's, they're supporting, you know, they're supporting Hamas's cause.

And so I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of ideological stuff baked into how these two events were handled and interpreted by people. Well, and your score is delivered a lot by student testimony. So you're, you're out there. interviewing students, how do you feel about it? This isn't just somebody, you know, in an ivory tower looking down and saying, well, you did this or this is two demerits. This is actually how students feel on these campuses. And I know we mentioned at the onset, James Madison has had this explosion of membership in a brand new turning point. But they were the bottom feeder amongst Virginia schools in the 257 on fire. I think they finished at 100 second.

Is that a story that's being rewritten as we see it right now as we watch? Well, you know, we'll see what happens. We started surveying them a few years ago. They had a pretty strong debut. And I've also pointed out 100. Yes, you don't want to be like 100 second, 100 third, right? But we did rank 257 schools. So they're still basically in the top half.

Right. Best thing, yeah, best thing that they could do, honestly, the easiest thing they can do to rise back up is they have a yellow light rating for their speech policies from our team. And that essentially means they have one or more speech codes on the books that can be, you know, the wording is basically these can be arbitrarily applied. So kind of maybe kind of maybe a little bit of what we were just. talking about with the Unite the Right Valley versus October 7, 2023. It's like, oh, one of these got

the penalty and the other one didn't. Whereas, you know, if you're following your policies to the letter, you're going to either either, either you penalize both of them or you penalize neither. Right. Yeah. That seems to be the case with that. And I do know they swapped, I think they swapped provost and president. And I was told by some staffers that that may make a change in how things are operating. I think that very much could. We've seen that happen at some other universities where new leadership comes in. And the one place I'd point to is Dartmouth over the last few years. Their new president came in. I think this is now she's entering her third year as president of Dartmouth. But the things she's done there in the first two years have been phenomenal, I think.

And her stance on free expression is very good. I wish more presidents would adopt it. I was at a conference in June this past June, and she was on a panel with other college presidents and one of the other panelists essentially was like, well, you know, like with everything going on with the Trump White House and, you know, higher ed's under attack right now. We really shouldn't criticize higher ed.

And her response was effectively, I'm sorry, we can walk and chew gum at the same time and we need to acknowledge that the reason we're facing this threat from the federal government now is because we didn't address these problems. Right. We got here in a way. So Sean Stevens is on with us from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Fire.org. And has been working in this space for a long time. there are some schools that didn't show up in the rankings. And one of the ones I went looking for was Liberty University. Were there standards as to what schools got looked at in these rankings? Explain why some schools were in there in the Virginia roster.

I'm sure there were other ones in other states that didn't make the list either. And why some were? Yeah, so a couple reasons, right? And so some of this just goes into like the practicalities of survey research, right? So first one is, you know, we, we factor in our speech code policy ratings. And so we've rated about roughly like 500 schools across the country. So if we haven't rated you, that would be one reason why we wouldn't include you yet. You know, we would love to rate every school on their policies and rank every school that we could.

But so that's that's one thing. A second one is simply cost. You know, we got paid for this expensive survey. We try to add schools every year, but it still is a pretty expensive survey, so we need to be able to do that. Third thing is our survey partner college pulse. They're great. They have, they've built a panel of over a million undergraduates in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. But, you know, individual panels at schools can vary.

at schools can vary in size. And so we want to have a sufficient sample size. So if they don't have what they consider a feasible panel at a school, we may not survey them either. On Liberty in particular, I could say we did survey them for a few years, but we didn't rank them. We surveyed them, got the data from them, but we didn't rank them because their speech policies actually receive a warning rating from a policy team.

And the warning rating means that the school has made it clear that they prioritize other values above freedom of speech. And so when freedom of speech comes into conflict with those higher values, they will restrict speech. Okay. So that's why I. Yeah. So we were surveying a handful of those schools every year to just get a sense of how students feel there. And then it's effectively like, well, we're not ranking them. So why don't we put in schools that we would actually rank?

And we're not closing the door on going back and surveying those schools and seeing what the students say and how they feel. But it would be a separate, it would be a separate project. Well, Sean, I appreciate you're taking some time with us. One of our researchers pointed to a Harvard survey that said 67% of their respondents felt that, and I think this becomes sort of the driving issue here. We've talked about October 7th several times. but I said that the Jewish population was oppressors and needed to be dealt with as such. Is this one of those fruits of not having free speech that if somebody's afraid to speak up, you know, this kind of racial hatred can foment and grow before somebody says,

oh my God, when did this happen? when if there had been more free speech on some campuses, it would have been seen a long time ago? Yeah, I mean, I think that that sounds plausible. I mean, there's, you know, the stuff with how Israel is viewed, how certain demographics are viewed. I mean, I think this, again, I'll go back to kind of like the ideological thing. You've got a significant portion of students and faculty who have this, it's a lens of like power. And so it's like you're either the powerful or you're the oppressed. And it's kind of this binary style of thinking.

And even though Jewish students are their minority, they're seen as part of the powerful. And so they kind of get put in that category with straight white men. Right. You're the oppressor. White people, white people, white people in general and, you know, other group, you know, wealthy people and this or that. And so I think part of it is that. is that and then I do think you would have seen kind of some of this more, yeah, I mean, if there was more free expression or more attention paid to some of the things that were going

on on campus that I'll say like we've called attention to, but we often get told by critics that were exaggerating the problem. I do think if things were more open or people were just more, got out of the binary thinking for a few minutes. Amen. We would, yeah, we would have realized some of this sooner. Well, and that's the thing. I think that's where sunlight becomes, you know, free speech is the ultimate source of the sunlight. And I appreciate it. Sean Stevens. Again, you can find the whole research and all the other research they do, the state rankings and everything else at fire.org. Thank you for talking with us a little bit. You're welcome. Thanks for having me.

That'll do it for today's show. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new episodes from The Daily Signal. Every weekday, you can catch top news in 10 to keep up with the day's top headlines in just 10 minutes, and every weekday afternoon catch Victor Davis Hanson's thoughtful analysis for The Daily Signal. If you like what you hear on this show, would you take a minute and leave us comment? We love hearing your feedback. Thanks again for being with us today.