FIRE's Rankings Reveal Free Speech Problems (and Promise) at Macalester

And how to keep improving the situation

By Charlie Birge

In September, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression — the free speech advocacy group I work for — released its 2025 College Free Speech Rankings, a comprehensive comparison of the student experience of free speech on 251 campuses nationwide. FIRE ranks these schools based on a survey of more than 58,000 students, along with an analysis of school speech policies and the conduct of administrators when dealing with speech controversies.

The Rankings included Macalester, which ranked #184 — a pretty poor showing. 98 Mac students were surveyed, a representative sample. You can dig into the rankings here (where you can see the full report and methodology) and here (where you can explore the findings for individual schools, including Mac).

I've spoken with President Rivera about the Rankings before, and she is skeptical of them because they’re based on an online survey, and no one creating them spends time on Mac’s campus. That’s a fair point, but I'd push back and say that, until Mac starts collecting this kind of data itself, this is the best information we have as outsiders on the overall climate for free speech and viewpoint diversity at Mac.

And whatever you think of the ranking methodology, the survey findings suggest there are significant problems among student attitudes and experiences related to free expression.

To start, students don't seem confident that Mac's administration will defend controversial speech. For example, FIRE's survey asks "If a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on your campus, how likely is it that the administration would defend the speaker’s right to express their views?" Only 34% of students responded "very" or "extremely likely." 36% said "somewhat likely" and 29% said "not very" or "not at all likely."

Students also feel discomfort discussing challenging ideas in class. When asked "How comfortable would you feel expressing your views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion?", 17% of student respondents said "very uncomfortable" and 23% said "somewhat uncomfortable." Testing our views on controversial topics in class is core to a liberal arts education. It’s not a good sign when 40% of students feel uncomfortable doing so.

And it gets worse when it comes to social media. When asked "How comfortable would you feel expressing an unpopular political opinion to your fellow students on a social media account tied to your name?", 42% answered "very uncomfortable" and 29% answered "somewhat uncomfortable."

Students also show too much willingness to engage in illiberal forms of protest that silence, rather than promote, discussion. When asked "How acceptable would you say it is for students to shout down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus?", only 14% of respondents said "never." Almost half said it was "sometimes acceptable," with 26% saying it was "rarely acceptable" and 12% saying it was "never acceptable." Meanwhile, 65% said it was "rarely," "sometimes," or "always" acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech, and 45% said it was "rarely," "sometimes," or "always" acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. These numbers should all be much lower.

What can Macalester do to improve these numbers?

To be clear, these numbers aren’t solely the College’s fault. Students pick up these attitudes from their pre-college education and the wider culture. But, if Mac is serious about promoting rigorous discussion across lines of difference, something that Pres. Rivera has stressed, it has a responsibility to work on improving them.

Thankfully, Mac is already doing many things that should push them in the right direction. The Dialogue Across Differences initiative offers a host of programs to help students learn how to have civil conversations with those they disagree with, and to carefully consider the strengths and weaknesses of views across the ideological spectrum.

But there's more to be done. I'd love to see Macalester officially commit to institutional neutrality, which would mean that the institution would refrain from making statements on contested political issues. President Rivera has already signaled her interest in this (and to my knowledge the College hasn’t issued any such statements recently, though I may be out of the loop on this), but I'd love to see the College formally adopt this stance. 

Second, Macalester should reform some of its policies governing student expressive conduct, many of which could easily be used to silence unpopular or controversial ideas. Although I'm not aware of any instances in which these policies have been used to censor, publicly reforming the policy would be a great way for Mac to show that it’s serious about free expression and viewpoint diversity.

Update — Oct. 25, 2024: The rankings also show possible good signs!

I decided to check how Mac's performance in the Rankings this year compared with previous years, and found some interesting, encouraging findings.

To start, here's the year-to-year comparison:

• 2022-23 Rankings - ranked 192 out of 203 ranked

• 2023-24 Rankings - ranked 211 out of 248 ranked

• 2024-25 Rankings - ranked 184 out of 251 ranked

So there was some improvement from last year to this year, which made me want to dig into the data to see why. In particular, I was interested in student perceptions of the administration — did students have more confidence this year that the administration would respect free speech? Because if so, that would suggest that Rivera's statements and the Dialogue Across Differences initiatives could be making a difference in how students perceived the climate for free speech at Mac.

What I found was encouraging. The number of students reporting that it was clear that the administration protects free speech increased significantly from last year to this year. So too did the number of students reporting that it was likely that the administration would defend a controversial speaker's right to express their views. Here’s a breakdown of the actual data:

Of course, this doesn't prove the efficacy of Mac's programs and Rivera's statements — correlation is not causation — but it is encouraging, and Mac's programs and Rivera's statements are certainly a plausible explanation for the College's improved rank and survey responses.