Campus speech codes appear to be in decline, according to Adam Goldstein, a Justice Robert H. Jackson Legal Fellow at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
“The good news is that in our most recent report we’ve seen the lowest number of unconstitutional speech codes that we’ve ever seen,” says Goldstein.
FIRE conducted a survey of 449 schools for this report and found that 39.6 percent maintain severely restrictive, “red light” speech codes that according to FIRE’s established criteria substantially prohibit constitutionally protected speech. This is the ninth year in a row that the percentage of schools maintaining such policies has declined, and this year’s drop was almost 10 percentage points. (Last year, 49.3 percent of schools garnered a red light rating.)
