Thread by @JeffreyASachs

New from me: Drawing on a survey of 20K+ students from 55 universities, @RealClearEd and @TheFIREorg have ranked schools according to how healthy the free speech climate is on campus. Unfortunately, its design has a strong anti-liberal bias.

realcleareducation.com/articles/2020/…

Quick summary: In the survey, students are assigned a Tolerance Score, which is supposed to measure how tolerant they are of controversial speakers. And one of the major findings is that conservatives score much higher on Tolerance than liberals.

But there's a problem.

Here's the question used to measure tolerance. See if you can spot where things go wrong.

Did you catch it? With the exception of the news media question, all of these are ideas that are MUCH more offensive to liberals than conservatives.

Of *course* libs look less tolerant than cons in this survey. Their tolerance is being subjected to a much more difficult test.

The Tolerance Score makes up 40% of each school's overall score, so this problem matters. For instance, @KState scores very well in the rankings (#2). And maybe that's because its students care deeply about free speech. But it could also just be that they're deeply conservative.

I have other major concerns with the Rankings, as well as with surveys in general as a tool for measuring free speech climates. For instance, there's a real problem with external validity, which I briefly discuss in this earlier piece on UNC-Chapel Hill.

heterodoxacademy.org/blog/freedom-f…

But the Tolerance Score issue is a straightforward mistake that can (and I hope will) be corrected in future surveys. In the meantime, you should take with an enormous grain of salt the idea that cons are better on tolerance than libs. The data just doesn't support it.

CODA: Based on some of the ways people are responding to this thread, let me offer my own opinion of FIRE: They're great. I don't agree with everything they do/say, and obviously I'm no fan of this survey, but they are on balance a bona fide Good Thing.

That's all. Carry on.