What does it look like when free speech is not allowed on a campus? Is it people being shouted down? Is it the social sanction of peers who ostracize someone who speaks out in an unapproved way? Is it biased faculty whose lectures are themselves in some way or another impediments to full deliberation in the classroom? Or do you make those distinctions?

I think so.

It could be most of those.

The one I would say is probably not happening very often is intentionally biased faculty in the classroom.

There's political imbalance and that's going to impact topics that But again, I don't think a lot of that is necessarily really intentional with some intent to indoctrinate.

I do think a lot of the other factors come into play.

We have documented over the past decade and over the past three, four years.

What am I supposed to do

yeah and we're definitely seeing that dei is a real good example of that and how things have changed i think you and i talked before about the biggest declines that you saw have been in real conservative states texas other southern states as part of this higher education reformation

Yeah, so some of the biggest drops were...

Texas State is now in the bottom five.

Oh, shoot.

Last year, they weren't necessarily in the top tier, but they were slightly below 100 out of 255 schools ranked.

So they were in the middle or slightly above the midpoint, even, you would say.

They have dropped a lot due to different campus controversies.

Yes.

They're, they're in our backyard.

Yeah.

So I like to think of the rankings, uh, uh, like I've mentioned, we've been doing this since-- for seven years, so beginning since twenty-twenty.

Um, so I usually kind of think of them as it's like, it's like a top twenty-five almost assessment, like in college football or, or college basketball.

And so everybody wants to have like, you know, the best ranking that they can.

Um, but if, if you're kind of consistently above a certain threshold, I'd say, you know, that, that says something.

Um, and I would also keep, you know, stress that we ranked two hundred and sixty-one schools.

Can you share that with us?

I mean, this really is what I think you guys have been trying to chronicle through your history at FIRE.

So two of the three databases are our campus deplatforming one.

That's the one that tracks controversies over events.

And the scholars on the FIRE database go back to the beginning of the century.

So we've got incidents that go back to 2000, 1998, etc.

Okay.

The student one only currently right now goes back to 2020.

I'm

Okay.

Um, we ask students questions about how confident they are their administration, um, will protect free speech rights, uh, during a controversy.

We ask about the difficult topics, uh, sp- specific topics that they find difficult to discuss.

And we ask about frequency of self-censorship, um, on campus in, in conversations with different constituencies.

So it could be their peers, it could be professors, could be administrators, could just be in the classrooms.

Um, so we, we ask all this.

We, we put that all together

Okay.

What's the overall free speech ranking for some of our schools?

So we surveyed and ranked four of Tennessee schools.

I'd say three of them do fairly well.

Vanderbilt University comes in at number five.

Last year they were also in the top ten.

I don't think this is terribly surprising.

We've been doing these rankings now.

That's not good, Sean.

And what were you thinking that your career might be on graduation?

Yeah, look, during medical school, I thought I'd do surgery.

I thought, oh, the cut and trust, that'll be great.

But when I started working, I realised I didn't particularly like surgery.

So I thought maybe I'll do radiology instead.

And so I looked to doing radiology and I worked as a medical registrar for about two years.

But I found that the thing I enjoyed most about being a medical registrar was the outpatient clinics.

But I wonder if you could talk about some of the other things that you've been doing and maybe how you got there as well.

I didn't make the rules of this job and I didn't force you to take all of this equipment or product or, you know, I, it's like, why am I the villain in this story? And, you know, and yeah, it does get to your morale when it feels like everywhere it's coming is a beat down from, you know, every area.

That's it.

And it's like, you put someone like you hire someone as a, as a, as an analyst, right.

They're opening your new accounts for you, but they don't realize from day one, they have the potential to close a small company.

If they say no to that order for a small company, that small company, it may be make or break for them.

And when you actually start to realize that, it does impact your decision.

You've got to try to figure out how to get through that.

I love it.

[laughs]

... uh, court rulings that deal, deal specifically with, with the abortion issue, so there is First Amendment, like, w- case law on that.

Um, and so yeah, I would just basically be saying we should, we should largely be following that, which leaves most expression, you know, it's, it's basically saying stay out of most of the expression online and let individuals, you know, regulate themselves.

And we have pretty clear examples of, of where the guardrails are and what the exceptions are.

And yes, there might be some gray areas.

Um, but we should have those discussions.

Should we be suspicious of that?

Yeah.

Uh, with that, and I do know they swapped, I think they swapped provost and previs- president, and I was told by some staffers that, that, that may make a change in how things are, are, uh, operated.

I think it (laughs), I think that very much could.

Um, we've seen that happen at some other universities, where new leadership, um, comes in.

And, okay, and, you know, uh, uh, the one, one place I'd point to is Dartmouth.

Uh, over the last few years, their new, their new president came in, I think, um, this is now, she's entering her third year as, as president of Dartmouth.

Um, but the things she's done there in the first two years have been phenomenal, I think, and, and her stance on free expression is, is very good.

I wish more presidents would adopt it.

Sure.