It’s the collective nightmare of all Notre Dame students: a failing grade.
But that’s exactly what our University received last semester on its “free speech report card.” According to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), Notre Dame ranks in the bottom 20% of universities nationwide when it comes to issues of free speech and free expression. While we aren’t alone at the bottom — Barnard, Harvard, U Penn, NYU and Columbia received similarly dismal rankings — the shock was enough to make waves in the Notre Dame network, both on and off campus.
The report was so starkly at odds with our self-image that initial responses, including ours, were largely skeptical. For instance, one headline-grabbing finding reports that “24% of Notre Dame students find it acceptable to use violence to stop a disagreeable political speaker.” Given the mild-to-neutral political climate among most students and in most classrooms on campus, many of us found this simply too hard to believe. And if a wild claim like that formed any part of the basis of the failing grade, it almost felt safe to assume bad intentions were somehow skewing the data collection or analysis. “We didn’t opt in to any class with this FIRE organization,” we thought. “Maybe they’re just another political organization trying to grift off widespread ill will toward elite institutions; maybe the rankings are just ragebait.”
But something about these findings struck a nerve. Even if we were being forced to take the course, and even if the grade seemed obviously unfair, we just couldn’t shake the confidence hit of seeing an “F” on a report card with our name on it. We decided we had to investigate. At the time, we, the authors of this piece, were covering the value of free speech and protected disagreement in God and the Good Life; one of us was teaching it, and the other two were taking it. We figured there wasn’t much to lose in doing a deeper dive to see if we could cut through the hype.
Here’s what we found.
Prima facie reasons to suspect FIRE’s analysis don’t lead to any damning or discrediting evidence (in other words: it’s not just smoke, there really is some FIRE)
FIRE is an independent organization, and it gives itself substantial latitude in interpreting the data it collects. Their “grades” for free speech and the rankings that come with them are calculated using a “weighting” system that could, in theory, be manipulated; the descriptive analysis they provide in their report is, to a significant degree, subjective. Each “group” of questions — e.g., self-censorship reports or administrative policy — counts for a different percentage in the final calculation. To stretch the analogy (perhaps too far), FIRE not only gets to decide what the most important assignments are for universities to complete, but it also gets to decide how much each counts toward the final grade.
But a close examination of the organization and its history gave us little reason to suspect a politically biased agenda. FIRE is a libertarian organization that, according to The New York Times, has a long and bipartisan track record of defending speech across ideological lines. It has advocated for conservative professors and progressive institutions. While Columbia and Harvard are low in FIRE’s rankings, the organization alternated between defending these schools’ right to express their political views free from federal pressures from the Trump administration and critiquing apparently illiberal policies within them. So whatever else there is to say about FIRE, we have to admit that they have a reputation for consistency and do pretty well on transparency with regard to their mission. And while it’s true that the organization received money from the Koch Institute, it’s also been supported by the center-left Knight Foundation. It’s known that donors (who all have the option of remaining anonymous) do not systematically skew toward one side of the political spectrum. None of these factors “cancel out bias,” but neither do they suggest the profile of a transparently ideological organization using polemical interpretation of data as a wedge.
Further evidence of their credibility comes from the fact that FIRE’s data set — which they made available to us upon request — looks pretty clean. FIRE contracts with a nationally known and respected polling organization to collect its data. We poked, prodded and even did a bit of scouring, especially Matthew, with the help of an unnamed but very popular economics professor. And we didn’t find anything in the data to be concerned about. In fact, once inside the set, we found plenty of nuance and insights FIRE could have weaponized but didn’t. Self-reported attitudes from Notre Dame freshmen over time, for instance, point to some surprising, statistically significant trends. But the data here was merely suggestive, and FIRE wisely, in our opinion, seems to have held back from drawing conclusions that could have made even more provocative headlines, at least until they have a bigger data set.
Tolerance of violence isn’t actually the main story at Notre Dame, but there are still plenty of issues to address
Once you reverse engineer the interpretive layer FIRE uses to translate its data for public discourse, we found that our failing grade is at least something to keep an eye on. In our reading, the unique story that emerged about Notre Dame is not one of violent unrest or civil disobedience, but quiet self-censorship and a subtle but powerful fear of open dialogue.
The starkest statistics about Notre Dame students favoring political violence (listed as “Disruptive Conduct” in FIRE reports) weren’t substantiated on a comparative and granular level. Notre Dame places 35 out of 257 schools in the category, so unless there’s a major drop-off in the top 30 — a drop-off so significant that we’d probably be able to see the smoke rising over neighboring universities in Michigan and Ohio — there’s no reason to think Notre Dame contains sleeper cells of explosive activism or is somehow a powder keg of political animosity.
The University’s greater weaknesses evidently lie in failures of courage on a smaller scale. Notre Dame ranked 158 out of 257 in self-censorship, with religious peers like Villanova noticeably outperforming us and some state schools like Purdue, just down the road, basically setting the curve. When it comes to political openness (which you’d expect to be closely correlated with self-censorship), we rank even worse at 203. We believe that dismal performances in these, largely individual measures, compound: even if the Main Building isn’t at risk of burning down anytime soon, it does seem like we’re harboring a culture of caution and false consensus that can only make the institution more anemic over time.
In search of a more complete picture
With regard to political openness (asked in the form of “Do you find it uncomfortable to have an honest conversation about X on campus”), Notre Dame stacks up poorly against both Catholic and geographic peers. Notre Dame students were less likely to have an honest conversation than Villanova and/or Purdue students on questions of abortion, the Israel-Palestine conflict, transgender rights, gay rights, affirmative action, immigration and racial inequality.
These are arguably some of the most contentious social-political issues of our time, so Notre Dame’s unique avoidance of these discussion topics is perplexing, especially given its prominent political posturing on issues like bipartisanship, shared inquiry and civil discourse.
If differentials were attributable to religious emphasis or Catholic culture, then supposedly Villanova should not consistently perform better; similarly, if attributable to geography and international breadth, Purdue shouldn’t. Why are Notre Dame students being more fearful of engaging in honest discussion is a question that remains to be answered.
Similarly, Notre Dame students find themselves withholding opinions in class more than their average peers. When asked if they find themselves self-censoring during in-class discussions, over 70% of Notre Dame students responded that they self-censor twice a month or more, with more than a quarter reporting that this happens multiple times a week or more. This sort of behavior is obviously a stumbling block to proper intellectual formation and healthy dialogue, and it’s also getting worse. Not only does Notre Dame score approximately 6% worse on self-censorship, but the proportion of students who self-censor rose 14% from just last year, illustrating the growing challenge the University faces with encouraging students to share their viewpoints in and out of class.
There are many hypotheses as to why this is the case, each with some plausibility from the armchair. Perhaps the progressive Catholicism in Notre Dame’s leadership since Fr. Hesburgh has had a neutralizing effect on the more intellectually conservative faculty it used to draw, and perhaps the lack of such expression at the front of the classroom has had a chilling effect in the seats. Or perhaps it’s a bit of the opposite, and perceived pressures to show deference to traditional (even magisterial) authority have had a chilling effect on the fast-growing segment of faculty and students who are more secularly disposed. Is it the small size of our school and less metropolitan locale? Or — as we hypothesize and aim to test — does this climate reflect a combination of factors that includes the professional aspirations of the majority of Notre Dame students and the ways political dialogue has become associated with high professional and economic risk in recent years?
Regardless of the cause (or causes), there is certainly room for administrative growth, as well as faculty and student-led efforts to improve. Breaking down barriers to open dialogue — or even just working on the small habits and virtues necessary for it — can have a cascading effect across campus. Much of the problem — self-censorship and a fear of political openness — really is problems that are mainly “in our own heads.” And if we’re willing to reestablish strong norms that reward rather than punish political and other forms of civil discourse, we could be the Notre Dame we present to the world. The Notre Dame Fr. Jenkins defended at university functions and in The New York Times. The Notre Dame Fr. Hesburgh described as:
“A crossroads where all the vital intellectual currents of our time meet in dialogue ... where every sincere inquirer is welcomed and listened to and respected by a serious consideration of what he has to say about his belief or unbelief ... a place where the endless conversation is harbored and not foreclosed.”
Paul Blaschko
Assistant teaching professor, philosophy
Director, Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise and Society
Notre Dame Ph.D. class of 2018
Matthew Deahl
Class of 2029
Joseph Dachnowicz
Class of 2029
March 2
