How Free is Student Speech on Maine’s College Campuses?: Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression Report

Policies governing speech on Maine’s campuses need improvement to protect students’ freedom of speech, according to a new report from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

In the 2024 Spotlight on Speech Codes report released Wednesday, Bowdoin College, Colby College, the University of Maine (UMaine), UMaine at Fort Kent, and UMaine Presque Isle all received a “yellow light” rating for their policies, while Bates College was rated as a “red light” campus.

Schools to which FIRE assigned a red light rating were described as “maintain[ing] at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech or bars public access to its speech-related policies by requiring a university login and password for access.”

FIRE described yellow light schools as “maintain[ing] policies that could too easily be applied to suppress protected speech or maintains policies that, while clearly restricting freedom of speech, restrict relatively narrow categories of speech.”

No college or university in Maine was awarded a “green light” rating, which would indicate that its “written policies do not seriously threaten student expression.”

The report also established a fourth rating — a “warning light” — for any school that “clearly and consistently states that it holds a certain set of values above a commitment to freedom of speech.”

Just eight institutions — six private schools and two public military academies — earned this rating, including Baylor University, Brigham Young University, Hillsdale College, Pepperdine University, Saint Louis University, United States Military Academy, United States Naval Academy, and Yeshiva University.

An institution’s rating was determined by an examination of the “written regulations on student expression” that are currently in place on its campus.

Some of the speech policies at Bates College — the only Maine school to earn a red light rating — were used by FIRE in their report to illustrate “bias reporting policies” that “impose vague consequences on those who engage in what is often constitutionally protected expression.”

“For example, Bates College states that examples of bias incidents include ‘hate speech,’ ‘sexist jokes,’ and ‘disparaging remarks on social media sites,'” the report states. “The college explicitly ‘reserves the right to address bias incidents that do not rise to the level of a policy violation’ through actions such as ‘education and training,’ ‘remedial and supportive actions,’ and ‘other Informal Resolution’ mechanisms.”

Of the 376 public and 113 private institutions included in the report, 98 (20%) earned a red light rating, 320 (65.4%) received a yellow light rating, and just 63 (12.9%) were labeled as green light campuses.

As explained in the 2024 Spotlight on Speech Codes report from FIRE, the increased percentage of “green light schools” was paired this year with a rise in the percentage of “red light schools.”

This is the second year that the rankings have shown an increase in red light ratings, indicating a reversal of the 15-year downward trend in red light campuses.

FIRE explains in the report that its ratings “do not take into account a university’s ‘as-applied’ violations of student speech rights or other cases of censorship, student- or faculty-led calls for punishment of protected speech, or related incidents and controversies,” only their written policies.

Click Here to Read FIRE’s Full 2024 Spotlight on Speech Codes Report

A report released by FIRE last September, however, did take a number of these factors into account by surveying thousands of students across nearly 250 campuses.

More than 55,000 students were asked to rate their campus’ free speech climate according to six criteria — openness, tolerance for controversial liberal speakers, tolerance for controversial conservative speakers, administration support for free speech, their comfort expressing ideas, tolerance for disruptive conduct.

Out of the 248 colleges included in those rankings, none of Maine’s higher education institutions cracked the top 100.

According to FIRE’s report, Bowdoin came in 122nd nationwide, while Colby ranked 139th, and UMaine finished 141st. Bates came in last with a ranking of 213 of 248.

The relative closeness of Bowdoin, Colby, and UMaine compared to the low position of Bates in this analysis tracks well with the findings in FIRE’s 2024 Spotlight on Speech Codes report.

This, therefore, suggests that the freedom of speech afforded students in the written policies adopted by each of these institutions translate effectively into the day-to-day climate on their campuses.

[RELATED: Free Speech Isn’t Always Free On College Campuses — How Do Schools In Maine Stack Up?]

FIRE’s 2024 Spotlight on Speech Codes revealed that none of the ratings for Maine’s higher education institutions changed from last academic year, meaning that their written policies neither worsened nor improved over the past twelve months when measured against FIRE’s standards.

Eleven schools improved their rankings — either by going from red to yellow, or from yellow to green — while ten received a worse rating than they did the previous year.

As of the publication of this article, none of the higher education institutions from Maine that are referenced in FIRE’s report have issued public statements addressing their ratings.