This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, September 11th, 2004.

I'm Caleb Brown.

As universities return to full steam this fall, how did they perform at defending freedom of expression

over the course of the last year? The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is out with

its new college free speech rankings.

Angela Erickson is vice president for research at Fire.

We spoke about the survey last week.

Angela, I don't know if you're aware of it but there were some campus protests this

spring. Yeah there were there many campuses. So when you put together this

large document ranking schools by the atmosphere of free speech on those

campuses for students, for faculty, and others.

How do campus protests and reactions from the universities to those protests?

How does that enter into those rankings.

Because had there been no encampments and other large protests,

had there been no university response

to the non-existent protests, then I assume that

would have made your rankings significantly different.

So how does the how do the actions of universities in response to campus speech enter into your rankings?

So this is our fifth year doing the survey of students at numerous campuses this year we surveyed 258 and we start the

survey in January so in January we had no idea that any of what unfolded in spring was going to happen. We knew that there were

tensions around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7th and we can

see that in incidents of speakers being canceled or student groups being

...