Free Speech in American Universities: Why the Elite Institutions Are Failing Most Often

This paper aims to answer why elite universities tend to score worse on free speech. Using ranking scores that claim to assess universities’ amenability to free speech, it is shown that in the United States, the correlation between university prestige and free speech can be accounted for by the behaviour of handful of institutions, plus variables that pertain to the prevalent academic culture as well as funding sources. Universities with a greater predominance of social science as well as less recipient of federal funding are less supportive of free speech. It is concluded that both academic culture and greater freedom from government do much to explain why elite American universities tend to be less supportive of free speech.