Dear people of the US. You already have free speech, you don't need to learn it from a university.
You need the unis to learn some advanced skills and do some networking. As an asside, you guys are paying way too much for universities (but that's unrelated to free speech).
It's ranking on how free you are to speak, not on how you are taught about free speech (if at all).
It's looking at things like what percent of students say it is OK to shout down speakers to prevent them from speaking, what percent of students say they have to self-censor at least monthly, what percent say they are worried about reputation damage from someone misunderstanding something they say or do, how tolerant the school is to speakers based on political leaning, and some others.
And when colleges enable small groups with loud voices to suppress other voices, you're going to be spending your time listening to only certain, pre-approved content.
Keep scrolling past the main list. There is an additional list of six "Warning Schools":
> The following schools have policies that clearly and consistently state that it prioritizes other values over a commitment to freedom of speech. These colleges were excluded from the rankings and were scored relative to one another.
They all have much less free speech than any school on the main list.
A quick Google search shows they're run by "Arn Pearson, Executive Director of the Center for Media and Democracy, publisher of SourceWatch, PRWatch, and BanksterUSA".
If you google Arn Pearson (https://muckrack.com/arn-pearson/articles) , he exclusively, and without fail, writes nothing but anti-Republican hit pieces or about how much of a threat the right-wing is. He doesn't seem to have ever found something bad done by a Democrat that might be worth criticizing.
So this seems to be a typical Democrat non-profit where NY trust-fund nepobabies get to hang out for high salaries and lattes and the bi-weekly Republican hit piece, probably funded by similar billionaires as the Republican donations they decry.
Have you actually looked at the rankings? Only 3 colleges that trend conservative are flagged 'Red' for poor free speech. Over 50 liberal colleges are. I'm not saying that's inaccurate, I'm pointing out that this seems to be pretty factual, and non-partisan, despite who the founder may be. Remember that as bad as many colleges are right now with free speech, liberals are generally not banning books. We of a certain age that lean left are horrified by the college free speech culture and hate to see it happen in places where our kids should be hearing many different philosophies and points of view.
It's probably misleading to use nominal figures to compare this, since there's going to almost certainly be a difference in the number of conservative and liberal leaning universities.
You need the unis to learn some advanced skills and do some networking. As an asside, you guys are paying way too much for universities (but that's unrelated to free speech).