Vox Silentium in Deserto?

The motto of our small but beloved College translates to “A voice crying out in the wilderness.” The implications for speech that stem from this biblical allusion (Mark 1:3) are directly contradicted by the 2024 College Free Speech Rankings jointly published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE, formerly the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education) and College Pulse. A whopping 55,102 students were surveyed nationwide, and, out of 248 colleges and universities, Dartmouth came in at 240th. This is a major plummet for the College, which ranked 63rd in 2021 and 83rd in 2022. And we thought that our latest US News and World Report Ranking was embarrassing . . . (see “Dartmouth Falls in US News” on page 4 of TDR, 9/29/23).

Not to be outdone, however, Harvard came in 248th: dead last. I trust our friends at the Salient will do their utmost to rectify what FIRE calls the University’s “abysmal” free-speech ranking. Surely, they’d be embarrassed to be outdone by their northern neighbor in independent journalism and free speech (however barely on the latter count). Dartmouth escaped with merely a “poor” rating from FIRE. Score!

Before we celebrate our (relative) trouncing of the Pilgrims, we must remember that Dartmouth’s ranking is itself awful—and a steep drop-off from its ranking in the preceding two years. However, we should also ask how these ratings were calculated. To abuse a quote apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, “there are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” 

FIRE’s survey provides its readers with descriptive statistics that attempt to quantify the speech climate of college campuses, an inherently nebulous quality that does not easily lend itself to quantitative examination. It seems like some circumspection is warranted.

General skepticism toward statistics in mind, is Dartmouth’s campus speech culture better described as vox silentium in deserto? 

FIRE is transparent with its methodology and provides straightforwardly its empirical specifications in the appendix of its 2024 report. Abbreviating from the methodology section of this appendix, rankings are “based on a composite score of 13 components, six of which assess student perceptions of different aspects of the speech climate on their [respective] campus.” The remaining seven components factor into the composite score the behavior of students, faculty, and administrators apropos free speech.

How did we fare on these metrics? Well, as our overall score of 25.8 and tail-end ranking would suggest: poorly. 

Dartmouth performs especially pitifully in the areas of “disruptive conduct,” “administrative support,” “tolerance difference,” and “comfort expressing ideas.” 

As an outspoken libertarian student who has led the Dartmouth Libertarians as director of programming or president since the spring of 2020, I struggle to understand, much less believe, our overwhelmingly poor performance in these areas. I just do not see, in practice, that anything has changed demonstrably within the past year to warrant Dartmouth’s fall from 83rd to 240th in FIRE’s free-speech rankings.

Before you accuse me of bringing anecdotes to bear in a discussion of statistics, I would like to remind the reader that many anecdotes (read: repeated observations) does data make. I think my anecdotal experiences are especially important given the Dartmouth Libertarians’ minority ideology on campus, the nature of the events that we host, and the reception granted thereto.

The Dartmouth Libertarians have never experienced “disruptive conduct” during our twenty-some-odd events from the spring of 2020 to today.

Case in point: 3D-printed gun developer Vinh Nguyen delivered a presentation, “All About 3D-Printed Ghost Guns,” only three days after the Uvalde school shooting in the spring of 2022. We had planned the event two months in advance for May 27 when, three days before the event was to take place, the tragedy at Uvalde occurred.

In the wake of the unspeakable horror that claimed twenty-one innocent lives, including those of nineteen children, we anticipated our decision to go through with the event might upset some of our peers. So did Dartmouth’s administration. As President, I was asked to meet with an administrator of the Council on Student Organizations (COSO) to discuss the possibility of rescheduling the event out of consideration for those on campus particularly affected by the tragedy. Having already booked flights, transportation, lodging, etc., months in advance, we politely declined to reschedule. The administrator respected our decision.

Instead of cajoling us into changing our plans, the COSO administrator asked me if I anticipated a need for security at the event. I audibly—and, in retrospect, perhaps rudely—scoffed at the notion. The Dartmouth Libertarians did not (and do not) have a reputation as provocateurs but rather as boring, pedantic policy wonks and armchair philosophers: We would need no such service. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the College was ready, willing, and able to provide us so that we could carry out the event.

I was right: Around 40 students and community members attended the event. Not a single attendee acted disruptively or inappropriately, holding questions for Nguyen until the end of his approximately 90-minute lecture.

Furthermore, despite the Libertarians’ relatively small membership, COSO has always provided us with ample funding to host libertarian academics, intellectuals, and pundits. In the spring of 2023, much to my genuine surprise, the Dartmouth Libertarians—the student club explicitly dedicated to promoting free-market capitalism and limited government—were awarded with a “Certificate of Excellence in Diplomacy,” which recognized us as the student organization that has most “worked to bring disparate groups together, foster collaboration, and facilitate thought-provoking dialogue on campus.” (Sorry, DPU. Better luck next time!)

So much for Dartmouth’s failing grade on “administrative support.”