Guide to Colleges | HeterodoxAcademy.org

Guide to Colleges | HeterodoxAcademy.org:
The Heterodox Academy Guide to Colleges rates America’s top 150 universities (as listed by US News and World Reports) and will soon rate the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools according to their commitment to viewpoint diversity. 
Is it a place where you are likely to encounter a variety of views on politically controversial topics? 
Or do school policies – or the students themselves– impose a rigid political orthodoxy that punishes dissenting opinions and creates a climate in which students are afraid to speak up, even in seminar classes?

Our guide to colleges helps you evaluate schools on this question by integrating these four sources of information:

1. Endorsed Chicago: Whether the university has endorsed the Chicago Principles on free expression
2. FIRE Rating: Whether the school’s speech codes foster or infringe upon free speech. As rated by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
3. ISI Rating: Is the school a reasonably welcoming place for conservative and libertarian students? Obtained from the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI) guide to Choosing the Right College. (We presume that open-minded progressive students would prefer not to attend a school at which students who are not on the left feel unwelcome, and are less likely to speak up.)
4. Relevant Events Since 2014: Events on campus that indicate a commitment by faculty, administration, and/or students to protect or restrict free inquiry and viewpoint diversity. We ignore events that involve just a few students or professors and focus on those indicating broader sentiment, norms, or policy.

Methodology: Below you’ll find our ratings for the top 150 national universities. (Ratings for the Top 50 Liberal Arts Schools coming soon.) For this first edition, we assign each of the four criteria a value from 0 to 1. We then multiply each by 25 and add up the values to create a “Heterodoxy Score” that runs from 0 (worst, most orthodox) to 100 (best, most heterodox, most open to viewpoint diversity). View our methodology in more detail.

Please note: This first edition of the guide was made public on October 19, 2016. Because university policies are changing rapidly this semester, we do not believe that our first edition is reliable enough to serve as a basis for decision making. Our goal is to release an improved edition in December. See our schedule of updates. 

We welcome corrections from university administrators and current students as well as your feedback via: collegeguide@heterodoxacademy.org.

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