Instead, I’ll focus on small, tangible wins—like improving campus life with simple, practical changes that matter day to day.
After landing 73rd in the 2024 report following accusations of professors’ classroom speech being punished, CMC climbed to sixth place in the 2025 ranking. As your FOB president—Funniest On Ballot, Freshest On Board, or Free Office Boba—you’ll get humor, energy, and inclusiveness. Even if you don’t rank me #1, I’ll always be here to hear you out—whether it’s ranting about classes, policies, dining hall food, or the meaning of life. With so many passions and perspectives at CMC, we deserve a leader who can bring us together, not divide us.
Staying silent while the Trump Administration lays siege to higher education will not protect us. Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow—assigned 4,309 times in classrooms since 2012—argues that though formal racial discrimination ended with the Civil Rights Movement, the carceral system has replaced the old Jim Crow. Critics like James Forman Jr., John Pfaff, and Michael Fortner argue that Alexander fails to consider favorable Black attitudes to incarceration and overemphasizes the role of drug convictions in prison growth. Despite criticisms of FIRE’s methodology, the organization’s broad reach and coverage have been celebrated for providing insights upon which to build better speech climates at American colleges. On the policy front, CMC earns a Green Light, particularly for its adoption of the Chicago Principles and commitment to institutional neutrality as far back as 2018.
CMC Class of 2029: First-Year Class President Statements
All of these authors have provoked pushback, with their critics raising subtle complications and, other times, offering full-throated rejections. The question remains whether these critics are being taught and, if so, at what frequency. Moreover, CMC is said to have “deplatformed” commencement speaker Salman Rushdie as its singular controversy, when the motivation behind Rushdie’s withdrawal remains unknown. These discrepancies may suggest that FIRE strongly weighs subjective student https://traderoom.info/cmc-markets-a-wholly-reliable-brokerage/ experience, or at the very least, receives much of its information from the FIRE-College Pulse surveys.
FIRE’s 2026 Free Speech Rankings: How the Claremont Colleges Fared
By no means should academics avoid teaching certain fashionable thinkers, Shields added. “The academy has always been…faddish and taken with certain intellectuals.” The concern lies in whether they are presented in conversation with critics or presented as infallible. Higher education through one-sided narratives has created “closed classrooms.” The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a premier First Amendment watchdog group, analyzed the climates of public and private colleges nationwide.
Philosophy is a “discipline whose pedagogical aims explicitly include exposing students to competing arguments,” the researchers state. Yet students are not made familiar with the heated debate between the two scholars. Huntington is only assigned in 758 of the courses that assign Said—less than five percent of the time.
The CMC First-Year Class President (FYCP) sits on the Executive Board of ASCMC and serves as a representative of the Class of 2029. The FYCP manages a budget of $3,000, which they can use to plan events and foster community within their class and across CMC’s student body. CMC’s neutrality on recent government interference in higher education is a far cry from the responsible leadership we preach.
- I’m running for FYCP because I can actually bring this class together—not just as a slogan, but as action.
- There are also pragmatic benefits to liberalizing these classrooms—even if such “controversial” courses are in the minority.
- The CMC First-Year Class President (FYCP) sits on the Executive Board of ASCMC and serves as a representative of the Class of 2029.
- Staying silent while the Trump Administration lays siege to higher education will not protect us.
- CMC’s grade of 79.86 is the highest score of any of the colleges rated by FIRE.
CMC Class of 2029: First-Year Class President Statements
In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values. Claremont McKenna College claimed first place in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2026 Free Speech Rankings on Tuesday, while Pomona College clocked in at 247th of 257 colleges. The other Claremont Colleges’ placements spanned between the two, with all but CMC earning an “F” grade. I bring the perspective of an Italian-American who has lived abroad and seen how different ideas strengthen a community.
Shields says that many higher-education courses are uncontroversial in their subject matters, and often taught without issue. But the measure of a liberal institution is not how it teaches inoffensive issues, but how it prepares its students to grapple with the deeply polarizing ones. Interestingly, when critics are assigned in syllabi regarding all three topics, the most commonly co-assigned materials are the mainstream canon.
Instead, they read texts that reaffirm Alexander’s thesis; the texts most frequently co-assigned with The New Jim Crow are Angela Davis’s Are Prisons Obsolete? I largely agree with the Kalven Report and generally support CMC’s institutional neutrality. It protects the academic freedom of students and faculty and facilitates the open and constructive dialogue that CMC has made so central to its identity. Since the paper’s release, critics have questioned whether “closed classrooms” are the norm.
FIRE’s 2026 Free Speech Rankings: How the Claremont Colleges Fared
However, during our interview, Professor Shields was cautious to read too much into disciplinary differences. Though philosophy professors assigned Thomson with her critics more often than their non-philosophy colleagues assigned critics for their materials, such professors were in the minority. The “norm was not to assign her with her critics,” Shields observes, remaining uncertain whether other questions in philosophy would be presented any fairer. The next step was determining the canonical texts of each debate, with decisions made based on citation counts and the researchers’ own familiarity with the scholarship. The researchers chose Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (19,000 citations) on criminal justice, Edward Said’s Orientalism (90,000 citations) on Israel-Palestine, and Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “A Defense of Abortion” (3,000 citations) on abortion.
Professors Jon Shields (CMC), Yuval Avnur (Scripps), and Stephanie Muravchik (CMC) have recently released a working paper analyzing diversity of thought in American college syllabi. FIRE’s ranking is based upon their speech code ratings of “Red,” “Yellow,” and “Green” for each school’s policies, indicating the degree to which each policy promotes expression through clarity, content neutrality, and other measures. Survey data is also obtained in partnership with College Pulse—a community-based survey platform—to accompany the speech code ratings in the ranking process. For the 2026 report, 68,000 students were surveyed from January 3 through June 5, 2025. CMC cannot claim to value open inquiry, academic freedom, and responsible leadership if it stands silent while those principles are challenged. This article is not a call for partisanship or an end to institutional neutrality.
Through the “Open Syllabus Project” (OSP) database, the researchers had access to 27 million syllabi scraped from university websites dating back to 2008. “The surprising thing about the database is how little it’s been used,” Professor Shields noted in an interview with The Forum. With features tracking how often specific texts are assigned and paired with those expressing opposing views, the team could use this tool in an innovative way—to examine if syllabi fairly assigned both canonical texts and their criticisms. Second, I already know many of you—not just names, but your halls, teams, classes, interests, and backgrounds. From athletes to artists, scientists to lawyers, north quad to south quad, internationals to locals—I’ve listened to and laughed with you. Connecting with diverse people is my biggest joy, something I’ve done across 40 countries (Antarctica, I’m coming for you next).
- “The academy has always been…faddish and taken with certain intellectuals.” The concern lies in whether they are presented in conversation with critics or presented as infallible.
- The question remains whether these critics are being taught and, if so, at what frequency.
- Moreover, CMC is said to have “deplatformed” commencement speaker Salman Rushdie as its singular controversy, when the motivation behind Rushdie’s withdrawal remains unknown.
- Standing with our fellow institutions of higher education is not a declaration of partisanship.
- Criminal justice and the Israel-Palestine conflict have been the two most polarizing campus issues for the past decade, Shields observed, whereas abortion is the most enduring issue in the broader American culture wars.
For instance, professors who assigned Forman assigned The New Jim Crow 82 percent of the time. And even if Alexander was not taught with her critics, the research team found that similar—sometimes even more radical voices—were often assigned in place of The New Jim Crow. There are also pragmatic benefits to liberalizing these classrooms—even if such “controversial” courses are in the minority.
Among these principles are the belief that universities must commit to individual freedom, open inquiry, and serve as a forum for diverse ideas. The Kalven Committee argued that universities that did not maintain neutrality endangered these principles. Of all the opposing texts co-assigned with The New Jim Crow, Forman’s essay “Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration” was the most common. However, Forman was assigned only 149 times in the 4,309 syllabi that include Alexander. Simply put, only three percent of students reading The New Jim Crow have also read its top critic.
CMC Class of 2029: First-Year Class President Statements
As the semester ramps up and the Class of 2029 settles into college life, a familiar fleet of banners hang outside Appleby Hall. The First-Year Class President campaigns are in full swing, and six eager candidates are vying for the opportunity to represent the newest cohort of CMC students, promising events, food, community, and memories. Standing with our fellow institutions of higher education is not a declaration of partisanship. It is a reaffirmation of our principles, values, and unyielding dedication to academic freedom.
