KSC receives “Green Light” for free speech

Vincent Moore
News Editor

Keene State Colleges free speech rating has gone from a “red light” to a “green light” ranking according to the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE).
Keene State College has become a safer place for freedom of speech, according to a release from the Foundation of Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), which updated the college’s rating to a “green light”.
According to FIRE’s website www.thefire.org, in order to have a green light rating a college or university policies must not “seriously imperil speech”. The rating’s description also contains a caveat explaining: “A green light does not indicate that a school actively supports free expression. It simply means that FIRE is not currently aware of any serious threats to students’ free speech rights in the policies on that campus.”
The Equinox reported in an article published March 10, 2016, that KSC received a “red light” rating based on its discrimination and discriminatory harassment policy.
FIRE describes itself as a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of students and faculty members at America’s colleges and universities.
“It’s a community issue and it should be a community conversation. There were a number of policies that FIRE felt were a little bit more prescriptive or restrictive then they should be and those policies lived in a variety of departments so they weren’t ‘owned’ by any one area, so really what it came down to was just having discussions with those various departments to assess if there were opportunities to align our policies with our institutional values in a way that FIRE would also recognise as a green light policy,” Director of Campus Safety and Compliance Jeff Maher said.
Maher said that the changes came from routine reevaluations of KSC’s policies.
“There’s been a campus conversation about our policies as it relates to FIRE’s red light, yellow light, green light rating for years…we traditionally will reevaluate our institutional policies on, I’d like to say, at least a yearly basis and certainly during those periods of reevaluations we want to ensure that we’re compliant with the law, with the case law, and kind of with the values of our institution. So Dottie, and myself, as well as a group of others look at these opportunities to increase transparency and ultimately ensure that our students and our staff have all the rights of freedom of speech and expression that they are entitled to.”
According to FIRE’s release Dartmouth College is the only New Hampshire institution to not have a green light rating.

Vincent Moore can be contacted at
vmoore@kscequinox.com