You can help end speech codes at your college campus by posting a FIRE Speech Code Widget on your blog or website. The widget will link directly to a page of your choice on Spotlight: The Campus Freedom Resource, our speech code ratings database that covers more than 350 colleges and universities nationwide, with more added every year. FIRE staffers and lawyers annually review policies at these institutions to determine whether the school is a “red light,” meaning it has at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech; a “yellow light,” meaning it maintains some policies that could ban or excessively regulate protected speech; or a “green light,” which indicates that FIRE was unable to find any policies that would seriously imperil free speech on campus. Spotlight’s speech code ratings have been repeatedly cited in newspapers from the Wall Street Journal and USA Today to local and campus newspapers across the country.
To add the widget for your school to your website, here’s all you need to do:
- Visit thefire.org/spotlight and select your school by state, region, or just by typing it into the search box.
- When your school’s page comes up, look on the right sidebar to see the widget for that particular school. Below it is a box with some text in it—select it all and copy it to the clipboard.
- Go to your blog or website, and paste in the text wherever you want the widget to appear (it’s made for a sidebar, but should work anywhere).
- Send us a link to your site with the widget posted on it and your mailing address.
Then we’ll send you a free FIRE t-shirt!