How's your state doing on freedom of speech?

Nearly three-quarters of colleges and universities maintain unconstitutional speech codes, according to a report released today by the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). Here's my alma mater--the school that used really poor judgement and hired Bill Ayers as a professor of education. Everyone else has to be silent, but terrorists can speak out about this terrible country and the state that pays his salary, I guess.

"In September 2008, faculty and staff members at the University of Illinois received a memo from the university’s Ethics Office informing them that, “when on university property,” they were prohibited from engaging in a wide variety of political expression, including attending a rally for a particular candidate or political party or wearing “a pin or t-shirt in support of the Democratic Party or Republican Party.” The memo even implied that faculty and staff could not drive onto campus with political bumper stickers on their cars. After news of the memo generated controversy, University President B. Joseph White responded with a vague statement that university employees needed to “use common sense” to determine what types of political activity were acceptable. Eventually, after extensive condemnation fromthe public and fromfree speech and academic freedom organizations including FIRE, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the American Association of University Professors, White issued another statement clarifying that faculty and staff could, after all, wear pins and t-shirts, place bumper stickers on their cars, and attend rallies on campus, provided they were not on duty at the time." FIRE'S Spotlight on Speech Codes, 2009

In last year’s report, FIRE gave 259 of 346 colleges and universities that designation: 75 percent, compared with 74.2 percent this year. I did a word search on Ohio for "red light" and didn't see Ohio State, but I think I noticed Ohio University.