Students at Hillsdale College enjoy the country’s best campus environment for free speech, according to a recent report which surveyed 45,000 students from 208 schools. Hillsdale College outperformed the entire field by a margin so wide that it borders on the comical, but was removed from the published results for having an overly restrictive speech code.

The survey, published by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), posed 27 questions on students’ campus speech environments, from which FIRE distinguished six basic metrics such as comfort expressing ideas and ability to have an open conversation on campus. Hillsdale scored first in the nation as a wide statistical outlier on three of these metrics, and second in the nation on two others.

On one question, 78% of Hillsdale students, more than any other college surveyed, said that they would be “very comfortable” expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion. The national average was 23%, and the runner-up was the University of Memphis at 38%.

FIRE is a nonpartisan advocate of free speech, it exclude the performance of the only college in the country that truly excelled in their data. In addition to the survey, FIRE also evaluates colleges’ written policies that regulate student speech. Hillsdale was one of five schools evaluated as “Warning” and removed from the field for having policies “that clearly and consistently state that it prioritizes other values over a commitment to freedom of speech.” FIRE evaluates colleges’ speech codes as they are written, not as they are applied.

I followed up with FIRE to determine the reasons for this judgment. FIRE stated that Hillsdale’s policies have no explicit protection for students’ speech rights, and pointed out two restrictive policies. The first was Hillsdale’s “Guidelines Regarding the Mission and Moral Commitments of Hillsdale College,” which states that Hillsdale will not support organizations or activities that contravene its commitment to a Christian understanding of marriage and sexuality. The second was Nos. 8 and 9 of Hillsdale’s “Regulations for Proper Student Conduct.” No. 9 is the most pertinent, which restricts:

Improper, offensive, abusive, disparaging, threatening, lewd, indecent, pornographic, or obscene conduct, communication or material on an online social network or third-party Web site, cell phone, email, Twitter, Facebook, blog or other social media.

This regulation allows Hillsdale’s administration the extraordinary power to use “suspension or expulsion” to enforce a ban on “improper” or “offensive” material in students’ texts, emails, and social media posts. If this power were exercised to even a fraction of the extent its wording allows, the violations of student speech rights would be drastic and intolerable. It is my assessment that FIRE’s evaluation of Hillsdale’s speech code was rational and consistent with their methodology.

Nevertheless, FIRE’s decision to separate the five Warning schools and score them only against one another is unaccountable. FIRE’s process makes these schools’ reported scores impossible to compare with the rest of the population, obscuring important data without benefit.

FIRE was, however, extremely receptive to my questions, and with some assistance I was able to recreate the methodology under which school scores were assigned. If the Warning schools had been allowed to compete, Hillsdale’s overall speech score would have been the best in the nation  at 105.30, beating the University of Chicago in second place at 75.72 by an astonishing margin. This is after applying FIRE’s generous adjustments to score for speech code, without which the gap widens yet farther.

Those skeptical of the meaningfulness of these results may argue that, with the highest ratio of conservative to liberal students in the nation (10.3:1 according to FIRE), Hillsdale’s student body assumes that its campus has wonderful freedom of speech merely because students never encounter any liberal speech. This is not borne out by the data. There are eight ranked colleges with a ratio of liberal to conservative students in excess of 20:1. If political uniformity did inflate student perceptions of free speech, it would be shown in each of these universities, none of which placed remarkably on any metric.

Restrictive written policies or not, Hillsdale’s performance evidences a campus speech environment not only superior to every competitor in the nation, but of a higher class entirely.