Many American colleges, universities fail free speech test, report finds

The University of Virginia, Michigan Tech and Florida State lead the largest annual rankings of free speech for colleges and universities.

Coming in dead-last with scores of zero and speech climate descriptions of “abysmal” were Ivy Leaguers Harvard and Columbia. Each, along with New York University, the University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College, had very poor scores for areas measuring “the strength of students’ favoritism when it comes to allowing liberal or conservative speakers on campus.”

Barnard is the undergraduate women’s college affiliated with Columbia.

FIRE, the acronym for Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, based the rankings on 58,000 students at 257 colleges and universities. More than half of the students (54%) said “an open and honest conversation” about the Israeli-Palestinian war is difficult to conduct, a record percentage for a topic.

And on 17 campuses, the majority saying this grew to 75%.

“Attempt to deplatform campus speakers for their expression are at record levels, and a majority of college undergraduates oppose inviting controversial speakers to campus,” the report concludes in issuing a warning about the state of free expression on American campuses. “During the encampment protests students occupied buildings and attempted to disrupt a number of commencement ceremonies. Before and after the start of these protests, administrators suppressed student and faculty speech and, in some cases, even called in police to arrest students.”

And, in final words, the report says, “Colleges and universities can do a lot to set the tone of the expression climate on campus. For starters, they can maintain clear policies that defend expressive rights, not ambiguous ones that administrators can apply arbitrarily whenever they see fit. With that said, maintaining clear speech-protective policies is not enough. Whether a school truly holds free expression as a core value is revealed when that school is tested by controversy.

“If the past year is any indication, a lot of America’s colleges and universities are failing the test.”

The report said that since 2020, each of the top three schools along with N.C. State, Oregon State, Mississippi State, Auburn, George Mason, Kansas State, Mississippi, the University of Chicago and Claremont McKenna “have all consistently performed well in FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings.”

The report says “analyses of the encampment protests are buttressed by an accompanying report detailing the results of a separate survey conducted on 30 campuses after the encampment protests began.”

A section of the report related to the Oct. 7 beginning of the conflict between Hamas and Israel said a record 156 deplatforming attempts happened on American college and university campuses in 2023. Fifty-four were tied to the war. In calendar year 2024 as the report went to press, 75 of 110 deplatforming attempts involved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The report says of the schools surveyed, 47% of students identified as politically liberal, 21% conservative and 16% moderate. Predominant liberal student bodies were in 228 of the 257 schools.

For difficult topics to discuss, the trends since 2020 put abortion consistently at the top, having never been below 45%. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict surged in this ranking from being between 26% and 31% to 55%, making it No. 1 this year.

Gun control, always 41% to 43%, dropped to 36%; and race and racial inequality, always 42% to 51%, dropped to 36%. Transgender issues and rights stayed steady at 41%; it’s been 40% to 44% each year.

FIRE bills itself as a “nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought. These rights include freedom of speech, freedom of association, due process, legal equality, religious liberty, and sanctity of conscience – the most essential qualities of liberty.”

It works to produce the rankings with College Pulse, a “survey research and analytics company dedicated to understanding the attitudes, preferences, and behaviors of today’s college students.” College Pulse has custom “data-driven marketing and research solutions,” utilizing a panel of “850,000 college students and recent alumni from more than 1,500 two- and four-year colleges and universities in all 50 states.”