Free speech remains a serious problem on American college campuses. And while some may believe conditions are improving, a newly released survey suggests otherwise. In fact, even conservative students, who are often portrayed as the victims of campus intolerance, are now contributing to the problem.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE's) sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings surveyed 68,510 students at 257 schools. The rankings combine student responses to a broad set of speech-related questions with further evaluations of institutional speech policies and documented campus speech controversies.
The results are roughly what one might expect, though not entirely for the reasons either side would prefer. American higher education continues to struggle with tolerance for dissenting ideas. But the survey also suggests that intolerance now cuts across partisan lines, with liberal and conservative students alike increasingly hostile to opposing viewpoints. A record one in three students said it is acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech. Record shares also endorsed shouting down speakers and blocking others from entering a speech or event.
To gauge students’ tolerance for dissenting views, FIRE asked respondents whether their schools should permit six hypothetical controversial speakers: three associated with traditionally conservative views and three associated with traditionally liberal ones. For the first time, a majority of students opposed allowing every one of the six speakers to appear on campus. Students did remain more willing to tolerate controversial liberal speakers than controversial conservative ones, but support for allowing liberal speakers fell more sharply this year. In other words, campus intolerance has become bipartisan.
“This year, students largely opposed allowing any controversial campus speaker, no matter that speaker's politics,” said FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff. “Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students' ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture's deep polarization.”
In a somewhat surprising result, students at three elite universities, Princeton, Stanford, and Harvard, were among the most tolerant of controversial conservative speakers.
FIRE's new survey of college students asked whether 3 right-leaning speakers should be allowed to speak on campus.
— The Missing Data Depot (@data_depot) September 19, 2026
A majority (53%) of students nationally would ban all 3. Strikingly, more than three-quarters of Mount Holyoke, Smith & Wellesley students would not allow all 3. pic.twitter.com/dWGxlYOmau
Of the 257 colleges and universities evaluated, 166 received an F for free speech. Only 10 earned a C, and just one school managed a B-minus. Claremont McKenna College claimed the No. 1 position in FIRE’s latest rankings, its second time leading the list. It was followed by Purdue, the University of Chicago, Michigan Technological University, and the University of Colorado Boulder. Barnard College, meanwhile, landed at the very bottom. Columbia, Indiana, Washington, and Northeastern joined it in the rankings’ lowest five.
“The atmosphere isn’t just cautious — it’s hostile,” the study’s authors wrote. “Students continue to show low tolerance for controversial speakers, and troublingly, more believe it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker, block access to events, or even resort to violence to silence campus speech than ever before.”
This comes as bias, retaliation, and weak free-speech protections remain top concerns for conservatives deciding whether to send their children to politically liberal universities. For some, the concerns have grown into a broader rejection of higher education itself: Why spend four years, and a small fortune, when students could instead go straight into the workforce or perhaps a trade?
Those concerns are real. But abandoning higher education, or ceding influential universities to ideological conformity, is obviously not a serious answer. Conservatives should be careful not to confuse an overpriced, ideologically imbalanced system with a worthless one. College still provides knowledge, credentials, professional networks, and access to the institutions that shape the country. Walking away from it entirely is not a recipe for reform, but a recipe for leaving the most influential campuses even more thoroughly in the hands of the people conservatives believe are already failing them. And it would only deepen the echo chambers on both sides.
As I have written before, conservatives should send students to liberal campuses prepared to challenge bad ideas, and to defend the free-speech principles they expect everyone else to honor. FIRE’s findings make that responsibility especially clear. Conservatives cannot credibly condemn intolerance on the left while embracing it on the right.
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