So that’s not great.

In our National Speech Index, FIRE asks the general public a variety of questions related to free speech, including: How acceptable is it to use physical violence to stop someone giving a speech in their community? Gen Z are 9.6 times more accepting of violence against speakers than Baby Boomers1, and over 25 times more accepting of violence against speakers than the Silent Generation2. Each successive generation is more supportive of violence against speakers than the last, in most cases more than twice as supportive. About 43% of Gen Z say violence against speakers is at least rarely acceptable, and over a quarter say it’s sometimes or always acceptable3.

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I consider this an illegitimate (and ineffective) response to legitimate grievances. Whether one believes that there’s a lot wrong with our country or leadership; that Gen Z has gotten a raw deal economically; or even that our politics are completely broken — that break is in part because we have lost the ability to sit down and talk our problems out. Hurting or killing speakers doesn’t fix political issues. It doesn’t do anything about the problems driving the grievances people have. It just foments chaos and creates a new problem to fix.

But is this support for violence more a liberal problem? Young people tend to be more liberal, so maybe that’s the real source of the effect. To check, let’s separate the age groups by ideology:

Nope4.

Regardless of ideology, Gen Z is vastly more likely to endorse violence against speakers than Boomers, with that effect being strongest among the “very conservative.” This is primarily a generational divide, and the impact of ideology is a distant second. But the intersection of age and ideology does produce some very interesting effects. When we ask, for instance, about whether offensive speakers should face consequences, we see the opposite effect for old and young liberals:

Heck of a fall.

Compared to any other ideology, young and middle-aged liberals show more support for punishing offensive speakers. When it comes to older people, the opposite is true. In our data, young liberals are the most censorious group while old liberals are the least censorious5. One explanation is simply that we are seeing a semantic shift whereby for many measures, “liberal” has come to represent the opposite of what it once did. Think “woke” vs. old-school Progressives and Classical Liberals.

For those who care about free speech and a culture of open discourse, this should warrant serious attention. I don’t have a silver bullet here. I don’t think there is one. But when this many people start to say they are willing to resort to such a desperate solution, we have to confront the problem before the problem confronts us.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots can be found here.

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Our data on the general population is less comprehensive than our student data. We don’t ask the same speaker-tolerance questions. But we do ask people whether they agree with the claim, “Words can be violence.” It seems likely that people who think words are violence are more likely to support censorship. The phrase is also a slogan among left-wing activists. But how widely held is this idea, and who holds it?

To figure that out, consider the scatterplot below, showing men on the left and women on the right. Each marker indicates a different political ideology, such as “conservative” or “very liberal.” The lower down each marker sits in a column, the more that group agrees with the claim, “Words can be violence.” The first thing to notice is that liberals, men and women alike, are more likely than conservatives to think words can be violence. That’s not too surprising. But take another look.

It turns out, this belief is not just a disproportionately liberal opinion — it’s also a disproportionately female one. In fact, even very conservative women are more likely to think “words can be violence” than very liberal men. Also, it seems the gender gap here is growing compared to last year, though there’s enough noise that it’s very uncertain.

Notably, the size of the gender gap varies significantly depending on what sort of question you ask, including in some ways that I wouldn’t have guessed. When we ask people whether offensive speakers should face consequences, we see a much smaller gender gap.

If I had to hazard a guess at why men and women are more in agreement here, I’d assume it’s because unlike with most of our questions, or public framings for that matter, there’s more emphasis here on how censorship can harm people. All you champions of free speech, take note. It might be that emphasizing the harm of censorship is a more effective way to get women engaged in the issue.

As one might expect, the gap reemerges when we look at aggression and ask whether Americans should have the right to curse at politicians.

Men are more okay with cursing at politicians than women, by and large. Very liberal women are also okay with it. Unsurprisingly, conservative women are not fans of profanity. But very conservative men are.

It’s striking to see how often speech issues don’t divide along simple political lines. Support for free speech isn’t a simple story about whether people agree with opinions or not. Oftentimes, it’s more influenced by social factors including gender, or driven by personality traits such as disagreeableness, or even more bizarre factors.

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An analysis of 72 campus deplatforming attempts — efforts to stop public expression on college campuses — from 1947 to 1999 shows that these efforts have their roots in the immediate post-World War II period.

In the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, almost every incident in the sample comes from someone to the political right of the expression they are targeting, and almost all of them were successful. Campus speaker-bans, ruled unconstitutional in 1968, were used to bar communists, communist sympathizers, and socialists from speaking on campuses across the country — including at Columbia University, UC Berkeley and UCLA, University of Michigan, and the University of North Carolina. But by the 70s, this pattern had reversed and deplatforming attempts now came overwhelmingly from the other direction.

The 1970s were the high-water mark of 20th century campus deplatforming with a total of 19 attempts. While earlier controversies centered around political views and the Cold War, deplatforming efforts in the 70s pivoted sharply to race. That shift was driven largely by repeated controversies involving William Shockley, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist turned eugenicist and, often, Roy Innis, the national director of the Congress on Racial Equality. Together, they account for nearly three-quarters (14 in all) of the deplatforming attempts that decade.

Shockley’s role is especially important. He had become a national symbol of controversy because of his views on race and intelligence. Invitations to speak on campus no longer functioned like ordinary academic events, but instead became flashpoints. When he was invited to speak at a symposium at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute in May 1968, a small group of faculty complained and the convocation was ultimately canceled, despite 493 scientists and engineers having already agreed to come, for fear of violence. Harold Taylor, the former president of Sarah Lawrence College, said of the scandal, “If we are never to discuss any controversial issues for fear there might be demonstrations, then the whole purpose of the university is destroyed.”

Innis matters here too because of his repeated connection to Shockley, and his willingness to debate him. In 1973, Innis was scheduled to debate Shockley on television on the topic of black intelligence, but Innis pulled out at the last moment because the student society at Princeton, which was organizing the event, would not grant access to the press or public. In 1974, Yale canceled a debate between Innis and Shockley on eugenics, an infamous decision that led to the publication of the Woodward Report, in which the university made the protection of freedom of expression an official school policy.

The 1980s brought geopolitics back. The decade’s deplatforming attempts were about the Cold War conflict, with Central America looming large. That makes the 80s distinct from both the anti-communist postwar years and the Shockley-driven scandals of the 70s. Now the targets were often appointees in the Reagan administration — figures like UN envoy Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, CIA Director William Casey, or Defense Secretary Casper Weinberger.

The 90s are the most politically mixed decade of all. There is a roughly even number of censors on the left and the right of the targeted expressions, the topics are all over the map, and the targets range from pro-choice commencement speakers to racial firebrands, conservative political figures, and culture-war provocateurs. Rather than one coherent wave, this decade looks like a transitional moment. This is the period when campus deplatforming began to take on the fragmented and multi-issue character it would have in later years.

But regardless of the decade, the attempts often succeeded. Of the 72 incidents in the sample, 53 ended by successfully deplatforming the target, including essentially all those prior to 1970. That’s a 74% success rate. But if that era was bad, the current one is even worse.

The 20th-century shows that campus deplatforming is not new. It has roots in the immediate post-World War II period, shifts ideological direction over time, and repeatedly clusters around the dominant controversies of a given era: anti-communism, race and intelligence, Central America, abortion, immigration, and the culture wars. But deplatforming attempts have become far more numerous since 2015. In the last few years, they’ve intensified even more: 171 in 2023, 179 in 2024, and 172 in 2025. We’ve already recorded 77 in just the first three months of this year. That’s more than the total number attempts in the entire dataset spanning from 1947 through 1999.

The post-World War II era saw widespread efforts to keep disfavored speakers off campus, often with remarkable success. But the modern era appears worse not simply because deplatforming still exists, but because it has become more frequent, more sustained, and in the most recent data, more successful. A 74% success rate in this 20th-century sample is troubling enough. But early 2026 data reveals a 93% success rate. The lesson is not merely that campus deplatforming has a long history, but that we are far from done with this fight. Indeed, by one crucial measure, this is our darkest hour.

“If it is protected, we will defend it … If you are a censor, we will fight you.”

– Bob Corn-Revere on maintaining principle in a time of polarization, Delaware Inns of Court keynote, March 2026.

Supreme Court revives protester’s lawsuit

The U.S. Supreme Court unanimously allowed a Mississippi man to proceed with a First Amendment challenge against a law restricting demonstrations to designated zones.

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The ruling clarifies that individuals can challenge speech restrictions prospectively — even if they were previously convicted under them — potentially expanding avenues for constitutional litigation.

Big Tech verdicts threaten speech

Recent verdicts in California and New Mexico, targeting social media platforms’ algorithms and design features, signal a push to treat online speech as a defective product despite longstanding First Amendment protections for editorial judgment.

Here’s to explain:

No matter how you feel about social media, the minute we start treating speech as if it were just another physical product is the minute we hand the government the power to decide what we can read, watch, and say.

Below the fold

• Two protesters in Australia were arrested — and could face up to two years in prison — on the first day of Queensland’s ban on the slogan “From the river to the sea,” as part of new rules regulating protest speech related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Terms of service

In his essay “The great chatbot panic,” Tyler Tone argues that the current wave of lawsuits blaming AI chatbots for suicides and violent behavior echoes past moral panics over media like Dungeons & Dragons, music, and video games, where courts ultimately rejected attempts to hold creators liable for harmful ideas rather than tangible defects. He warns that treating chatbot outputs as a “product” subject to liability would undermine First Amendment protections and push AI companies to sterilize speech to avoid risk.

This week in history

On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry delivered a speech at the Second Virginia Convention urging the American colonies to take up arms against Great Britain. The speech is best known for the line, “Give me liberty or give me death.” He began by emphasizing the value of open debate and the right to express differing opinions. His remarks helped persuade the convention to adopt a resolution calling for the mobilization of troops, a pivotal step toward the American Revolution.

By the numbers

Only three months into the year, campus deplatforming is already on pace to set a disturbing new record, and if current trends hold, 2026 won’t just be a bad year for campus free speech. It’ll be the worst year on record for campus deplatformings.

In just the first three months of this year, there have been 70 such attempts. Even worse, 65 of those attempts succeeded — the highest success rate we’ve ever recorded in any year with 10 or more attempts.

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FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database tracks efforts to stop public expression on college campuses — disinviting speakers, canceling performances or film screenings, removing art, or disrupting events while they are happening. In just the first three months of this year, there have been 70 such attempts. Even worse, 65 of those attempts succeeded — the highest success rate we’ve ever recorded in any year with 10 or more attempts.

Universities’ responses to deplatforming attempts reveal whether their stated commitments to free inquiry and open debate mean anything in practice. Each successful cancellation teaches students, faculty, and organizers the same lesson: controversial expression is a liability, and institutions tend to care more about ducking trouble than standing on principle.

This chills future expression, and recent controversies show how broad that impulse has become.

This week, the University of Southern California scrapped a gubernatorial debate after excluded candidates complained about the race of those invited — they were all white. This shut down what should’ve been one of the clearest examples of a university serving as a forum for democratic exchange. Universities often claim to prepare students for civic participation. Canceling a debate involving major political figures because the controversy “created a significant distraction from the issues that matter to voters,” sends the opposite message. Namely, that even core political discourse can be treated as too difficult or too risky to host.

At New York University, the administration reportedly told student organizers that they could not invite certain music performers to a concert because the performers were affiliated with the No Music for Genocide boycott of Israel. That decision illustrates an especially troubling dynamic: universities are not only reacting to speech after the fact, but increasingly preempting it.

When administrators reserve the authority to decide which artists are too controversial to be invited in the first place, student autonomy shrinks and institutional gatekeeping expands. The result is a campus culture in which permission for expression becomes contingent on administrative comfort.

Other incidents this year further demonstrate this pattern.

• The University of North Texas removed an art exhibit after an anonymous tip alleged the show included artwork denouncing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. UNT also just revoked approval for a drag show after the university system lifted its systemwide pause on drag performances last August.

• The Catholic University of America rejected requests from the campus chapter of Students Supporting Israel to host Randy Fine and Dany Turza at two separate events because the discussions would not feature a “balanced presentation” of views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

• And, the University of Southern Maine terminated its agreement to host a one-day conference, “The Consequence of Palestine,” because one of the scheduled speakers (Francesca Albanese, the U.N. Human Rights Council’s special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967) has been sanctioned by the U.S. government and appears on the U.S. Department of the Treasury’s office of foreign assets control’s specially designated nationals and blocked persons list. Administrators said that hosting the event with a “sanctioned scholar” would violate federal law. Albanese was scheduled to appear remotely and organizers and free-speech attorneys argue that including Albanese as a remote, uncompensated speaker in a virtual event was not prohibited and required no authorization.

These cases differ in subject matter, politics, and format. But that is exactly the point. Deplatforming is not confined to one ideology or one type of event. It can target political debate, artistic expression, student entertainment, invited lectures, or academic programming. The common thread is a willingness to suppress expression rather than answer it, criticize it, or contextualize it.

Defenders of these cancellations often frame them as prudent, values-based, or necessary for campus harmony. Sometimes they invoke safety, reputational concerns, institutional mission, or community standards. But too often those rationales are vague, inconsistently applied, or selectively enforced. Universities rarely cancel events because they are truly incapable of supporting peaceful disagreement. More often, they cancel because controversy itself is treated as unacceptable.

That is a profound mistake. The university is one of the few institutions explicitly designed to accommodate disagreement. Students should encounter ideas, performances, and speakers they dislike, distrust, or find offensive. They should also learn how to respond: through protest, questioning, criticism, counterprogramming, and debate. Those are the habits of a free society. Deplatforming replaces those habits with passivity and permission-seeking.

That is what makes the 93% success rate so alarming. Failed deplatforming attempts can still cause harm, but they at least show that institutional safeguards are holding. A successful attempt signals that those safeguards are eroding. If nearly all deplatforming efforts are now succeeding, then the problem is not simply that controversial events are being challenged. The problem is that universities appear increasingly willing to fold under pressure.

These actions can have long-term consequences. Student organizers may stop proposing ambitious or provocative events because they fear resistance. Faculty may avoid controversial programming because administrative support feels uncertain. Artists and speakers may decline invitations if they believe universities cannot or will not stand by them. Over time, the chilling effect becomes more powerful than any one deplatforming. The lesson spreads quietly: do less, invite less, say less.

Seventy attempts in three months is troubling on its own. Sixty-five successful cancellations is worse. A 93% success rate suggests a campus speech environment in which those seeking to silence expression are winning.

This should concern anyone who believes higher education exists to test ideas rather than shelter institutions from them. If universities want to remain credible as places of inquiry, they must do more than praise free expression in mission statements. They must defend it even when it is inconvenient, contested, and costly.

A new survey of University of Wisconsin-Madison faculty, released this month by the school’s Tommy G. Thompson Center on Public Leadership, offers a clear look at how ideological imbalance shapes the campus climate at a flagship public university. Read alongside FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey, it tells a familiar story — just with sharper numbers.

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Among tenured and tenure-track faculty at UW-Madison, 70% identify as liberal, 21% as moderate, and just 9% as conservative — a ratio of almost 8-to-1. That’s not an outlier, but is part of a broader trend. Nationally, another recent analysis shows 74% of faculty identified as liberal and only 11% as conservative. By these numbers, compared to the general public, liberals are overrepresented in academia by 186% while conservatives are underrepresented by 70%.

This gap also may be widening as junior faculty at UW Madison skew more liberal than senior faculty, suggesting that as older professors retire, ideological homogeneity will deepen.

Ideology in hiring

The Thompson Center survey also tested for possible downstream effects of this ideological imbalance. Faculty respondents were randomly assigned to evaluate hypothetical job candidates expressing liberal or conservative views. The result: candidates with conservative views were consistently less likely to be supported for hiring, with gaps ranging from 11 to 38 percentage points depending on the topic. The topic of immigration produced the largest disparity.

Because the statements were randomly assigned, these results don’t reflect response bias or a general aversion to candidates expressing political opinions. Rather, the results reflect bias against academics with conservative viewpoints, plain and simple.

These findings mirror a growing body of independent studies and national surveys. FIRE’s 2024 survey also shows the same pattern. Among UW-Madison faculty in FIRE’s survey, only 44% said knowing an applicant was conservative would never count against them, compared to 69% who said the same about a liberal applicant. And while 76% said a liberal individual would be a good departmental “fit,” only 17% said the same about a conservative. These numbers were similar to faculty overall in FIRE’s survey. Importantly, in academic hiring, “poor fit” often translates into “not hired.”

Chilling effects

The imbalance doesn’t just shape hiring either. It also shapes who feels comfortable speaking.

At UW-Madison, only 23% of conservative faculty say they’re highly comfortable discussing controversial topics with colleagues, compared to 55% of liberals. The classroom also shows a similar divide. Similarly, FIRE’s 2024 national survey shows that nearly half of conservative faculty report self-censoring due to fear of backlash, compared to one in five liberals.

And when conservative faculty do speak up, they’re more likely to pay for it. Among UW-Madison faculty who expressed views on controversial topics in class, 20% of conservatives reported institutional consequences, compared to just 1% of liberals. On social media, the gap is 30% to 8%.

This is despite the fact that liberal faculty are more likely to say they express controversial views in the first place. In other words, one group speaks more freely and faces fewer consequences while the other speaks less and gets punished more when it does.

The bigger picture

None of this is happening in a vacuum, and this pattern extends beyond UW-Madison. FIRE’s 2024 survey of faculty finds that 55% of conservative faculty reported at least occasionally hiding their political beliefs from colleagues to protect their jobs, compared to 17% of liberals. And among the broader faculty population, the share of faculty self-censoring in their writing is nearly four times the rate recorded among social scientists at the end of the McCarthy era.

Taken together, the data point to a system where ideological imbalance doesn’t just describe who’s on campus but who gets hired, who speaks up, and who gets punished when they do.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

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At these hyper-liberal schools, the topic is more than twice as difficult for liberals to discuss as any other issue.

Remember, the hyper-liberal schools discussed here are only a small group of schools, and don’t include any Ivies or other large schools, such as Columbia University. At those other schools, there are of course many examples of administrations going after students for protected pro-Palestinian speech.

While this phenomenon got worse after Oct. 7, the issue has been uniquely thorny for these students as far back as our data goes. In addition, disagreements among liberals or fear of social stigma may make the issue harder to discuss in general, but they do not explain why it is especially difficult at very liberal schools.

Students who don’t trust their administrations are significantly more likely to find it difficult to discuss the conflict. Liberal students at hyper-liberal schools are less trusting of their administration and more worried about discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though they’re seemingly less likely to face punishment for pro-Palestinian protests there.

One generally assumes people are more comfortable sharing their views when surrounded by others who think the same way. So then why are liberal students at very liberal schools scared to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict?

In FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings survey, we ask students whether they’re comfortable discussing a variety of political issues.1 Which issues do they find difficult to discuss? Let’s begin by looking at students at moderate schools.2 In the scatterplot below, issues that conservatives find hard to discuss are closer to the top (measured on the vertical axis) while issues that liberals find hard to discuss are more to the right (measured on the horizontal axis):

This is about what I’d expect. The points fall along a diagonal line with a slope of roughly one, meaning conservatives and liberals roughly agree on which topics are difficult to discuss. Abortion and transgender rights are the thorniest. For women, the presidential election is also very difficult. China, crime, and SCOTUS are the easiest.

The offset from the center diagonal is interesting. At schools with close to perfectly moderate student bodies, liberal students still report greater difficulty discussing most topics. Given that most schools don’t exactly have administrations or environments that are disproportionately hostile to liberal students, it seems most plausible that this reflects a psychological difference between liberals and conservatives, perhaps greater neuroticism3 or anxiousness, a greater tendency to view one’s environment as oppressive, or something else. The fact that this gap is larger in women than men supports the notion that we’re seeing a psychological effect. That said, it’s not a massive effect.

But what about students at extremely liberal schools?

That’s a result.

For the most part, liberals at liberal schools are comfortable talking about every issue. We might’ve expected a diagonal with a larger offset or steeper slope, but instead we see a vertical blob. It’s not just that liberals have an easier time talking about most issues: the difficulty for the two sides becomes decoupled. Conservatives still have a difficult time talking about the normally difficult issues — abortion, transgender rights, and the 2024 Presidential Election — and an easy time with the normally easy ones — the Supreme Court, China, climate change — but liberals have an easy time with every issue. But these dynamics disappear for liberals at very liberal schools — echo chambers can seemingly make people more comfortable talking. To the small extent that some issues are tougher for liberals, it’s things like economic inequality, which aren’t normally thorny.

Until we get to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. At moderate schools, it’s a normal political issue. For liberal students at liberal schools, it’s the difficult issue, with more than twice as many students finding it difficult to talk about than any other issue, even though they are surrounded by more like-minded peers than any other students.

So what’s going on here? Why is this issue so thorny? To understand why this happens, we look at four possibilities: the impact of Oct. 7, ideological divisions among liberals, fear of social stigma, and fear of administrative punishment.

October 7

First, the obvious: Presumably, this is a response to Oct. 7, the subsequent war, and the encampments. We can check that by making the scatterplot with (early) 2023 data:

Erm, what?

Oct. 7 and its aftermath coincided with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict becoming more difficult to discuss, but it’s been a uniquely difficult issue for liberal students at liberal schools for longer than that — in fact, since at least 2020, the first year we have data on this.

What’s so special about this particular issue?

Divisions among liberals

Well, there’s an unusual amount of disagreement amongst liberals of various shades. And the scatterplots binned together students who were anywhere from slightly to very liberal. At moderate schools, liberals tend to be more moderate. But at hyper-liberal schools, you tend to have more left-wing extremists. Maybe very pro-Palestinian students are uncomfortable discussing the conflict more often, and the difference between liberal students at various schools is just a question of how far to the left they are. To check this, let’s bin individuals by ideology (in addition to school leaning):

That’s part of the explanation. Very liberal students do have a tougher time discussing the conflict than moderately liberal students. But students at more liberal schools also have a harder time discussing it, regardless of ideology. A very liberal student at a far-left school is nearly 20 percentage points more likely to have difficulty than a very liberal student at a moderate school. For moderately liberal students, the gap is even larger. More liberal schools genuinely seem to be tougher places to discuss this issue.

But while I do suspect that liberal infighting contributes to the issue being difficult to discuss in general, I don’t think it’s the primary reason that it’s especially difficult at very liberal schools. At moderate schools, there are roughly even numbers of very and slightly liberal students. At hyper-liberal schools, very liberal students outnumber slightly liberal ones by roughly 6 to 1. While our ideology measurements are an imperfect proxy for opinion on this issue, I’d bet against numbers like that causing more liberal infighting.

Fear of social stigma

Okay, there’s research suggesting that college students often fear social sanction for speaking their minds. Even if hyper-liberal schools, which are all small liberal arts schools and half of which are all-women, have less disagreement of opinion, maybe what disagreement exists is met with more social stigma there. I don’t have any data that proves this isn’t a factor, and I suspect this has some effect, particularly on creating a baseline difficulty across a range of schools and contentious political issues.

But it’s probably not the whole story, or anywhere close to it. It can’t explain why conservative women report having an easier time discussing abortion or the 2024 presidential election at hyper-liberal schools than they do at moderate schools. It can’t explain why the presumably-apathetic students who haven’t thought much about their ideology have an easier time discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And it can’t explain a relationship between administrative distrust and difficulty, which we’ll discuss momentarily. There seems to be a larger factor here.

Fear of administrative punishment

Another obvious possibility is that fear of administrative ire is silencing students. After all, there were more than a couple heavy-handed administrative crackdowns in response to the encampments. We have data on a question similar to this: In our survey, we ask how clear it is that an administration protects free speech on campus. Are students who distrust their administrations more likely to be uncomfortable discussing such a charged issue?

That’s very information-rich, but also busy. Here’s a simpler plot showing the same core trend:

Yes, emphatically. At the most liberal schools, students who think it’s not at all clear that their administration protects free speech on campus are 30 percentage points more likely to find the conflict difficult to discuss than those who think it’s extremely clear. (Looking just at liberal students at hyper-liberal schools, we see a similar result.) On the plot above, notice how the higher rows (where students trust the administration less) are darker (more difficulty): there’s a very strong relationship between distrust of one’s administration and difficulty discussing the conflict, especially at liberal schools. While we can’t prove that it’s causal, that result suggests that fear of the administration is a significant force in deterring discussion on this issue.

So what do students at hyper-liberal schools say about the topic? We ask students to share a moment where they felt they could not express their opinions on campus. When they feel they’re unable to talk about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, do they talk about the administration?

“Whenever we discuss the ongoing conflict in Gaza, it’s under the assumption that if we go against administration, we are kicked out of the college.” (Barnard College)

“Administration just expelled two students over speaking out about the Israel-Palestine conflict.” (Seemingly for disrupting an Israeli history class, which, regardless of whether it justifies expulsion, isn’t protected speech.) (Barnard College)

“Not being able to say from the river to the sea without risk of being honor coded” (Wellesley College)

“The college has been very pro-Israel, this has led to a lot of censorship away from pro-Palestinian conversations” (Mount Holyoke College)

“The admin here is pretty pro-Israel so sometimes I’m worried about expressing my pro-Palestine opinions” (Smith College)

These should be treated as an illustration, not a representative sample or strong evidence: there are students who give other reasons for silence on the conflict, including fear of social repercussions, or no reason at all. That said, sentiments like the ones above are quite common.

So is this fear actually justified? Are administrations actually cracking down on liberal students or pro-Palestinian protestors especially aggressively at hyper-liberal schools? We don’t have data on that exact question in its entirety, but we do have data on the responses to the encampments, which seems like a reasonable proxy. Were they shut down more often at very liberal schools?

No. Encampments were more common at more liberal schools, but, when they happened, they were less likely to result in arrests or other police action. (This is the size of the red/yellow bar as a fraction of the whole bar.) Administrations at more liberal schools were less likely to punish students for encampments.

But what about punishment for speech generally? We also ask students whether they’ve been punished or threatened with punishment for expression on campus:

Generally, the more liberal the school, the less likely the students were to be disciplined or threatened for expression. Yes, college administrators are famously unkind towards student speech, but the administrations at hyper-liberal schools seem more lenient towards pro-Palestinian protestors than their counterparts at other schools. Liberal students at hyper-liberal schools are less trusting of their administration and more worried about discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, even though they’re seemingly less likely to face punishment for pro-Palestinian protests there. While I certainly agree with their general distrust of college administrations, in this specific regard, it looks like this might be a case of many pro-Palestinian students at hyper-liberal schools being scared of their own shadows or having deeply distorted views of what free speech means. We should of course be appropriately cautious when reading into the data something very related to what it says, but that seems the most reasonable conclusion from the available evidence.

Conclusion

I see two useful warnings here. The first is the danger of scaring yourself into silence with an invented or exaggerated fear. Yes, the administrative onslaught against student expression is often real, fierce, and brutal. Yes, even when not officially punished, speaking your mind can have social repercussions. But, if you’re lucky enough to be in neither of those situations (or neither particularly severely), it’s easy to overestimate the danger you actually face. If you’re an ardently pro-Palestinian student at an overwhelmingly liberal school, you probably shouldn’t be more afraid to talk about the conflict than someone who holds the same opinion at a school with a slightly liberal student body and an administration possibly deeply hostile to your cause.

The second is more obvious: the general state of discourse on campuses is bad. At moderate schools, over half of students find it difficult to discuss many important issues. At very liberal schools, those with minority viewpoints face a similar situation. Part of the problem here is censorship, but not all of it. If we want to make progress on issues vital to our nation, we need to be willing to discuss them honestly even when doing so is difficult, uncomfortable, or worse.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots can be found here.

Since 2018, More in Common, a nonprofit focused on reducing political polarization, has tried to explain American politics less by demographics and more by the core values that shape how people see the country. That approach matters because it shifts the conversation from who people are to why they think as they do, and it often reveals divisions hiding in plain sight.

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Last month, MiC released Beyond MAGA: A Profile of the Trump Coalition, a study based on more than 18,000 interviews with Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024. The headline finding is simple but consequential: Trump voters are not one bloc. They fall into four distinct types, and their views diverge sharply on two issues now at the center of American cultural conflict: freedom of speech and whether presidents should use federal funding to pressure colleges and universities over DEI and CRT-related content.

Here are the four types of Trump voters:

• MAGA Hardliners are mostly evangelical Trump supporters who believe a “deep state” runs politics and that “the Left” hates America. About 25% hold college degrees.

• Anti-woke Conservatives say American identity is fading and “woke” ideology has ruined American education, news, and entertainment. They are the least religious group (31% atheist, agnostic, or unaffiliated) and about 40% hold college degrees.

• Mainline Republicans are the most optimistic about the American dream and least likely to say the country is in decline. About 25% have some college experience but no degree, and 38% hold only a high school diploma.

• Reluctant Right voted for Trump because he seemed “less bad” than Kamala Harris. They are the least likely to identify as Republican, the least hopeful about the next four years, and the most likely to say they vote across party lines.

Those distinctions aren’t just academic. They predict meaningful differences in how Trump voters weigh rights, institutions, and presidential power.

Consider freedom of speech. When asked whether it is an “unconditional basic right that the government should never be able to take away,” support among MAGA Hardliners and Anti-woke Conservatives is notably mixed: roughly half in each group say speech is unconditional, while the other half view it as conditional when expression poses a “threat of violence.” Mainline Republicans look similar, though slightly more supportive of an unconditional right (56%). The outlier is the Reluctant Right: roughly three-quarters say freedom of speech is unconditional and should not be taken away by the government.

If you’ve grown accustomed to assuming that the political right is uniformly absolutist on speech, this complicates that picture. The strongest free-speech instincts in the Trump coalition may be concentrated among voters who are also least committed to the Republican identity and least enthusiastic about the coming years.

The split is even clearer on federal funding for higher education and DEI/CRT-related issues. Nearly all MAGA Hardliners and Anti-woke Conservatives (96% in each group) agree that “younger Americans are worse off because of ideas pushed by the Left.” And at least nine in 10 (93% and 90%) say President Trump should punish public universities that promote ideas like DEI or CRT by withholding federal funding.

By contrast, Mainline Republicans are closer to a 50–50 coalition on these questions: 54% say younger Americans are worse off because of ideas pushed by the Left, and 53% support withholding funds to punish universities. The Reluctant Right matches Mainline Republicans on the first claim (55%), but breaks sharply on presidential intervention: 66% say it’s not the president’s role to determine what is taught in universities and that federal funding should continue.

Taken together, these findings point to a political reality that institutions, especially higher education, often miss: the internal debate among Trump voters is not only about ideology, but about authority. Even many voters who feel alienated by progressive (woke) cultural influence are uneasy about using the presidency to police what universities teach.

That nuance matters for anyone trying to lower the temperature. If universities respond as if all Trump voters want punitive crackdowns, they risk hardening opposition and confirming the most cynical narratives. And if policymakers assume a single “MAGA mandate” for sweeping funding threats, they may overread the coalition’s unity and underestimate the backlash from within it.

MiC’s report doesn’t argue that campus conflicts are imaginary; it shows they are politically complicated. The Trump coalition contains voters who want aggressive retaliation, voters who want cultural change without federal coercion, and voters who still hold a surprisingly robust commitment to unconditional free speech. Treating them as one bloc guarantees miscommunication and miscalculation. If we want fewer zero-sum showdowns, the first step is accuracy: recognizing that the next fight over speech and universities won’t only run left versus right. It will run through the right as well, and the outcome will depend on which faction leaders choose to represent.

Americans’ confidence in U.S. colleges and universities remains near historic lows. Although some have suggested that public opinion about higher education may be stabilizing or rising, our latest survey finds little evidence of meaningful recovery.

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In our latest poll, conducted in partnership with NORC at the University of Chicago, less than a third of Americans say they have “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in U.S. colleges and universities. That’s statistically indistinguishable from 2024 and 2025 levels. At the same time, almost the same proportion report having “very little” or no confidence at all.

These results stand in stark contrast to public opinion a decade ago. In 2015, 57% of Americans told Gallup they had a great deal, or quite a lot, of confidence in higher education, while just 10% expressed very little confidence. By 2018, these figures were starting to slip, with high confidence decreasing and low confidence increasing. Since then, the decline has accelerated. Compared to 2015, the share of Americans expressing high confidence has fallen by 26 percentage points, while the share expressing very little confidence has nearly tripled.

Confidence in higher education also differs sharply according to one’s politics, with long-term drops driven primarily by Republicans and, to a lesser extent, Independents. In 2015, over half of Republicans expressed high confidence in higher education. Today, only 15% say the same. That’s a decline of 41 percentage points. Independents have also lost confidence. While nearly half expressed high confidence in 2015, only 16% did in 2025, before rebounding.

Democrats remain more confident than other groups, but even Democratic confidence has eroded. In 2015, more than two-thirds expressed high confidence. In 2026, only 45% do, the lowest level recorded for Democrats across these data. The overall result is not merely polarization, though that does explain part of what’s happening here. But also, what we’re seeing is a collapse of confidence in higher education across all partisan political groups.

On their own, these confidence trends reflect an untenable dynamic for higher education leaders. But viewed alongside other indicators, they suggest deeper structural problems. Some are starting to voice concerns about an impending enrollment cliff facing higher education, but data compiled by researchers such as Kevin Wallsten suggest that demographic change is only part of the story. Just as important are signs that many high schoolers — most notably males and Republicans — are less interested in graduating from college, that ideological diversity among professors and administrators is low and still declining, and that highly visible speech controversies continue to pile up.

If colleges and universities want to remain socially relevant and financially stable, they’re going to have to confront the reality that large segments of the public increasingly see them as exclusionary rather than open.

This has consequences beyond institutional reputation. For young adults, college degrees remain one of the most reliable pathways to future success, even as growing numbers question whether it is worth pursuing. Allowing confidence to stagnate or erode further risks not only institutional stability, but also the broad-based access to opportunity that higher education has long promised. We need our colleges and universities. But confidence cannot be restored unless colleges and universities are willing to earn it.

It’s no secret that most colleges lean significantly liberal, but it’s easy to forget just how liberal. Describing many colleges as “liberal” doesn’t really do it justice when over 80% of colleges are more liberal than California. It’s therefore become a common refrain that such hyper-liberal colleges make students intolerant of conservatives and unwilling to engage them in productive conversation. But is that true?

We already know students on the extremes of both ends of the political spectrum tend to be less tolerant than moderates, suggesting that politically extreme schools would be less tolerant than moderate ones. We can check this by plotting minimum tolerance, or the student body’s overall willingness to let disfavored speakers speak, against the school’s ideology:

Being a conservative at Smith College must be fun.

As expected, more extreme schools (measured by the average student ideology) tend to be less tolerant. This suggests hyper-liberal schools (since hyper-conservative schools don’t really exist) are rough environments for dissenters. That’s hardly shocking. But the more interesting question is, do hyper-liberal schools make students less tolerant? Are liberal students at liberal schools less tolerant than liberals at moderate schools? The first question is tough to confidently answer from our data, but the answer to the second question is basically no. We can see this when separating students by ideology, which lets us ignore the of-course-it-happens-at-liberal-schools effect seen above. Let’s look at tolerance for right- and left-wing speakers separately:

For the most part, within each ideological camp, right-wing tolerance remains similar regardless of the leaning of the school. But left-wing tolerance is a different story:

Wait, what?

Both liberal and conservative students at liberal schools are more tolerant of left-wing speakers (making those schools rank as more tolerant overall). The effect is so massive that conservative students at the most liberal schools are even more tolerant of left-wing speakers than liberal students at the most conservative schools. Why on earth is this happening?

One explanation might be the contact hypothesis, famously articulated by the psychologist Gordon Allport, which is the idea that bringing people into contact reduces prejudice. According to this idea, conservatives, surrounded by liberals, would become more tolerant of liberals. But the effect doesn’t seem to work in reverse because tolerance for conservative speakers isn’t higher at the few conservative schools that exist. It’s hard to be confident without data from deep-red schools, but liberal schools do seem to have a unique effect.

What else could cause this? Well, more liberal colleges are more likely to have liberal arts majors, which tend to have higher (especially left-wing) tolerance. But that’s only part of what’s happening here. And beyond that, I don’t know yet.

This doesn’t mean that hyper-liberal colleges are tolerant or pleasant places for dissenters whose opinions cut against the grain, or that they’re bastions of good political discourse. Indeed, there’s evidence to the contrary. But something seems to be going bizarrely right there.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots are available here.

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First, compared to last year, Americans are about five percentage points more likely to say the country is headed in the wrong direction when it comes to freedom of expression. Second, the small increase in trust the public had in President Trump to protect their First Amendment rights when he took office in January 2025 has now largely evaporated.

All together, the percentage of people who say things are headed in the wrong direction is consistently high. Recently, it’s even higher. In January 2024, 69% said things were headed in the wrong direction. The number dipped to 63% in April, then fell to its lowest level right after Trump took office in January 2025, reaching 59%. But that reprieve didn’t last.

By April, around the time Mahmoud Khalil and Rumeysa Ozturk were arrested and the Trump administration launched its campaign to “reform” higher education, two-third of Americans felt free expression was headed in the wrong direction. That spiked to about three-quarters in October, during the brief removal of Jimmy Kimmel, where it remained as of last month.

Ideology clearly impacts how people answer these questions, but it doesn’t explain everything. Conservatives appear especially sensitive to changes in party control. Throughout 2024, three-quarters or more said free speech was headed in the wrong direction. This dropped to one-third in January 2025 after Trump took office, but has been rising over the past year. Very conservative Americans show an even sharper relief pattern from roughly 80% in 2024 down to roughly a quarter in early 2025.

This is what you’d expect if “wrong direction” is partly a referendum on who’s running the executive branch. But the story can’t be reduced to just that. The liberal side’s volatility over the past few years indicates something beyond simple party-in-power logic and suggests that recent events have driven their perception of the country’s expressive environment. So while the color of the president’s necktie sets a baseline, it doesn’t lock perceptions in place. Events and institutions beyond the presidency also plausibly shape how safe people feel speaking freely.

The second big trend is even cleaner: confidence in Trump to defend First Amendment rights has declined compared to January 2025, regardless of one’s political beliefs.

In January 2025, shortly after Trump returned to office, 29% of Americans said they had “no confidence at all” that he would defend their expressive rights. One year later, 47% say the same, an increase of almost 20 percentage points in just a year. In April, a whopping 84% of very liberal Americans said they had no confidence in Trump to defend their expressive rights. Now 94% of them say this. The percentage of very conservative respondents who agree rose from 4% in July 2025 to 11% now, and among conservatives, from 3% in July to 13% now.

If we put the two trendlines together, the message is hard to miss. Americans increasingly feel less free to speak, and many of them increasingly doubt that the president will protect the right that makes that possible. The brief post-inauguration thaw in January 2025 now looks less like a durable reset than a momentary hope that the temperature would drop. Instead, the year that followed supplied vivid reminders that expressive freedom isn’t just debated online or litigated in courtrooms — it can be tested by arrests, pressure campaigns, and street conflict.

The most important takeaway from the NSI data may be that free speech is becoming a significant political issue again. When Americans see government power aimed at protected expression, they update their beliefs quickly and not just along partisan lines. If this trajectory continues, the country risks settling into a new normal where large majorities assume expressive freedom is deteriorating and where trust in leaders to defend it becomes the exception rather than the rule. Reversing that won’t come from rhetoric alone. It will require visible restraint from officials, institutional guardrails that hold in moments of anger, and a public commitment to the principle that the First Amendment protects unpopular speakers precisely when it’s hardest to do so.

In our surveys assessing university student tolerance for hypothetical controversial speakers, most students have not wanted to allow most speakers on campus. You can almost hear someone saying, “These kids today are too soft. Send ‘em to boot camp!” The funny thing is, that might actually help.

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One would hope that military duty would make people more principled defenders of free speech. But it also seems plausible that strict military hierarchies could make people more willing to use authority against dissent. So which is actually true? As usual, that’s tough to confidently answer with our data, but a related question is much easier: Are military students more tolerant?

Okay, that’s hardly shocking. Military students are, on the whole, more right-biased than others, and a bit more tolerant. But what if we break down the data according to ideology?

This looks very similar to the free speech map for gender and tolerance. Given that most students aren’t military (note the plot title), this is expected. So where do military students place?

Not a silver bullet, but that’s quite a result.

Military students are only a bit more tolerant overall, but they are significantly more fair to their political opponents. Male military students have 21% less tolerance bias than their civilian counterparts. Female military students have 29% less tolerance bias. (This is controlling for ideology. If you don’t control for ideology, then military men are 16% less biased than civilians while military women are 32% less biased.)

Two things to note here. First, there are 676 men and 526 women in this dataset. That’s a small enough sample that you shouldn’t put too much trust on any particular point (particularly when split by ideology). But it is high enough that the general pattern is very probably an accurate description of reality.

And, as usual, this doesn’t prove the direction of causation. Maybe being in the military decreases bias and increases tolerance. Or maybe students who are less biased and more tolerant are disproportionately likely to join up for the military. Or both.

It’s a common refrain that everyone is biased, and people are doomed by their own perspectives to never be fair judges towards ideas they oppose. But the data here reminds us that some people are significantly fairer than others. And if military experience indeed causes a decrease in bias, perhaps a principled impartiality really is a teachable skill.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots are available here.

The assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University last year sparked a wave of anger directed at scholars for their public comments following Kirk’s death. This reaction was faster, more targeted, and more severe than the response following the murder of George Floyd in 2020.

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Relatively few professors faced significant consequences for comments about Floyd himself. On the other hand, Floyd’s death appears to have spawned a broader, more sustained sensitivity to race-related discourse. In the months and years that followed, scholars who addressed racial issues — even when not speaking directly about Floyd — faced growing public backlash, administrative investigations, and in some cases, dismissal, as seen in the case of Charles Negy, who was fired, and Gordon Klein, who was placed on administrative leave.

It’s important to note that the data on race-related sanctions in 2020 covers the entire year, whereas the data on Kirk only spans about four months. In this compressed timeline there were 92 scholar sanction attempts, 44 sanctions, and 21 terminations. Notably, all 21 scholars who were terminated for their comments about Kirk had expressed views critical of him and were targeted by right-leaning activists, media outlets, politicians, administrators, and students. For example:

• Tamar Shirinian, a professor of anthropology at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, posted on Facebook that “the world is better off without [Kirk] in it,” prompting outcry from lawmakers and media figures, and resulting in her termination.

• Darren Michael, a theatre professor at Austin Peay State University, re-shared a 2023 Newsweek headline quoting Kirk as saying that gun deaths were “unfortunately” necessary to preserve the Second Amendment, after which critics claimed the post signaled tacit approval of Kirk’s killing, Tennessee Senator Marsha Blackburn labeled it “reprehensible,” and the university fired Michael, condemning his post as “insensitive, disrespectful, and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death.”

• Lisa Greenlee, an instructor at Guilford Technical Community College, appeared to joke about Kirk’s death in a video that circulated online, prompting prominent political figures, including U.S. Representative Mark Walker and Representative Virginia Foxx, to call for her removal, after which Guilford Tech fired her.

Scholar sanctions hit a record high in 2025, with the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination being one of the primary contributors.

The long-term impact of Kirk’s assassination on campus speech — particularly for faculty — remains uncertain. A FIRE survey of 2,028 undergraduates, conducted Oct. 3–31, 2025, revealed a striking finding: while 81% of Utah Valley University (UVU) students opposed firing a hypothetical professor who said, “We are going to make America great again,” 57% of UVU opposed firing one who said, “These fascist Bible thumpers want to drag us back to the Dark Ages.”

When the survey results were broken down by political ideology, clear partisan divides emerged. Most liberal students opposed firing hypothetical professors who said, “It’s O.K. to punch a Nazi” or “These fascist Bible-thumpers want to drag us to the Dark Ages.” Similarly, most conservative students opposed terminating professors who said things like, “We are going to make America great again” or “Our colleges and universities are progressive indoctrination centers.” These differences suggest that what people consider acceptable speech often aligns with their politics rather than any consistent commitment to academic freedom.

Free speech after Floyd and Kirk: A call for consistent principles

The shift from left-leaning scrutiny over George Floyd to right-leaning backlash over Charlie Kirk reveals more than just ideological whiplash. It underscores the volatile, politicized landscape of academic speech in America. As faculty face growing pressure from all sides, the principle of intellectual freedom hangs in the balance.

If we want universities to remain spaces where difficult conversations can unfold, we must protect the right to speak — even, or indeed especially, when that speech is offensive. True academic freedom cannot depend on which side holds the cultural or political majority. In this polarized moment, recommitting to dialogue over censorial punishment may be our only path forward.

For the past two years, FIRE’s National Speech Index has tracked Americans’ views on free expression — whether the country is moving in the right or wrong direction, how secure people believe free speech to be, and how often they self-censor.

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That period has hardly been quiet. Americans have lived through a presidential transition, major political upheaval, and widespread campus protests. Our data offers a window into how public attitudes toward free speech have responded to those events.

The headline finding is consistent — and sobering. Over the past two years, Americans have generally said the country is headed in the wrong direction when it comes to people’s ability to freely express their views. But those judgments are highly sensitive to political loyalties.

Prior to the 2024 presidential election, most Democrats thought things were headed in the right direction, compared to only a minority of Republicans and Independents. After Donald Trump’s election, those views flipped. Clear majorities of Republicans now say the country is moving in the right direction, while Democrats have grown markedly pessimistic.

Perceptions of the security of free speech follow the same partisan arc. In October 2025, more Americans said the right to freedom of speech is “not at all secure” (22%) than said it is “very” or “completely” secure (15%). That represents a stark reversal from January 2025, when 23% viewed free speech as very secure and fewer than one in 10 believed it was not secure at all.

Among Democrats, nearly one in three now say freedom of speech is “not at all secure,” a sharp increase from roughly one in 12 who held that view prior to Trump’s election and inauguration. Independents show a similar, though less pronounced, shift. Republicans, by contrast, are less likely to view free speech as insecure than they did during the final months of Joe Biden’s presidency.

Yet while Americans’ perceptions of free speech rise and fall with political fortunes, other core indicators tell a different story. Self-censorship has remained remarkably stable. Across the entire two-year period, roughly one in four Americans report self-censoring at least a couple times per week.

That stability holds even across party lines. Independents consistently report higher levels of self-censorship than Democrats or Republicans, but rates for all three groups have changed little since January 2024. This suggests that self-censorship may reflect a relatively stable personal disposition rather than a reaction to political events.

Taken together, these findings paint a revealing portrait of Americans’ relationship with free expression. Beliefs about free speech appear to shift quickly with changes in political power. Actual behavior — whether people feel free enough to speak their minds — changes far less. In other words, political tides turn fast. But as for self-censorship, the chill lingers.

Data byte

• Students studying religion and philosophy have the highest average rates of political tolerance. The majors with the lowest average tolerance are preprofessional ones — fashion, marketing, and real estate sit at the very bottom.

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• Majors often mocked as “woke studies” perform better than critics might guess. Gender studies students tend to show higher tolerance than those in finance, real estate, or marketing, while students in African American studies tend to be more tolerant of both left- and right-wing speakers.

• Our data suggests that learning philosophy, political science, or math may increase political tolerance while studying business, finance, or marketing may decrease it, especially in women.

• For certain majors, the tolerance gap is larger than the gender tolerance gap. Women studying philosophy or religion have higher average tolerance than men studying a number of fields including finance, business, theater, or nursing.

Deep dive

I’ve previously discussed surprising results around tolerance for hypothetical controversial speakers, which we assess by asking whether students would allow those speakers on campus1, including the fact that men are substantially more tolerant — so much so, in fact, that men are often more tolerant of their political enemies than women are of their own allies.

These results have left me wondering what, if anything, can be done to make people more tolerant. One possible answer is education. One would hope, for instance, that studying philosophy teaches people to engage in open debate and meet ideas they disagree with using rational argument rather than censorship. But is that true?

That question isn’t easy to definitively answer using our data, but one way to approach an answer is by looking at which majors have students who are unusually tolerant. Here’s a list of all majors with at least 100 men and 100 women in our sample, along with the average rate of political tolerance for each, both controlled for gender and not:

Huh.

Some of that is expected. Philosophy indeed does well, at least relative to other majors, as do other subjects that study political issues like political science and public policy. The top three majors in terms of political tolerance are religion, philosophy, and classics (though not all of them are listed above, as some have too few students). This isn’t shocking, especially given that other results from the College Free Speech Rankings data suggests people who frequently attend religious service tend to be more tolerant.

But it is somewhat surprising to see which majors are at the bottom. One might’ve expected to see what critics might call “woke studies” such as gender studies. Instead, we see preprofessional majors such as fashion, nursing, real estate, and marketing at the bottom — all well below gender studies, which has too few men to be on the list, but a controlled average tolerance of 37.

The decision to control for gender comes from wanting to figure out which majors might make people more tolerant. It’s true that male-dominant majors are, generally speaking, more likely to be tolerant. But what we want to know is not which majors score higher in tolerance simply because they have more men, but which ones might actually instill values or ways of thinking that generate tolerance.

And after controlling for gender, we find that the gender gap is not the only story here. English, for example, ranks high on the list despite being heavily female, whereas finance ranks low despite being heavily male. That said, it’s important to remember that just because a major ranks high doesn’t necessarily mean it’s making people more tolerant. Correlation, as the old saying goes, is not necessarily causation.

Also, this is just average tolerance. A major could have 100% tolerance for left-wing views and zero tolerance for right-wing views, yet score higher than any other major on this list despite being full of incredibly intolerant students. To find out if that’s really happening, let’s look at tolerance for each side by major:

So is the low tolerance of preprofessional majors and high tolerance of some “woke studies” a bias-driven mirage, where high tolerance for left-wing speakers means that a major ranks high despite having abysmal tolerance for right-wing speakers? Not really, though many of the majors listed do well specifically because they have higher left-wing tolerance.

If you walk into an English classroom, you’ll find above-average tolerance for left-wing speakers and below-average right-wing tolerance — but that’s to be expected for a major in which most students are left-leaning. The question is, how much more tolerant of right-wing speakers are English majors than we might expect, given that most of them are left-wing women? Let’s control for ideology to find out:

Wow.

A lot of the more “tolerant” majors are disproportionately filled with people on the left. But once you control for that, they tend to be more tolerant of both sides. The preprofessional majors tend to sit at the bottom of both axes. Conversely, even some of the “woke studies” majors actually do fairly well. African American studies has above-average left- and right-wing tolerance.

That said, theater is indeed extremely intolerant of right-wing speakers, and gender studies is similar in that regard. Interestingly, women in theater have roughly average female tolerance, while men in theater have the lowest right-wing tolerance of men of any major on the chart by a large margin (~5 percentage points). In fact, men studying theater have about the same right-wing tolerance as women in theater.

Philosophy occupies a unique position, beating every other major on the chart in terms of tolerance toward both left-wing and right-wing views. Meanwhile, religion beats philosophy at right-wing tolerance and every major except philosophy when it comes to left-wing tolerance.

Do these majors make people more tolerant? Do more tolerant people choose these majors? Or is it both? To answer this, we’d ideally set up a controlled experiment, though logistics make this untenable (if you have the resources to make it happen, please reach out). But if a major makes students more tolerant, we’d expect seniors who have spent more time in that major to be unusually more tolerant than freshmen (older students tend to be more tolerant anyway). So what does the data say?

Okay, that sort of looks like philosophy has a larger gap between younger and older classes, and marketing a smaller one, but there’s too much noise to really tell. We’re talking about groups of roughly 60-70 philosophy students per grade, so go figure. Let’s toss in some more majors with large sample sizes:

It just might work.

Among men, all bins have seniors higher in both dimensions than freshmen, but the gap is smaller (compared to everyone else) for the marketing/finance/business bin, and noticeably larger for the poli sci/philosophy/math bin. Women show a similar effect, but with smaller gaps in general, and seniors in marketing/finance/business showing lower right-wing tolerance than freshmen in those subjects, suggesting a decrease during college.

This suggests (but does not prove) that learning math, philosophy, and certain other subjects causes an increase in political tolerance in both genders, especially men. And it suggests (but does not prove) that learning business, finance, marketing, etc. causes a decrease in political tolerance in both genders, especially women. (This is based upon an assumption that the gap for everyone else is a baseline tolerance increase due to college/getting older, and the additional in/decrease for subject bins is the effect learning them has. That assumption is obviously far from certain, but it being wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that these subjects aren’t in/decreasing tolerance.)

Again, it’s worth emphasizing that there’s a lot of uncertainty here, and there are other possible explanations for the tolerance change. But conversely, this method may significantly underestimate how much an excellent philosophy education increases tolerance. It ignores effects of pre-college education (though those should show up in the tolerance gap between philosophy and other majors). It’s binning high-tolerance (relative to average) majors in to assess a very-high-tolerance (relative to average) major. And it averages together the change for all math/poli sci/philosophy majors.

Still, it seems to me that an excellent philosophy education, and perhaps even just an excellent course or two, should be able to do significantly better than the mean. This one just might work.

The code, data, and codebook used to generate these plots are available here.

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Almost all these sanction attempts came from the right of the faculty member’s expression.

This accelerated a long-term trend — attempts to sanction scholars coming from the left of their expression have declined every year since 2020, while attempts from the right have exceeded those from the left every year since 2021.

As we’ve noted, government actors targeting faculty expression were the main driving force last year behind the surge in attempts to sanction scholars. This includes the removal of almost 400 books from the shelves of the Naval Academy’s Nimitz Library following directives from the Pentagon to comply with President Trump’s executive orders opposing diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Many of these books were authored, co-authored, or edited by academics, including:

• The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism (2003) by Michael J. Bailey, which sparked backlash from transgender activists for defending sexologist Ray Blanchard’s typology, which divides trans women into “homosexuals” who are attracted to men and “autogynephilics” who are aroused by the idea of having a female body.

• Getting to Diversity: What Works and What Doesn’t (2022) by Frank Dobbin and Alexandra Kalev, which summarizes decades of research on common diversity initiatives like bias-training to conclude that such efforts often fail to achieve their goals.

• The New White Nationalism in America: Its Challenge to Integration (2004) by Carol M. Swain, which argues that the best response to white nationalism is debate, not deplatforming. Swain, who retired from academia in 2017 following a cancellation campaign over her position that Islam poses a threat to America, said, “I will not miss what American universities have allowed themselves to become.”

The actions of state legislatures also chilled faculty expression in 2025.

One particularly egregious example occurred at Texas A&M University last fall. Melissa McCoul, a senior lecturer of English, was fired after a student secretly recorded part of her Literature for Children class, which included a discussion of gender identity and a slide image of a gender unicorn — a graphic used to teach children about gender identity and sexuality. In the video, the student challenged McCoul, claiming the material was “illegal” under state policy and citing Trump’s executive order on gender identity. The student then reached out to the university’s president, Mark Welsh, who defended McCoul’s inclusion of the content.

But the course was still canceled. Brian Harrison, a state representative, then posted the student’s video on X and wrote a letter to the Trump administration, calling for an investigation. Harmeet K. Dhillon, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, called the incident “deeply concerning” and said her division would “look into this.” Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said McCoul acted “contrary to Texas law.”

McCoul was fired and Mark Zoran, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as Emily Johansen, the head of the English department, were demoted. Harrison and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick then demanded Welsh’s termination too. A week later, Welsh resigned. Mission accomplished. But unfortunately, these actions have ripple effects that do not end when the cancellation efforts cease.

What is needed most is courage. Courage from faculty, from students, but especially from administrators. With governors, state legislatures, members of Congress, and even the White House moving aggressively to police campus expression, college and university administrators have an opportunity to reclaim their role as stewards of free inquiry by recommitting to academic freedom in a way that allows expression even when it’s unpopular or offensive.

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The 273 attempts to sanction student speech in 2025 breaks the previous record of 252 set in 2020, and that was a year marked by George Floyd protests, a presidential election, and a global pandemic. Yet 2025 set a new high, culminating in the assassination of conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

What “chilling effect” really means

We use the term “chilling effect” a lot in First Amendment work to describe when people self-censor because they fear punishment or backlash. It doesn’t require anyone to be punished directly. On college campuses, the mere threat of investigation or discipline is enough, as that can discourage students from speaking freely and silence entire conversations.

But 2025 brought something colder. Students were retaliated against for their unflattering journalism, investigated for writing op-eds, ordered to rewrite club charters and change the wording on their flyers. They were expelled for controversial social media posts, denied recognition for not aligning with school values, and had their events canceled. In one case, a student was even censored from presenting research at a conference about censorship (yes, really).

What’s causing the chill?

If 2025 stood out for anything, it was the surge in attempts by government officials to influence how universities respond to student speech — particularly after Kirk’s assassination. Some recent examples include:

• Indiana’s attorney general urged constituents to pressure Indiana University to terminate a student from their campus job after they posted, “The world just got a little better today” in response to Kirk’s murder.

• Rep. Derrick Van Orden announced on X that he introduced legislation to strip federal funding from Oberlin College unless the university expelled a student over their social media activity, which included posting a video in which she said, “I don’t feel bad” about the shooting and “We need to bring back political assassinations.”

• Texas Representatives demanded that the University of Texas at Austin investigate and ban a student group and expel its members from the university after the group posted images of an anti-Trump rally to Instagram — including one showing a student holding a piñata of Donald Trump with its head split open.

We also saw state and federal executive orders used as justification to impose system-wide bans on student-organized drag shows (Texas A&M, University of North Texas, and University of Texas system-wide bans/pauses resulted in 30 entries between the three of them alone), cancel student film festivals, and outright disband numerous student groups.

In all these cases, students were targeted or punished not because their speech was unlawful — but because it caused controversy.

As we enter 2026, FIRE urges colleges and universities to make a simple New Year’s resolution — protect the rights of your students rather than the comfort of your administrators.

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After Kirk’s assassination, student opposition to violent or obstructive protest tactics increased overall, but not evenly across ideological groups. Moderate and conservative students became significantly more likely to say protest methods like shouting down speakers, blocking entry to events, or using violence are “never acceptable.” Among liberal students, on the other hand, these shifts were much smaller or absent.

Among moderates, opposition to shoutdowns rose from 58% to 65%, while opposition to blocking entry rose from 73% to 76%. For conservatives, the increase was even sharper. Opposition to blocking entry went from 68% to 83%, while opposition to violence jumped from 73% to 98%. In contrast, among liberals, opposition to shoutdowns rose just one point from 35% to 36%, and opposition to blocking entry remained flat at 63%. Only their rejection of violence showed a notable increase, from 81% to 90%.

This suggests that the Kirk assassination may have pushed moderates and conservatives to double-down on non-violence, while liberal students barely shifted.

The trends in tolerance for controversial speakers among Utah Valley students, however, are concerning. Views on who deserves a platform to speak on campus remain deeply polarized, and in some areas, the ideological gap is widening.

Take the speaker who previously said “abortion should be completely illegal.” Support for allowing this speaker on Utah Valley’s campus rose from 68% to 89% among conservative students, while declining from 34% to 25% among liberal students. Similarly, liberal students’ support for allowing a speaker who previously said that “transgender people have a mental disorder” fell from an already low 17% to just 6%, while conservative support ticked up from 52% to 62%.

Among moderate students, the post-Kirk assassination data shows significant increases in support for nearly every type of speaker, suggesting that students in the political middle at Utah Valley University may be leaning toward broader viewpoint tolerance, even as those more at the poles of the ideological spectrum move further apart.

But what is most striking is how liberal UVU students have become less tolerant of controversial left-leaning speakers as well. Support for allowing a speaker who previously said that “children should be able to transition without parental consent” on campus dropped from 57% to 42%. Support for allowing speakers who previously said that “the Catholic Church is a pedophilic institution” or one that said “the police are just as racist as the Ku Klux Klan” also declined significantly.

These findings paint a complicated picture. On the one hand, the near-universal rejection of violence is a hopeful sign. Conservative and moderate students at UVU also became more opposed to students blocking other students from entering an event and shouting down speakers.

On the other hand, liberal students at UVU did not shift their views on blocking entry and shouting down speakers. Furthermore, the decline in support among them for even allowing ideologically sympathetic speakers on campus, and the continuing low tolerance for opposing viewpoints, point to an increasingly polarized discourse. The risk is a chilling effect on dialogue. Not just from fear of violence, but from a growing reluctance to engage in controversial conversations or platform certain ideas.

As institutions of higher learning continue to grapple with free speech, inclusion, and the boundaries of protest, this data reminds us of both the progress and the perils. The moral clarity against violence is encouraging. But if ideological litmus tests continue to determine who gets to speak, campuses may find themselves ill-equipped to fulfill their role as forums for genuine intellectual exchange.

We’ve already seen that when we ask students whether they’d allow controversial speakers on campus, men are far more tolerant. In fact, men are often more tolerant of speakers from the opposite side of the political spectrum than women are of their own side. That’s pretty wild. So the natural question is, what else drives tolerance? Even better, is any of it something we could actually influence?

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One candidate is political engagement. FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings ask students whether they’re registered to vote — so we can check whether that lines up with tolerance. And the answer is…strangely, yes. But not how anyone might think. For men, being registered to vote is associated with higher tolerance. For women, it’s associated with lower tolerance.

That brings us back to the map from the earlier post. This is that same map — just rotated and reversed so the pattern is easier to see. As before, there’s a large tolerance gap between men and women:

To show differences between men and women who are registered to vote and those who aren’t, we’ll use something called a vector difference plot. Think of it as drawing arrows that represent how people move on the free-speech map when we go from looking at those unregistered to vote to those that are registered. The arrows all start from the center so you can compare their directions and lengths directly. In short, these arrows capture the impact of being registered on men’s and women’s positions in the free-speech landscape. They aren’t showing how tolerant men and women are, just the difference in tolerance between registered and unregistered men and women:

Wow. Men who are registered to vote are, on average, more tolerant of both sides than those who aren’t. Women who are registered to vote are, on average, less tolerant than those who aren’t — namely less tolerant against the right.

For men, the boost in tolerance mostly comes from one place: registered men are a lot more likely to be “perfectly tolerant” — the folks who say they’d allow every speaker that we ask about, full stop. Those men registered to vote seem more likely believe in the principle of free speech for all. That relationship is inverted for women. Instead, being a registered female voter is related to being totally intolerant of the right specifically. Men see a bump in that zone too, but it’s much smaller — and still overshadowed by the much larger increase in men who are fully tolerant across the board.

Put together, this means that being registered to vote correlates with the free speech ideal for men and correlates with politically biased intolerance for women. We can’t make any causal conclusions here: it could be that political involvement changes tolerance differently across gender, or it could mean that differences in existing tolerance levels influence whether men and women register to vote.

If our goal is to grow support for free speech, more research is needed to better understand what correlates with and what causes tolerance. Would training in free speech, philosophy, or rational debate be of any help? What about stigmatizing being unwilling to engage in rational debate (and change your mind if the evidence demands)?

The problem may look intimidating, but there’s nothing here that says it can’t be fixed. If we want to correct our failures through open debate, we’ve got to understand the problem — and then get to work on fixing it.

Correction: A previous version of this post contained lines that unintentionally implied a causal relationship that the data does not support.

Click here to see previous National Speech Index results

In the latest iteration of the NSI, Americans shared with us how much of a problem they perceive political violence to be among progressives and among conservatives. In an almost near perfect demonstration of how polarized Americans are, liberals perceive violence to be a greater problem among conservatives, and conservatives, in a mirror image, perceive it to be a problem among progressives. And moderates, being moderates, perceived political violence to be equally problematic across the board.

What makes this pattern so striking is its near-perfect symmetry. Both sides are making the same kind and magnitude of error, just in opposite directions. Also striking are the responses from political moderates who place roughly equal blame on both sides and view political violence as a problem across the spectrum, rather than a problem concentrated on any one side. The pattern is so stark that it almost makes it seem like the figure plotting the means is fake!

But it is not fake. And it is concerning.

When almost everyone on a “team” truly believes their opponents are the ones with violent tendencies, mistrust becomes self-sustaining and dialogue becomes increasingly difficult. These misperceptions breed fear, cynicism, and division, which amounts to pouring gasoline on the fire of political polarization that is already burning.

Americans are correct that political violence is a problem, but it’s one that everyone should be grappling to address regardless of partisan loyalties. Because while explicit support for political violence is low (2% or less, depending on the form), neither side is actually more supportive than the other.

Now, none of this means both sides are always identical, that every claim of bias is wrong, or that political violence doesn’t exist. Real differences in beliefs and behavior do manifest. But the picture each side holds of the other is often distorted, and distortions keep division alive even when the facts differ.

As the parable goes, each side must confront the log in its own eye before condemning the speck of dust in the other’s. Both should acknowledge and address their own serious failings with political violence before they can see clearly enough to address it in others. If both sides keep pointing fingers, the problem may instead continue to grow worse.

Tune in tomorrow for many more NSI findings when this quarter’s full results are released.