The canary in the coal mine for campus illiberalism came in 2015, when Nicholas and Erika Christakis were forced out of their administrative positions at Yale after the latter wrote an email warning Yale that micromanaging students’ Halloween costumes would inappropriately impinge on free expression. Censorious student activists argued this violated Christakis’s obligation to cultivate a “safe space,” taking to the quad to demand her resignation. Despite some mealy-mouthed talk of scholarly freedom by Yale’s bureaucrats, the Christakises ultimately resigned.
It’s fitting that one of the early free-speech flashpoints during this era of campus illiberalism involved students decrying a college official’s defense of free expression. Today, what started as the early signs of woke demands for “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” has metastasized into a cancer that is eroding support for robust academic and political discourse on both the left and the right.
New findings this week from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s (FIRE) 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, a survey of 68,000 students across 257 universities, finds that censoriousness has increasing become something of a unifier for an otherwise fractured generation. More than 70 percent of students say it’s at least occasionally acceptable to shout down a campus speaker, including 83 percent of very liberal students and 59 percent of very conservative students. That figure has steadily crept up over the past four years. Far worse, a third of students now say using violence to stop someone from speaking on campus is somewhere between “rarely” and “always” acceptable, up sharply from a decade ago.
For the first time ever in FIRE’s survey, a majority of students opposed allowing any of the six hypothetical controversial speakers to speak on campus — rejecting speakers from the left and right alike. Just 26 percent of students, including 12 percent of very liberal, 15 percent of somewhat liberal, and 23 percent of slightly liberal students, agreed that their school “probably” or “definitely” should allow onto campus a speaker arguing that “transgender people have a mental disorder.” On the other side of the ledger, more than two-thirds of very or somewhat conservative students, along with 61 percent of slightly conservative students, said their school “probably” or “definitely” should not allow a speaker who contends that “children should transition without parental consent.” On campuses today, illiberalism is increasingly a broadly shared mindset.
In addition to the student survey data, FIRE analyzes school policies and investigates free speech controversies. The organization combines the three measures into an overall free-speech climate score for each college, on an A to F scale. This year, only 11 schools scored a C or higher for speech climate, while 166 schools — nearly two-thirds of the sample — got an F. Claremont McKenna College, which scored a B-, topped the rankings, followed by Purdue, the University of Chicago, Michigan Technological University, and CU-Boulder. Barnard College brought up the rear, along with Columbia, Indiana University, the University of Washington, and Northeastern.
The willingness of students to quell speech with which they disagree has long been troublingly high. But what’s different in 2025 is the context: College students today are seeing illiberalism unapologetically wielded by both sides. For many years, the higher education debate was framed by campuses where the left shouted down right-leaning speakers and stifled those who’d challenge progressive orthodoxy on issues of gender, race, immigration, Israel-Palestine, and more. Conservatives pushed back by defending free inquiry and robust discourse.
That’s changed. Republicans in the Trump administration and many red states have pivoted to championing a thinly disguised MAGA illiberalism, in which admirable moves to dismantle politicized DEI bureaucracies have yielded to more troubling efforts to dictate what can be discussed in classrooms. This tit-for-tat escalation, with higher ed’s woke illiberalism matched (and raised?) by government officials on the right, is creating a vile new norm, in which a vanishing minority of public figures embrace principled tolerance. Given that backdrop, it’s not hard to grasp why college students might regard platitudes about free inquiry and robust discourse with cynicism.
In the coming weeks, colleges that scored well on FIRE’s rankings will issue self-congratulatory press releases, while the others will make excuses or bury their heads in the sand. But all the rhetorical pyrotechnics will miss the point. The real issue is that we’re raising a generation where, year by year, students are increasingly inclined to say that it’s okay to silence those with whom they disagree — and even to use violence to do so. Unless we reverse this trend, our other efforts to overhaul higher ed and promote civil discourse may well prove hollow — and the plight of the Christaksises will be remembered less as a cautionary tale than as a quaint prologue of the iniquities to come.
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