No More ‘Trust us, we’re the administrators!’

Our campus free speech rankings provide an unparalleled view into campus censorship — one that administrators love to hate.

As regular ERI readers know, FIRE releases its College Free Speech Rankings every year. These are detailed survey reports that offer students, parents, professors, administrators, and any other interested constituency unrivaled insight into undergraduate attitudes about and experiences with free expression on their college campuses.

Unfortunately, not everyone agrees.

TIME magazine recently published a piece critical of the rankings and, sadly, demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of what they measure. Not only that, the piece also implies that Americans shouldn’t trust our judgment. Instead, we should give college and university presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators the benefit of the doubt, based on both the assumption that they know their campuses better than an off-campus organization like FIRE would, and that they would be honest and forthcoming about their free speech failings.

Obviously, we disagree. After many years of failing to defend — and sometimes actively undermining — free speech on campus, college and university presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators have lost the benefit of the doubt. FIRE has been drawing attention to campus censorship for more than 25 years now, but it has accelerated almost every year for the last 11, and it’s become particularly bad in the last 5. And yet, this entire time — every single year — many administrators have claimed there’s nothing wrong on their campuses.

It's time to start believing your eyes and the data, and not the same people who have been saying there’s nothing to see here even as things got steadily worse.

Clearing up confusion about our College Free Speech Rankings

The TIME piece starts by describing the CFSR, along with the Anti-Defamation League’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card, as “an emerging type of ranking based solely on impressions of inferred tolerance of campus cultures rather than assessments of scholarly contributions, or evaluations of student learning, or descriptions of campus life.”

Beyond being a word salad, this characterization is so wrong that it’s irresponsible.

Just a recap here: The FIRE rankings are based on the largest survey ever conducted of student opinion on the free speech atmosphere on their campuses. It also factors in the largest database ever assembled of professor cancellations, student cancellations, campus speech codes, deplatformings, and other threats to campus expression. There has never been an attempt even remotely approaching the scale, ambition, and scope of the Campus Free Speech Rankings. The idea that it’s solely based on impressions is just a lazy attempt to wish the data away.

Sure, we can quibble over the wording of FIRE’s survey questions, but to claim they don’t offer insight into campus life is simply false. For instance, our questions ask students how comfortable they are expressing controversial political views in different settings on campus. They are also asked to describe a specific moment when they felt they could not express their views because of how a peer, a faculty member, or an administrator would respond.

These sound to us like ways of asking students to describe some aspects of campus life — specifically, aspects related to free speech, which is FIRE’s area of concern.

Later, the TIME piece describes the FIRE and ADL rankings systems differently:

The college rankings by FIRE and ADL have received much attention as of late. Each is attempting to assess how well campus leaders, through their stated policies and procedures, protect the individual liberties and rights afforded students by the U.S. Constitution. Both organizations endeavor to go further by connecting the ranking outcomes to their respective missions.

When it comes to the CFSR, this description is not incorrect, but it is incomplete. The CFSR does factor in FIRE’s spotlight rating of a college or university’s speech policies, which awards green light schools with points while taking points away from yellow and red light schools. But this is based on a rigorous and painstaking application of First Amendment case law to the vast collection of campus policies in question. This by itself has been a Herculean effort, and goes back to the early days of FIRE, when Greg would evaluate the policies for constitutionality himself. And remember: this is only one component of a school’s overall CFSR score.

We would also like to clear up the misconception, put forth by the TIME article, that FIRE’s “methodologies for establishing a weighting of survey components” are not specified. The CFSR methodology is publicly available on the rankings website and in the appendix of each annual report. We have no reason to hide the ball, so we don’t.

Finally, the article also expresses surprise that three different ranking systems — those of US News, FIRE, and the ADL — all rank American colleges and universities differently. This is a puzzling criticism, given that each ranking system is measuring something different. Here are the descriptions offered for each of them (emphasis added):

• US News: The four overall rankings — National Universities, Liberal Arts Colleges, Regional Universities and Regional Colleges — are based on factors that indicate academic quality, such as graduation rates and faculty resources.

• FIRE: Presented by College Pulse and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), the 2025 College Free Speech Rankings is a comprehensive comparison of the student experience of free speech on their campuses. These rankings are based on the voices of over 58,000 currently enrolled students at over 250 colleges and are designed to help parents and prospective students choose the right college.

• ADL: ADL’s Campus Antisemitism Report Card is a tool for students, parents, alumni, college faculty, guidance counselors, admissions consultants and other stakeholders. Our goal is to serve students and their families looking for information about the current state of antisemitism on campus and how particular universities and colleges are responding.

Given these distinct and clearly-articulated goals, as well as their strikingly different methodologies, why is it surprising that these different rankings reach different conclusions?

The TIME piece notes that the difference between FIRE’s CFSR and the ADL’s antisemitism report card is most pronounced when it comes to the ranking of the University Virginia, which was the top-ranked school by FIRE but received an F from the ADL. UVA’s top-ranking in the CFSR is then challenged on the basis that 27 protesters were arrested there, after officers used pepper spray to remove an encampment on the campus grounds. The idea, presumably, is to discredit FIRE’s rankings by showing that we don’t apply our own methodologies fairly or consistently.

On the contrary. We actually noted in our report for 2025 that no school was penalized for how they handled the encampment protests. We decided this for a variety of reasons, not the least of which being that the utter chaos on campus was hard to parse through fairly — and much of the protests that took place were either ambivalent or hostile to the free speech of other students. More than that, a huge percentage of these protests, like attempts to have semi-permanent encampments, was not protected speech in the first place. So instead of trying to disentangle all of that and ending up scoring schools unfairly, we knew we could see what the actual effect of these protests and encampments was from the student climate surveys we were taking. As we wrote:

The impact of the encampment protests on the campus speech climate is captured by responses to survey questions that ask students about their confidence that their college administration protects speech rights on campus, their comfort expressing controversial political views, and how frequently they self-censor.

It should also be noted that although UVA is the top-ranked school in FIRE’s CFSR, its overall score was only a 73.41 — the equivalent of a C on a standard letter grade scale. In other words, even our top-ranked school has a lot of room for improvement.

‘Trust us, we’re the administrators!’

The TIME piece reports on a recent Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute Higher Education Summit, which was attended by over 100 presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators from American colleges and universities. When asked about FIREs College Free Speech Rankings, roughly two-thirds of attendees said they are not accurate.

It’s hard to imagine a less surprising result.

Why? Because college and university administrators are human, and it is natural for them to be skeptical about, and even dismissive of, any kind of ranking system or report card that says they are not doing a good job.

Yes, it is true that there are a number of ways a college or university president knows their campus better than an off-campus advocacy organization could. But there are also good reasons to think that many higher-level administrators view the climate for free expression on their campus through rose-colored glasses.

For the past 15 years, Inside Higher Ed has surveyed college and university presidents about the climate for open inquiry, both on their campus and on American college and university campuses in general. In its most recent survey, conducted a few months ago, 85% of college and university presidents said the climate of open inquiry is “good” or “excellent” on their campus, while just 39% said the same about American colleges and universities in general — a finding consistent with previous Inside Higher Ed surveys.

Inside Higher Ed also asked these college and university presidents who is most at fault for escalating tensions around campus speech. A clear majority — 70% — of presidents identified politicians as being “at fault.” Another 27% identified faculty, and 18% identified students. Only 5% identified administrators.

“It ain’t me babe.”

It’s hard to know where to begin with how off-base this perception is. Again, we have been defending free speech on campus for 25 years, and the ultimate decision maker for who gets in trouble and who doesn’t on campus for their free speech is administrators. It is not an exaggeration to say that if administrators were still good and consistent on free speech, the free speech problems on campus today would be negligible or nonexistent.

Just imagine it: Whenever politicians pressured administrators to fire professors for inflammatory statements, the administrators would say no. When students shouted down speakers, administrators would punish those students for infringing on their classmates’ and the speakers’ free speech. When there was a Cancel Culture mob directed at a professor or student, administrators would try to turn it into a teachable moment about the value of freedom of inquiry, freedom of speech, academic freedom, and the arduous, never-ending process of knowledge creation.

We would love to live in that world. But we don’t. Quite the opposite, in fact.

To say that administrators are just 5% of the problem is unfathomably self-deluded, and the epitome of what Greg has dubbed the Silver Spoon Rule: “It can never, ever, ever be higher education’s own fault (even when it is).”

Consider that in each of the following speech controversies, administrators either facilitated a heckler’s veto, bragged about one having happened, blamed the speaker for it, or characterized the disruption as freedom of speech:

• Two years ago, law students at Stanford University interrupted Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan’s prepared remarks at a Federalist Society sponsored event. The almost nonstop shouting and heckling was clearly coordinated with administrators — one of whom met with the protesters beforehand and then gave prepared remarks after the nearly ten-minute shoutdown ended.

• A few months later, Riley Gaines, a political activist and former NCAA swimmer, was heckled and accosted by student protesters at San Francisco State University over her opposition to transgender athletes competing in women’s sports. She barricaded herself in a room for three hours to avoid them. The next day, the university’s president bragged about how the incident provided a clear demonstration of the school’s “commitment to free speech while successfully hosting a speaker whose views do not align with the University’s commitment to inclusivity.”

• Later that fall, a panel at Harvard University discussing the 1973 Oil Embargo was disrupted by protesters, who objected to the platforming of two panelists because they both had ties to the fossil fuel industry. Administrators in attendance said they could not interfere with the protesters’ rights to free expression.

• This past January, Olivia Krolcyzk, a women’s rights advocate and ambassador with the Riley Gaines Center, along with members of Turning Point USA (the organizers of the event), barricaded themselves inside an event space at the University of Washington due to disruptive protestors. They were eventually escorted out by university police and security. Afterwards, the University blamed not just the protestors, but also Krolcyzk and Turning Point USA for the incident.

A critic might acknowledge that each of these incidents was bad, but still insist that they amount to only a few examples from a handful of schools in a nation that contains thousands of colleges and universities.

But this criticism is also an obfuscation. Why? Because “thousands” of colleges and universities massively overestimates the number of schools that the majority of students attend. Consider that, if we exclude very small religious schools and institutions for vocations like hairdressing, cosmetology, welding, massage therapy, and so on, there are only around 2,800 four-year colleges in the U.S. These kinds of schools have a built-in resilience to Cancel Culture in that, while incredibly important in their own right, they tend not to be the site of interactions between ideologically opposed groups on hot button culture war issues.

So, how many schools are actually like what most people have in mind when they think of the typical American college or university? About 600. These 600 schools educate about three out of four students at four-year colleges.*

Sadly, this problem is not limited to just a handful of schools. It is in fact happening in the majority of schools where these kinds of issues can occur.

In 2024, FIRE recorded 171 deplatforming attempts, 84 scholar sanction attempts, and 182 student sanction attempts† on college and university campuses across the country. When you add all of that up, it means that there is more than one attempt a day to sanction some kind of expression on a college or university campus somewhere in this country. If that still sounds like no big deal to you, it might help to know that administrators were involved in 193 of these incidents, or essentially one every other day (maybe it’s not just those politicians!). This involvement ranges from preventing the scheduling of events, requiring unreasonable security fees, and even canceling events altogether.

This is happening everywhere, not just at a few choice schools. Did we record multiple incidents from schools that garner a lot of media attention, like Harvard or Yale University? Yes, we did. Did we also record incidents at colleges and universities most Americans have probably never even heard of? Yes, we did.

At this point you can be forgiven for thinking that this kind of behavior is at least deeply ingrained, if not outright systematic, in our colleges and universities.

Higher education has found itself incredibly unwilling to actually accept the blame for the free speech crisis it has created on its own campuses. Given how bad things have gotten, as well as the much-celebrated vibe shift that universities are starting to feel, you’d think administrators and other higher-ups in our colleges and universities would start singing that Taylor Swift song: It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem. It’s me.

But that hasn’t made it into the polling yet, and we aren’t holding our breath.

What do the students say?

Since 2020, FIRE has surveyed over 200,000 undergraduates for its College Free Speech Rankings, including almost 59,000 last year. That gives us a lot of insight into student attitudes about the state of free expression on American college and university campuses. If, as the TIME article suggests, we’re to give professors and administrators the benefit of the doubt, why not students?

Let’s see what those surveyed last year said:

• At least half of undergraduates are uncomfortable expressing their views on controversial political topics in classroom discussions, in conversations with other students on campus, on a social media account linked to their name, and with their professors either publicly or privately.

• Almost 60% say that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is difficult to have an open and honest conversation about on campus, and a notable portion of students (between 40% and 50%) also say this about abortion, racial inequality, and transgender rights.

• Roughly 25% of surveyed undergraduates self-censor a few times a week in conversations with their peers and their professors, as well as during classroom discussions.

• Roughly 25% of students nationwide say that it is “not at all” or “not very” clear that their college administration protects free speech on campus. Twenty-eight percent say it is “not at all” or “not very” likely that their college’s administration would defend a speaker’s rights during a speech controversy.

Ok, fine, those overall numbers look bad. But what about individual campuses? What about the schools ranked highly by US News, for example?

At Yale, which US News ranks fifth in national universities, 62% of undergraduates say they are “very” or “somewhat” uncomfortable publicly disagreeing with a professor about a controversial political topic. Roughly half of Yale students say this about disagreeing with a professor over a controversial political topic in a written assignment, or expressing their views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion. Roughly 20% of Yale students also say that they self-censor multiple times a week in discussions with their peers or their professors, as well as in classroom discussions. About 66% say that it is difficult to have an open and honest conversation about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on campus.

The story is similar at Stanford, and worse at Harvard, Columbia, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania.

Houston, we have a problem. One wonders what the authors of the TIME article have to say about whether college and university students know their campuses better than an off-campus organization like FIRE, or their own campus administrators, professors, and presidents. Who should get the benefit of the doubt, really — the ones dealing with the awful free speech climate on their campuses, or the ones who have every incentive to deny it exists?

Why the campus free speech problem is likely to persist

The first step required to solve a problem is admitting you have one. And as we’ve shown above, while most high level administrators at American colleges and universities do not deny that our higher education system has a free expression problem, they do deny that their campus is part of it. And with pieces like the one published in TIME completely misunderstanding and misrepresenting FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings, it seems this problem will still be with us for quite some time.

Recall that this is what college and university administrators think:

• About two-thirds of the college presidents, chancellors, and senior administrators who attended the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute Higher Education Summit said that FIRE’s rankings are not accurate.

• In a recent Inside Higher Ed poll, 85% of college and university presidents said the climate of open inquiry is “good” or “excellent” on their campus, while just 39% said the same about American colleges and universities in general.

• In that same Inside Higher Ed Poll, 70% of administrators said that politicians are “at fault” for escalating tensions around campus speech, while 27% identified faculty, and 18% identified students. Only 5% identified administrators.

If this isn’t an example of complete denial, then it is evidence of obliviousness to the reality on most American college and university campuses. Neither case can be considered good or positive, and both disqualify these presidents and administrators from getting the benefit of the doubt.

For instance, when asked about Fordham University’s poor performance in FIRE’s 2024 College Free Speech Rankings, its president said, “First of all, those FIRE rankings … We don’t really understand how they come to them.”

FIRE responded by noting that this statement was more of an indictment of Fordham than the CFSR, since the methodology is publicly available. We also explained that Fordham’s speech policies are the primary reason for their low ranking, and expressed interest in meeting with the administration. We do not know if Fordham’s administration ever read the CFSR’s methodology, but the university has not contacted us, nor has it taken any steps to revise its speech policies. Fordham ranked poorly again in the 2025 CFSR.

On the other hand, campuses like DePauw and the University of South Carolina have admitted that they have a problem. In response to their low rankings in the CFSR, these schools worked directly with FIRE and improved their rankings.

FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings are the result of a colossal amount of work from a number of FIRE staffers, including the whole of our amazing research and communications departments. As we noted earlier, it is the largest survey of campus free expression ever performed. The data we collect is not just unique, it is incredibly valuable. There is simply no other comparable method for gauging both the state and the perception of free speech on college campuses than the CFSR. Our methodology is publicly available, and our data provides insight you simply cannot get anywhere else.

Rather than dismiss, deflect, and deny the findings we report, we implore the colleges and universities whose free speech policies and student attitudes we’ve flagged to reach out to FIRE. They should try to understand why the rankings ended up the way they did, and work with us to improve their standing. FIRE is happy to help them in this pursuit. All a school needs to do is reach out to us and ask.

*Figures derived from Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System’s 2021 complete data files of 12-Month Enrollment (unduplicated headcount), and Directory Information. Undergraduate and graduate students were included.

†Student sanction attempt data is available upon request, please email data@thefire.org.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I was honored to present the final lecture at the Censorship in the Sciences: Interdisciplinary Perspectives conference at the University of Southern California back in January. It was sponsored in part by FIRE, the University of Austin, our friends at Heterodox Academy, and others.

Here’s my full talk, “How Cancel Culture Destroys Trust in Expertise”: