Israel remains one of the most difficult subjects for American college students to discuss openly at school, according to a new survey that gave nearly half of the universities it ranked an “F” for the way they handle free speech on campus.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, released its annual College Free Speech Rankings on Wednesday based on responses from nearly 63,000 students and an analysis of policies and free-speech controversies at 261 colleges and universities nationwide.
The University of Chicago ranked first with a B-minus and overall score of 81. It was followed by Claremont McKenna College, Georgia Institute of Technology and Michigan Technological University.
New York University finished last at No. 261, preceded by University of Washington, Texas State University, Northeastern University and Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Of the 261 schools, none earned an “A” and 121 received an “F.” Vanderbilt University, which has been praised for its handling of Jew-hatred on campus, ranked fifth with a C-plus.
Sean Stevens, author of the report, told JNS that it is “probably hard for a school to get into the ‘A’ range,” because student survey responses make up a significant portion of the score.
“The reality is, a perfect score is likely unobtainable because if even one student doesn’t give you perfect survey responses, you won’t have a perfect score,” he said.
Half of students surveyed said that the “Israeli-Palestinian conflict” was difficult to discuss openly on campus, making it the most commonly cited difficult topic.
Stevens, who has authored all seven of FIRE’s annual reports on the topic, told JNS that the subject “has grown more contentious after Oct. 7.”
“For three years running, it’s been the most difficult topic,” he said. “In the immediate aftermath, that was the highest percentage of students we’ve ever recorded identifying any topic.”
That was not the case at every campus, he said. At Utah Valley University, for example, nearly two-thirds of students said that Charlie Kirk was difficult to discuss after the conservative activist was assassinated while speaking on the campus in September 2025.
Nine schools lost points after administrators punished professors over comments related to Kirk, according to the report. Some campus chapters of Turning Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded, were also denied recognition or faced efforts to revoke their status as official student groups.
Nationwide, 44% of students identified Kirk as difficult to discuss, behind U.S. President Donald Trump at 46%. Abortion followed at 43%.
“The impact of Charlie Kirk’s assassination continues to negatively reverberate on campuses across the country,” Stevens stated. “Rather than view the tragedy as a warning about the extreme results of partisanship and inability to peacefully engage in dialogue, many college admins took it as an invitation to double down on censorship.”
Stevens told JNS that Utah Valley’s “administration does not bear responsibility for what the assassin did, but it happened there.”
“So I think naturally that’s going to have some impact on student speech and how they feel about the climate, and it’s understandable,” he said. “But it’s also clear that the assassination reverberated on campuses across the country.”
JNS asked Stevens what went wrong at NYU, which received an overall score of 44.97 after finishing as the third-worst school last year.
“Since Oct. 7, they’ve had a number of different controversies that revolve around expression regarding Israel-Palestine,” he said. “Sometimes they’re punishing pro-Palestinian speech. Other times, it’s targeting pro-Israel speech.”
“With NYU, I think a lot of the controversies center around expression on that issue,” Stevens told JNS.
FIRE cited NYU for barring students from inviting performers affiliated with No Music For Genocide to the university’s annual V100 concert and for directing Jews Against Zionism, a Jewish student group critical of Israel, to remove a social media post.
The report also noted NYU’s initial cancellation of an Oct. 7, 2025, appearance by pro-Israel law professor Ilya Shapiro, a decision that the university reversed after public backlash.
Stevens said that Rutgers, his graduate alma mater, offered another example of how schools can send conflicting signals about free speech.
This spring, students tried to disrupt a campus speaking event involving a former Israeli soldier. Rutgers removed the protesters and issued a strong defense of free expression, a response Stevens said that FIRE viewed favorably.
About a week later, however, Rutgers rescinded an invitation for Rami Elghandour, an alumnus and CEO of Arcellx, to deliver the School of Engineering’s commencement address after students objected to his social media posts about Israel.
“To us, it’s kind of sending a mixed message,” Stevens told JNS. “The week before, you have this really good reaction to an attempt to disrupt an event, and then you cave to mob demands a week later about a commencement speaker.”
“That’s not sending the right message to the campus community,” he said.
The average score across the schools surveyed was 61.36, the highest in the rankings’ seven-year history, but equivalent to a D-minus under FIRE’s grading system.
Columbia University and Barnard College, which ranked as the bottom two schools last year, both improved substantially.
“Just as Utah Valley is kind of the epicenter for the impacts of the Charlie Kirk assassination, Barnard and Columbia are the epicenter of the encampment protests that started in the spring of 2024,” Stevens told JNS.
“I think they’ve been flashpoints of protest activity over Israel-Palestine since the Oct. 7 attacks,” he said.
Stevens pointed to leadership changes, improved student perceptions and policy reforms as factors in the schools’ improvement. Barnard, he said, “engaged in a good amount of policy reform.”
“We are encouraged by those policy changes,” he said. “But at the end of the day, that’s on paper, and you’re still going to have controversies happen, and so we’ll see how you handle them when they do pop up.”
FIRE’s methodology depends on student surveys, campus speech policies and how administrators respond to speech controversies.
The surveys ask students questions like, “If a controversy over offensive speech were to occur on your campus, how likely is it that your college’s administration would defend the speaker’s right to express their views?” and “How often do you self-censor during conversations with other students on campus?”
The grades primarily reflect “the outcomes of consequences,” Stevens told JNS.
“The deplatforming database can feature incidents where the students themselves are the ones doing the censoring like shouting down a speaker,” he said. “That’s usually not administrators engaged in that behavior.”
“It’s not limited to just the school punishing speech, per se, but a lot of the examples are, yes, administrative punishment of student or faculty speech,” he told JNS.
Students were slightly less accepting of efforts to shut down campus speakers than they were last year. Some 69% said that shouting down a speaker could be acceptable in some circumstances and half said that blocking access to a speech could be acceptable. Some 30% said the same about using violence.
Stevens said that he was encouraged that support for violence fell from 34% last year to 30% but expected a larger decline after Kirk’s assassination.
“I kind of maybe would have thought that would have declined a little more sharply in response to that event,” he told JNS. “The number is still pretty high.”
Schools looking to improve their scores should examine their speech policies and avoid sending students conflicting messages about what expression they will protect, Stevens advised.
“I think having strong leadership on the issue and not sending contradictory messages about what speech is or is not supported on campus also goes a long way,” he told JNS.
