How Much Free Speech Do College Students Really Have on Campus?

Free speech isn’t always so free on college campuses, according to a recent ranking done by College Pulse and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

Of the 251 colleges and universities included in FIRE’s most recent study, Maine’s schools were all ranked on the lower end of the scale, ranging from 99th to 147th place.

Although their positions relative to each other remained largely unchanged compared to last year — with the exception of the University of Maine — all four schools ranked more positively this time around.

In 2023, Maine’s higher education institutions were ranked between 122nd and 213th place out of a similar 248 colleges and universities.

Surveyed for this year’s study were more than 58,000 students across 250-plus campuses between January and June of 2024.

[RELATED: Free Speech Isn’t Always Free On College Campuses — How Do Schools In Maine Stack Up?]

Free speech rankings were calculated based on composite score of fourteen components. Seven of these were designed to assess “student perceptions of different aspects of the speech climate on their campus,” while the remaining seven assess “behavior by administrators, faculty, and students regarding free expression on campus.”

Nationally, 47 percent of students surveyed identified as politically liberal, while 21 percent said they were conservative and 16 percent indicated they identify as moderate. The remaining students said they were either Democratic Socialists, Libertarians, something else, or that they hadn’t “thought much about this.”

Only 29 schools had a majority-conservative student body, including four of the six schools rated with a “warning” — meaning that its policies “clearly and consistently state that it prioritizes other values over a commitment to free speech.”

At two schools — Kenyon College and Pitzer College — just one student identified as conservative, and there were no conservative students at Macalester College.

Over 40 percent of students surveyed said that it was only “somewhat” clear that their administrators protect free speech on campus, and nearly a quarter said that it is “not at all” or “not very” clear that they do so.

Forty-seven percent of students said they felt administrators would only be “somewhat” likely to defend someone’s right to express their views if a speech controversy were to occur on campus.

Just 34 percent of students report feeling “very” or “somewhat” comfortable expressing an unpopular political opinion to other students using a social media account tied to their own name.

Half, however, said they would feel equally comfortable discussing a controversial political topic with other students in a campus common space or when disagreeing with a professor’s apparent viewpoint in a written assignment.

Across all contexts, “very liberal” students were more likely to feel comfortable discussing controversial political topics than any other political identity, including those who are “somewhat” or “slightly” liberal.

On the other hand, “very conservative” students are the most likely to report self-censoring “fairly” or “very” often in a variety of contexts, including when conversing with other students, talking to professors, and participating in classroom discussions.

For only the second time in the survey’s five year history, more than half of students questioned identified the same topic as one that “difficult to have an open and honest conversation about.”

This year, 54 percent of students said that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was hard to discuss with others on campus. The only other time this occurred was in 2021, when 51 percent of students identified racial inequality as a difficult subject.

Other subjects students noted as being particularly hard to have an “open and honest” discussion about included abortion [45 percent], transgender rights [41 percent], racial inequality [36 percent], and gun control [36 percent].

While the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was cited most frequently by liberal-leaning students, abortion and transgender rights were most commonly identified by conservative-leaning students.

Based on the scoring method utilized by FIRE, the University of Virginia was found to have the greatest degree of free speech out of all the institutions surveyed, while Harvard University was found to have the least.

Out of Maine’s four higher education institutions, Bowdoin College was found to have the best climate for free speech — coming in 99th nationwide — followed closely by the University of Maine in 103rd and Colby College in 110th.

Bates College ranked the lowest among Maine’s schools, coming in 147th in the country. Although all four institutions received an “average” score, Bates was the only one in this group to be given a “spotlight rating” of red as opposed to yellow.

FIRE’s “spotlight ratings” reflect the group’s analysis of a given school’s written policies governing free speech and are factored into each institution’s overall score.

A yellow spotlight rating is indicative that an institution maintains at least one policy that “places a clear restriction on a more limited amount of protected expression, or one that, by virtue of vague wording, could too easily be used to restrict protected expression.”

A red spotlight rating, on the other hand, is given to a school if it has “at least one policy that both clearly and substantially restricts freedom of speech.” In order to earn a green spotlight rating, a school must have no “policies that seriously threaten speech.”

Click Here to Read FIRE’s Full 2025 Report