Tolerance for Controversial Campus Speakers Declines

College students—particularly those who identify as conservative—are less likely to tolerate controversial speech than they were last year, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual survey.

For the 2026 edition of its free speech rankings, FIRE surveyed over 68,000 students from 257 colleges and universities in the U.S. In a question about six hypothetical speakers—three with what are widely considered conservative views and three with traditionally liberal beliefs—the share of students who said the speakers should be allowed to speak on campus dropped by at least five percentage points in all six cases.

While 32 percent of respondents in 2024 said they would permit a speaker claiming transgender people have a mental illness, that number dipped to 25 percent this year. On the flip side, the number who found it acceptable to welcome a speaker who said children should be able to transition without parental consent also dropped, from 56 percent to 49 percent.

But changes on both issues were driven primarily by conservative students’ decreased willingness to allow controversial speech on campus; liberal students reported a level of tolerance similar to previous years. Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research adviser and the report’s author, said it’s unclear why conservative students have had a change in attitude.

“These trends actually started a few years ago … I think maybe some of that is [conservatives feeling like], ‘Oh, we’ve said we wouldn’t do this stuff for so long and it’s not really gotten us anywhere, so why don’t we just join the party?’” Stevens suggested.

It could also be the case that a growing number of moderate students are beginning to identify as conservatives but still maintain more traditionally left-leaning ideas about speech, he said.

The report comes almost two years after pro-Palestinian protests began roiling campuses nationwide, with many shutting down pro-Palestinian student organizations, calling in police to quash demonstrations and penalizing protesters. Since then, the Trump administration has frozen billions of dollars in federal funds to institutions that it says failed to protect Jewish students during the protest movement; officials have even attempted to deport international students who participated in the demonstrations. In another move that has been criticized as a violation of free expression, the administration has restricted agencies such as the NIH and NSF from funding research related to topics like racism and gender inequity. (FIRE and other free speech organizations have called the administration’s actions a “multi-front assault on First Amendment freedoms.”)

Interrupting Speakers

The survey also showed an increase in students who approve of various methods of interrupting speakers with whom they disagree. That includes shouting down speakers, which 71 percent of respondents said was at least rarely acceptable, blocking students from attending a speaking event (54 percent) and even using violence (34 percent).

Those gains, again, came from conservative students; for the first time in the survey’s six-year history, students who identified as “strong Republicans” were more likely than “strong Democrats” to say they would ever find it acceptable to use violence to stop a speaker.

Additionally, Republican students were more likely than Democrats to find such violence acceptable more often; strongly identified Republican respondents said that using violence to interrupt a speaker is OK “sometimes” and “rarely” at equal rates, whereas strong Democrats were more likely to think it’s only “rarely” acceptable to use violence.

Elizabeth Niehaus, an associate professor of educational administration at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln who studies student self-censorship, said she takes issue with FIRE lumping together those students who find it “rarely” acceptable with those who selected “sometimes” or “always.”

“We don’t know what those students mean when they answer any of these, but to me, ‘rarely’ seems to indicate that this is not generally acceptable … ‘This is not what we should do, but I can conceive of a situation where maybe I would say, “OK, yeah, that’s justified,”’” she said.

Still, she finds it concerning how many students said that violence is “sometimes” or “always” acceptable—15 percent, more than double the 6 percent who responded that way in 2021; at her institution, Niehaus said, that share would amount to 3,000 undergraduates.

“I do think that there’s something going on here that we need to figure out. Even if this particular data can’t really explain what it is that’s going on or why, that does raise a red flag for me,” she said.

Over all, Republican students were still less likely than Democrats to say they found any form of interruption acceptable, but that gap is lessening.

The survey also asked students which subjects they would find it “difficult” to have an “open and honest conversation” about on campus. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, unsurprisingly, topped the list at 53 percent, a slight dip from 55 percent in 2024. The report did not ask whether that nervousness derives from concerns about peer reactions, fears of institutional punishment or censorship, or another cause altogether. On 21 campuses, many of which had major clashes between students and administrators over pro-Palestinian protests, over 70 percent of students surveyed said they felt it was difficult to talk about the conflict.

Respondents also find it challenging to talk about abortion (46 percent), the recent presidential election (42 percent) and transgender rights (41 percent). Students on both sides of the aisle tend to find similar issues difficult to talk about, Stevens said.

Niehaus argued that it’s not inherently problematic that students find it challenging to discuss these subjects. “Issues like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, abortion, race—the whole list, even the most recent presidential election—these are just actually difficult topics to discuss and make a lot of people uncomfortable,” she said. “I think with this particular question … the data does provide a helpful insight into students’ experiences with controversial issues on campus, but I don’t think we should be interpreting any of these findings in here as actual problems.”