Special Edition: Harvard Ranked 245th in FIRE’s New Free Speech Rankings. Here’s What’s Behind the Number.

Harvard improved from last year’s last place ranking, but still ranked 245th out of 257.

Harvard’s policies materially depress its ranking. FIRE estimates that with a “green-light” policy set instead of a yellow one, Harvard would rank about 84.

Students express tolerance in principle for bringing controversial speakers to campus, but that does not carry through to practice, where 4 out of 5 Harvard students find shoutdowns acceptable.

Students’ trust in Harvard’s administration has further declined, even though confidence that administrators would protect free speech or defend a controversial speaker has long been low.

Israel-Palestine is, by a wide margin, the hardest topic for students to have an open and honest discussion on. And it’s become harder for them to do so over the past three years.

President Alan Garber earned Harvard a “high honors” bonus from FIRE for his statements in defense of free speech.

1636 Forum’s Key Takeaways

Who is FIRE?

What are FIRE’s rankings and how are they calculated?

Does FIRE use the same survey every year?

What explains Harvard’s low score?

How did Harvard’s 2026 results compare to last year’s results?

What would Harvard need to do to move up in FIRE’s rankings?

Harvard currently holds a “yellow-light” rating for maintaining ten policies FIRE flags as too restrictive of speech; FIRE also estimates that with a “green-light” set of policies Harvard would rank about 84th.

Five of the flagged policies are harassment and bullying definitions that do not track the legal standard for a peer hostile environment, which can sweep in protected speech.

The remainder include time, place, and manner requirements that call for advance permission to distribute written materials anywhere on campus (that means not even handing out flyers in a dormitory or Annenberg Hall) and prior approval for outdoor events (even those as long-standing as Primal Scream), an anonymous bias-incident reporting system that does not define “bias,” and an IT use rule that expects “civility” in online communications.

In the past two years, Harvard has taken measures such as beginning to issue University-wide guidance on time, place, and manner rules and adopting centralized Campus Use Rules that require advance approval for protests and other public displays. In recent months, it has also more consistently enforced these rules.

FIRE suggests that to improve its score, Harvard change these policies to be less restrictive of students’ speech.

Harvard ranked 245th of 257, second-to-last among the Ivies ahead only of Columbia at 256th; Barnard, ranked separately, was 257th.

Dartmouth led the Ivies, coming in 35th. Dartmouth’s high ranking was not a surprise, given the culture that President Sian Beilock has famously worked to cultivate on campus. Over her tenure, Dartmouth has maintained free expression and instituted institutional neutrality, set and consistently enforced clear time, place, and manner rules, and sponsored programming to encourage open dialogue.

The remaining Ivies placed: Yale (58th), Princeton (160th), Brown (187th), Cornell (227th), and Penn (231rd). Columbia and Barnard were both in FIRE’s overall bottom five. Beyond the Ivies, placements included: the University of Chicago (3rd), Vanderbilt (7th), Duke (37th), Stanford (75th), and MIT (82nd).

Of the topics asked about on the survey, 73% of students mark Israel-Palestine as a difficult topic to have an open and honest conversation about. This is far above the next highest topic, affirmative action at 39%.

No other topic comes close to Israel-Palestine, whether related to politics, race, gender, or national security. For example: presidential election (32%), racial inequality (27%), gender inequality (14%), China (8%).

The same pattern exists at other schools. For example, at Penn, 75% of students say Israel-Palestine is a hard conversation, with all other topics significantly trailing, generally in the 30s or lower (though the 2024 presidential election reaches 44%).

Moreover, in the years since October 7, the share of Harvard students naming Israel-Palestine as a difficult conversation has risen each year, from 38% in FIRE’s 2024 survey, fielded in the months after the October 7 attacks, to 73% in the 2026 report. In 2024, a higher percentage of students marked other topics like racial inequality and abortion as difficult compared to Israel-Palestine. 

Some argue Harvard’s low placement is mainly about how it handled encampments after October 7. But FIRE’s scoring system points to a broader, multi-year picture. 

In addition to the undergraduate survey, this year FIRE adds a “speech controversies” component built from its databases on Campus Deplatformings (efforts to block speakers or events), Scholars Under Fire (calls to punish faculty for protected speech), and Students Under Fire (calls to punish students or student groups). Schools can receive up to five penalty points when speech is restricted, with each penalty reduced by one point in each subsequent year. 

Harvard has multiple controversies before and after October 7, and several are not about Israel-Palestine. For example, in 2024 there were attempted disruptions involving Chinese Ambassador Xie Feng, President Alan Garber’s Alumni Day remarks, and Senator Joe Manchin’s talk at the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. Those incidents carried penalties in 2024 and still cost Harvard a point each in 2026.

FIRE notes that Harvard students have higher political tolerance for speakers compared to students nationally. (e.g., 55% would allow a pro-abortion ban speaker, vs. 40% nationally).

But 79% of Harvard students say shouting down a speaker is acceptable, and 58% say blocking entry to a talk is acceptable. FIRE also says, “students at Harvard found shouting down speakers and blocking other students from attending a speaker’s event as more acceptable compared to students nationally.”

Allowing a speaker on campus is not the same as listening or engaging with them. Not only does widespread support for disruption undercut the purpose of an event, but genuine engagement is essential to cultivate a culture of intellectual exploration and rigorous inquiry on campus. 

Students have long reported relatively low trust in Harvard’s administration to protect free speech, and those views have further declined over time.

About 30-32% said it was very or extremely clear the administrators protect free speech in 2021-2023, which slid to 20% this year. 

In the same timeframe, the share who think the invitation of a controversial speaker would be defended by Harvard administration fell from an already-low 27% in 2021 to 8% today — fewer than 1 in 10 students.

In formal learning settings, 56% of students say they self-censor in conversations with professors and 62% do so in classroom discussions. Grades are not the main driver of this self-censorship: only 30% think holding back would earn them a better grade, which may not be much of a concern when more than 79% of the grades awarded at Harvard College today are in the A range.

In common campus spaces, such as a quad, dining hall, or lounge, students are nearly evenly split with 49% comfortable expressing their views, 51% not.

Reluctance is highest online, where 84% say they are somewhat or very uncomfortable expressing unpopular political opinions on social media tied to their names. Beyond campus dynamics, the outsized media attention on what Harvard students say likely amplifies this chill.

More broadly, while the frequency of self-censorship appears to be trending downward compared to 2024, the reasons why are less clear. For example, students may have felt more unified during Harvard’s clashes with the federal government. It could also reflect efforts within the University itself, such as adopting institutional neutrality, President Garber’s Building Bridges Fund to expand constructive dialogue efforts, or the Kennedy School’s Middle East Dialogues series.

Over one-third of Harvard students believe a professor would likely be reported for making a controversial remark. 

This perception echoes Harvard’s own Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue (OICD) Task Force report, which found that 51% of faculty are uncomfortable leading class discussions on controversial topics; 68% of faculty avoid discussing controversial issues outside of class, such as around students, faculty, or staff; and 41% of faculty feel uneasy researching controversial subjects. In the OICD report, faculty cited risks tied to student evaluations, contract renewal or tenure, and online criticism as reasons for holding back.

On the student side, nearly one-quarter think a peer would likely be reported for a controversial statement. This perception may help explain why students are especially reluctant to post political opinions under their own names on social media, where the permanence and visibility of remarks could increase the risk of being reported later.

As in years prior, Harvard received penalties for deplatforming incidents and student and faculty speech controversies. However, this year it also earned a two-point “high honors” bonus for President Garber’s response to federal demands. 

According to FIRE, this is because “President Alan Garber responded with a strong free speech statement to federal demands to derecognize several student groups.” In his April 14 letter to the community, Garber wrote that Harvard would “not surrender its independence or relinquish its constitutional rights,” and pledged instead to foster a “thriving culture of open inquiry.”

Like penalties, bonuses also gradually decrease by one point per year, so this commendation will carry over into next year’s rankings.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a national nonprofit dedicated to defending free speech in all its forms. Founded in 1999 with a focus on higher education, FIRE has since expanded to broader First Amendment work in courts, legislature, and culture. Still, it remains best known for its campus advocacy, including its annual College Free Speech Rankings, which assess how universities protect or restrict student expression.

FIRE emphasizes its nonpartisan mission, having defended the First Amendment rights of speakers and organizations across the political spectrum. When it comes to Harvard, FIRE has often been a sharp critic, ranking the University’s speech climate “abysmal” in recent years. But true to FIRE’s principles, it has also stepped in to defend Harvard, including filing a brief against federal demands that the University argued threatened academic independence, as profiled recently in The New York Times.

FIRE is often considered a modern-day American Civil Liberties Union (now that the ACLU has refocused its work around selecting speech to defend based on its content). 

FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings assess how well U.S. universities protect and promote free expression. The rankings combine three elements:

Each year, FIRE collects survey responses between January and June (so for example, the new 2026 report comes from data collected January-June 2025). FIRE then publishes a national ranking list of schools based on these components, alongside comparative data across institutions. FIRE also produces more detailed “spotlight” reports on individual universities, such as Harvard.

Not exactly. While many core questions are consistent, FIRE adapts its survey each year to reflect shifting campus debates and capture data relevant to the moment.

That means not all results are directly comparable across years. For instance, last year’s survey asked several questions about students’ views on Israel-Palestine, while the year before included items on political self-identification and the war in Ukraine — none of which appeared in the current one.

FIRE also adjusted its scoring methodology. In prior years, penalties for campus controversies (such as sanctions against scholars) decayed gradually over four years, with termination cases carrying extra weight. FIRE has since simplified the system: bonuses and penalties now decay by one point per year.

Taken together, these changes mean the scores (and rankings) are best understood as a snapshot of a given year’s campus climate rather than precise trendlines across years.

Harvard’s 2026 ranking reflects weaknesses across survey results, institutional policies, and speech controversies. On the survey side, students expressed little confidence in administrators to protect free expression, placing Harvard 247th for “Administrative Support.” Self-censorship rates and willingness to disrupt controversial speech also dragged down results. Harvard’s “comfort expressing ideas” and “political tolerance” scores were close to the national average, but not strong enough to offset these deficits.

Beyond survey responses, Harvard was docked five points for its “yellow-light” rating, which reflects ten restrictive speech policies. It also incurred penalties from incidents in FIRE’s Campus Deplatformings, Scholars Under Fire, and Students Under Fire databases — some from the past year, others still carrying over under FIRE’s multi-year decay system. Taken together, these factors explain Harvard’s overall score of 49.47 and ranking of 245th. 

However, FIRE notes that if the policy penalty alone were removed (i.e., Harvard had five more points), Harvard would have landed around 84th.

Harvard’s 2026 outcome marks a rebound from last year’s last-place finish, driven by gains in several of the categories FIRE tracks year over year. The University improved in self-censorship (moving from 185th to 88th), openness (123rd to 63rd), and political tolerance (71st to 64th). Administrative support rose only slightly (250th to 247th), while Harvard slipped in comfort expressing ideas (235rd to 247th) and disruptive conduct (147th to 161st).

As noted above, FIRE changes some survey questions each year, so not every category is exactly comparable. These results should be taken with a grain of salt; they suggest progress in how undergraduates perceive the speech climate compared to last year’s results, but they do not tell the full story.

FIRE says Harvard could dramatically improve its standing by reforming its speech policies. Right now, Harvard holds a “yellow-light” rating for maintaining ten policies that restrict expression; if those were revised to meet a “green-light” standard, Harvard’s overall ranking would rise from 245th to 84th.

As previously noted, some of these yellow-light policies are time, place, and manner ones that Harvard has somewhat clarified and centralized, and sometimes enforced in the past two years to create an environment where students can focus on academics.  

FIRE also encourages Harvard to adopt the Chicago Statement, which is widely considered the gold standard for campus free speech and affirms a strong commitment to open inquiry.

But policy changes alone are not enough. FIRE notes that Harvard’s administration trust gap is a major factor, as only 8% of students believe administrators would defend a speaker’s controversial remarks (a figure reflected in Middle East Dialogues host and Kennedy School professor Tarek Masoud’s Wall Street Journal op-ed), and only 20% of students think it’s clear that Harvard protects free speech. 

To improve, FIRE suggests that Harvard consistently defend student and faculty expression during controversies and communicate more clearly why free speech matters in a university setting.

Finally, FIRE recommends embedding expressive rights training into first-year orientation. This would help students distinguish between protected expression and unprotected conduct, potentially reducing penalties from future disruptions and improving Harvard’s scores on “Disruptive Conduct” and “Administrative Support.”