The assassination of Charlie Kirk last year at Utah Valley University contributed to colleges nationwide tightening free-speech restrictions, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reported Wednesday.
The Philadelphia free speech group found that more than half of undergraduates it surveyed said the Sept. 10, 2025, shooting was a difficult topic to discuss openly and honestly — ranking it alongside abortion, President Trump and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as the most taboo topics.
That included 62% of students surveyed at the Orem, Utah, campus, where the conservative activist was shot while debating free expression during a stop on his “Prove Me Wrong” tour. It was the highest percentage out of 61 campuses sampled.
The foundation’s annual rankings penalized at least 10 schools for punishing student or faculty comments about the assassination in the past year, awarding them an F grade for stifling expression.
They dinged the University of Washington for investigating a research scientist’s comments about Kirk on X, Texas State University for pressuring a student who mocked Kirk’s death at a campus vigil, and the University of Tennessee for firing an anthropology professor who posted that the world was better off without Kirk.
“Our data suggests that the impact of Charlie Kirk’s assassination continues to negatively reverberate on campuses across the country,” said Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief researcher.
“This effect seems to be most pronounced at Utah Valley University, where the assassination occurred, but it is very clear that it introduced a chilling effect on campuses across the country,” he added in a statement.
Launched in 2020 to identify which colleges do better than others at promoting free expression, the seventh annual report surveyed roughly 62,000 students on 261 campuses. It gave F grades to 121 schools, or 46%.
The average college scored a 61.36 out of 100 for its commitment to protecting free speech. FIRE noted this number is “the highest recorded in seven years but still corresponds to a D- on the report’s grading scale, an unacceptable state of affairs.”
New York University ranked dead last in this year’s rankings after blocking several anti-Israel events on campus. The next-worst campuses were Texas State and the University of Washington, respectively.
None of the universities penalized for tamping down opinions about Kirk responded to requests for comment.
Jonathan Zimmerman, an education history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League institution that flunked the student rankings, said the report confirms that Kirk’s death uncovered “deep inconsistencies around free speech” in higher education.
“Conservatives who had been railing for years about ’cancel culture’ on campus led the drive to fire professors who said the wrong thing about Kirk,” Mr. Zimmerman said in an email. “Meanwhile, liberals who had supported university speech codes to bar ’violent’ speech insisted the colleagues had the right to say violent things about Charlie Kirk.”
Penn ranked 227 out of 261 for free speech. FIRE’s report noted that surveyed Penn “students frequently feel uncomfortable expressing their opinions and are likely to stay silent, especially on controversial topics.”
The national survey also invited open-ended responses to this question: “Please share a moment where you personally felt you could not express your opinion on your campus because of how you thought other students, a professor, or the administration would respond.”
“I have personally heard threats on campus of violence towards those who share opinions with right-wing figures like Charlie Kirk,” said one student the report identified as “very conservative.”
One “very liberal student” at Utah Valley admitted keeping silent to avoid hostility from Kirk’s supporters.
“Tables advocating for what he believed in are often set up around my campus, and I know if I openly disagreed with what they are doing, [a] majority of the student body would disagree with me,” the student wrote.
Slight improvements
FIRE reported slight advances in collegiate free speech under the Trump administration, but warned the overall numbers remained dour.
This year’s survey found 69% of students supported shouting down a campus speaker, down from a record-high 72% last year.
Half supported physically blocking access to a campus speech, down from 54% last year, and 30% supported using violence to stop it, down from 34% last year.
Attorney Gail Heriot, a senior scholar at the conservative Manhattan Institute, noted that all three readings were nevertheless 11 to 17 percentage points higher than in 2020, “when woke fever was supposedly at its height.
“Many people think the woke era is over,” said Ms. Heriot, a former independent member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. “It’s a comforting thought, but it’s not entirely true.”
Only 24 campuses received a C or better in this year’s FIRE rankings.
FIRE ranked the University of Chicago as the best campus for free speech due to its stance of institutional neutrality toward politics.
California’s Claremont McKenna College and the Georgia Institute of Technology came in second and third, respectively, for similar reasons.
But all three received only a B- grade.
“Thus, even the ’best’ schools for free speech still have plenty of work to do to create a truly open environment for expression on their campuses,” the report concluded.
Tim Cain, a University of Georgia professor of higher education, advised taking the annual rankings with a grain of salt because they “are somewhat idiosyncratic” and examine only a small fraction of the millions of students studying at over 5,000 colleges nationwide.
“They capture a variety of things and largely ignore others that are just as important, including state-sponsored censorship in the college classroom,” Mr. Cain said in an email.
His campus received a D and placed 97th in this year’s rankings, reflecting what FIRE described as basic openness to hot-button issues but a lack of clear policies supporting its commitments.
Peter Wood, president of the conservative National Association of Scholars, countered that the left’s growing willingness to “excuse murder” poses a bigger threat to free speech than disciplining professors who went right up to the line of celebrating Kirk’s death.
“The celebration of violence when it is used to advance a claim of ’social justice’ is increasingly undermining the rule of law,” said Mr. Wood, a former associate provost at Boston University. “Colleges seem to be where these ideas are formed and spread.”
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