Columbia University and Harvard University both saw some of the most fiery anti-Israel protests at the end of the last school year, and a new report ranks them as the worst colleges for free speech.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), a First Amendment advocacy group, and College Pulse released its 2025 college free speech rankings, as students return to campus for the new school year. The rankings were compiled with 58,000 student responses, from more than 250 colleges across the country, according to FIRE.

The University of Virginia, Michigan Technological University, and Florida State University, were rated as the top three best colleges for free speech, while Harvard, Columbia, and New York University were ranked as the bottom three.

All three schools in the bottom three had significant protests, which, in many instances, blocked access to parts of campus and, in some cases, led to violent confrontations with police. At Columbia University, as classes returned from summer, so too did anti-Israel protests, offering a possible preview for the coming months as the war in Gaza continues.

“The Middle East crisis plunged campuses into absolute chaos last academic year and administrators largely failed in their response, clamping down on free speech protections instead of fostering spaces for open dialogue,” FIRE CEO Greg Lukianoff said in a statement.

“The nightmare scenarios of last spring cannot be repeated this fall. Colleges need to reassert their mantle of being marketplaces of ideas, not bubbles of groupthink and censorship,” he added.

Harvard, Columbia, and New York University were all rated as having an “abysmal” speech climate, with the former two receiving overall scores of 0.00 on a scale from 0 to 100 for speech climate. The University of Pennsylvania and Barnard College rounded out the bottom five, with FIRE finding that the low-ranking campuses have low administrative support for free speech.

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“The lack of administrative support for free speech trickles down into student behavior,” FIRE Vice President of Research Angela C. Erickson said in a statement. “How many more students will be blocked from attending speeches, and how many more speakers will be shouted down or even attacked?

“These aren’t just statistics: We’ve seen the names and faces of people who are hurt when a campus is hostile to free speech,” she added.