Dartmouth rose 29 spots to sixth place in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s 2027 College Free Speech Rankings, up from 35th last year and 224th in 2024.
FIRE is a nonprofit free speech advocacy organization that annually ranks colleges on university speech policies and speech-related controversies, including censorship, based on student survey responses. This year, FIRE and College Pulse — an online survey and analytics company — surveyed 62,997 students across 262 colleges and universities, including 181 Dartmouth students, between Jan. 2 and June 3.
Dartmouth earned a score of 76.96 out of 100 and a C+ speech climate grade, placing it first among Ivy League institutions.
FIRE attributed Dartmouth’s improvement to gains in students’ comfort expressing ideas, openness, lower reported self-censorship and greater confidence in administrators, as well as changes to the College’s formal speech policies and a reduced penalty associated with the College’s 2024 postponement of a Geisel School of Medicine lecture on health and human rights in Gaza. The FIRE website claims that there have been no speech controversies at the College. The organization did not classify the May 1, 2024 protest on the Green, during which police arrested 89 students, faculty, staff and community members, as a speech controversy in the 2027 ranking.
The rise comes after several years in which free expression has become a priority of College administrators — and a source of campus debate. In December 2024, Dartmouth adopted its institutional restraint policy, under which College leaders and academic departments are directed to refrain from issuing statements on political and social issues unless they relate to Dartmouth’s mission. The College revised its Freedom of Expression and Dissent policy in April 2025 to strengthen protections for student expression and distinguish protected speech from disruptive conduct.
Those reforms helped Dartmouth receive full formal policy credit from FIRE. The College also maintained FIRE’s “green light” rating for its written speech policies — making Dartmouth the only Ivy League institution with that designation. A green-light rating indicates that FIRE does not consider a school’s written policies to seriously threaten student expression.
FIRE president and chief executive officer Greg Lukianoff, who received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Dartmouth in June, wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth that the College’s 29-place rise should not be interpreted as a precise measurement of how much campus culture changed. Instead, he said the rankings are a “useful way of tracking a university’s direction over time.”
Philosophy professor Samuel Levey, who chaired the faculty Committee on Freedom of Expression and Dissent, which reviewed the College’s free expression policies and recommended revisions, said the College’s revised speech policies may provide important protections without necessarily producing an immediate shift in campus culture.
“Those are guardrails around free speech,” Levey said. “Those don’t constitute a free speech climate.”
Lukianoff said Dartmouth’s changes in student responses provide stronger evidence of improvement.
“A university can change a policy relatively quickly; changing whether students feel comfortable speaking their minds is harder,” Lukianoff wrote.
Dartmouth also rose from 221st to 47th in FIRE’s “Comfort Expressing Ideas” category this year. Sixty-two percent of surveyed Dartmouth students said they would feel comfortable expressing a controversial political opinion in a class discussion, compared with 53% nationally.
The College also rose from 178th to 33rd in FIRE’s “Openness” category, which measures which topics students perceive as difficult to discuss honestly on campus. The Israel-Palestine conflict was the most frequently identified “difficult topic” nationwide. Sixty-three percent of Dartmouth respondents selected it, compared with 50% nationally.
Vice president for institutional case management and community support Kristi Clemens, who formerly served as the inaugural executive director of Dartmouth Dialogues, said the College’s improvement reflects several years of institutional efforts.
“I think that the improvement in our FIRE rankings is the culmination of commitments Dartmouth has made over the past few years, not just last year,” Clemens wrote in a statement to The Dartmouth.
Clemens described Dartmouth Dialogues as a “culture change initiative” centered on “skill building, role modeling and expectation setting through clear policies.”
Clemens transitioned to her current position in July. Dartmouth has since launched a national search for the next executive director of Dartmouth Dialogues.
Despite improvements in several categories, Dartmouth’s “political tolerance” score declined this year. FIRE measures political tolerance by asking students whether six hypothetical controversial speakers should be permitted to speak on campus, regardless of whether respondents agree with them. Dartmouth ranked 23rd nationally on the measure but received an F.
For example, 27% of Dartmouth respondents said they would allow a speaker who calls Black Lives Matter a hate group, while 61% would allow a speaker who calls the Catholic Church a “pedophilic institution.”
Lukianoff wrote that the decline was particularly pronounced in tolerance of right-leaning speakers.
“This isn’t unique to Dartmouth: Dartmouth did very badly here, but so did most schools,” he wrote. “These changes suggest an environment where the administration is making positive policy changes, but cultural problems … related to student desire for open debate at Dartmouth are bad and worsening.”
Dartmouth Political Union president Roger Friedlander ’27, who worked as an administrative intern at FIRE this summer but said he did not work on the College Free Speech Rankings, said the College’s improvements in students’ comfort expressing controversial views and willingness to engage in campus dialogue align with what he has observed at the DPU, a nonpartisan student organization that hosts political speakers and debates.
“We’re noticing more individuals coming from different parts of campus,” Friedlander said of attendance at DPU meetings and events. “The conversations are really engaging. Students feel like they’re learning, even if they end up disagreeing with the outcome that’s reached in meetings.”
The DPU does not collaborate with FIRE on its survey.
FIRE also found that Dartmouth students became somewhat less accepting of disruptive responses to campus speakers. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said shouting down a speaker is at least rarely acceptable, down from 74% last year.
Twenty-one percent of Dartmouth students said using violence to stop a campus speech could be acceptable in at least rare circumstances. That figure was nearly unchanged from 20% last year.
Dartmouth also improved in FIRE’s self-censorship category, rising from 130th to 49th. Forty-three percent of respondents said they at least occasionally felt unable to express their opinion because of how other students, professors or administrators might respond, down from 51% last year.
Levey questioned whether all behavior captured by “self-censorship” necessarily reflects fear of social or institutional consequences. Students may also withhold an opinion because they are uncertain about its merits, he said.
“The real trick of being an academic institution that is in the business of expression and ideas is that you need to send two signals that are sometimes hard to hold together,” Levey said. “One is that every point of view is welcome on campus, and it’s not true that all ideas are equal.”
Levey said generative AI may be another factor affecting students’ confidence in expressing their own ideas.
“Students are losing confidence in their own thinking, writing, reading abilities,” Levey said. “And that has made me wonder whether it’s making them start to be a little less confident about speaking up.”
Administrative support remained Dartmouth’s weakest survey category, improving from 190th to 148th. Seventy-five percent of respondents said it was at least somewhat clear that administrators protect free speech, compared with 82% nationally.
Levey said the disparity may reflect lingering distrust stemming from the May 1 arrests.
“I suspect that we’ve got a community that right now is pretty skeptical about its own administration’s forthrightness about what they’re saying and doing,” he said. “Frankly, the administration’s got to earn that trust back.”
Government professor and Polarization Research Lab director Sean Westwood offered a more affirmative assessment of Dartmouth’s results.
“The American public is deeply worried about the integrity, biases, and future of higher education,” Westwood wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth. “This shows not only that Dartmouth is taking these concerns seriously, but that we are leading the way for the other Ivies.”
He added that he has “never been prouder to work for Dartmouth.”
Haley S. Rodriguez ’29 is a reporter with roots in New York City. She is studying history and biology and enjoys long-distance running, reading and sailing.
