The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has released its 2025 college free speech rankings, and Stony Brook University’s position on the list has dropped significantly since last year.

FIRE’s free speech rankings, conducted annually since 2020, use survey data collected from undergraduate students through College Pulse. This year’s survey was taken by 58,807 undergraduate students attending 257 colleges and universities across the United States (U.S.). In order to rank colleges, FIRE created a composite score for each school based on 14 different categories, including administrative support for free speech and tolerance for speakers on campus with controversial views.

In the 2024 rankings, Stony Brook was ranked 67 out of 248; in the 2025 rankings, Stony Brook dropped 65 places to 132 out of 251. In the 2024 rankings, FIRE gave Stony Brook an overall score of 53 out of 100. That score dropped to 46.96 out of 100 for the 2025 rankings.

Sean Stevens, FIRE’s chief research advisor, said that one of the reasons the University had been penalized in their rankings was because members of the administration had pressured SB4Palestine, the group that has organized many of the on-campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas war, into removing any association to the University from their Instagram profile.

“This year, they got penalized for [how they treated SB4Palestine] … administrators pressured them to remove any association with the University from their Instagram account,” Stevens said. “There’s a penalty for that.”

Stevens also specified that the category Stony Brook saw the biggest drop in with the data collected by FIRE was administrative behavior and that the administration pressuring SB4Palestine had likely raised enough questions about the University’s support of free speech that it reflected in the survey data collected by the organization.

“I don’t presume every Stony Brook student is aware of that incident, but I’m going to presume that enough of them are, so it shows up in ways where there are questions about the administration,” he said.

In a statement sent to The Statesman by a University spokesperson, officials emphasized that the school supports free speech and praised the student body for expressing their viewpoints through peaceful means.

“Over the past year, our campus witnessed numerous peaceful demonstrations and discussions on a wide variety of topics, reflecting an engaged and diverse intellectual community,” officials wrote. “We consider this constructive dialogue vital to our educational mission and commend our students for their thoughtful participation and dedication to respectful dialogue.”

This year, FIRE also published a separate report on the encampments that took place on college campuses during the spring 2024 semester. Data for this report was collected using College Pulse from 3,803 undergraduates attending 30 different colleges.

10 of those colleges were randomly selected from schools that didn’t have an encampment or any students arrested, and another 10 were randomly selected schools where an encampment took place but no students were arrested. Nine more schools were randomly selected out of those where both an encampment took place and students were arrested — one of them being Stony Brook.

Columbia University was manually selected to be added to the list of colleges with both encampments and arrests, the report said, because they were the “epicenter” of campus protests related to the Israel-Hamas conflict.

The report found that at schools that had encampment protestors arrested, the number of students who believed their school’s administration supported the right to free speech dropped significantly.

Stevens also shared data specific to Stony Brook with The Statesman, showing how faith that Stony Brook’s administration supported freedom of speech was affected after 29 encampment protesters were arrested in May.

When FIRE first surveyed Stony Brook undergraduates about how clear it was to them that the administration protected free speech on campus, only 18% of students initially responded with “not at all or not very clear.” After the demonstrators were arrested, the percentage of students who chose that same response rose to 40%.

FIRE also asked Stony Brook students about how likely they felt the administration would defend a controversial speaker’s right to express their views on campus. Before the encampment took place, 28% of respondents selected the option “not or all or not very likely,” but after the encampment arrests took place, the percentage of undergraduates who selected that same response increased to 42%.

According to Stevens, this was a recurring pattern on many campuses across the U.S. and not limited to Stony Brook.

“On all these campuses, students are very unhappy with how the administrators reacted to these protests,” he said.