More than half of US college students say controversial speakers should be banned from their campuses, with a record-high number adding that violence is acceptable to stop them, a disturbing study shows.

The results provide a dangerous and “sobering picture” of cancel culture on US campuses, according to the expansive six-year study of almost 300,000 college undergraduates nationwide by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

“The atmosphere isn’t just cautious — it’s hostile,” the study’s authors wrote. “Students continue to show low tolerance for controversial speakers, and troublingly, more believe it’s acceptable to shout down a speaker, block access to events, or even resort to violence to silence campus speech than ever before.”

The surveyed students were given six controversial topics — three conservative and three liberal — and asked if someone should be allowed to speak on campus about those subjects,

Only a quarter of the students last year said they would allow speakers to say transgender people have a mental disorder, which was down from roughly a third in 2024.

The percentage of students who would “permit” speakers to say, “Black Lives Matter is a hate group” also fell from roughly one third to one quarter between 2024 and 2025, the data shows.

Around 40% of students said speakers should be allowed to say, “Abortion should be completely illegal,” down from around 45% in the study.

Controversial left-wing talking points, including calling the Catholic Church “a pedophilic institution,” describing the police as “just as racist” as the KKK and saying children “should be able to transition” without parental consent also saw decreasing tolerance among students between 2024 and 2025.

The percentage of students who supported disruptive or even violent tactics to suppress controversial speakers meanwhile went up between 2021 and 2025.

An astonishing 34% of students nationally believe violence is acceptable to stop a campus speech, up from 20% in 2022. 

More than half of students, or 54%, support blocking others from attending a campus speech, while almost three-quarters, 71%, call for shouting down a speaker they don’t like.

The top 10 most intolerant campuses were predominantly in one state: Massachusetts, the survey added.

Conservative views are most under attack on college campuses, according to an interpretation of the data by the Missing Data Depot.

The three most intolerant undergraduate bodies to conservative views were all at liberal arts colleges in Massachusetts, with Mount Holyoke College seeing 80.5% who supported barring all three controversial topics from campus.

Smith College was second, followed by Wellesley College, with 79.6 and 75.5% of undergraduates, respectively, supporting the barring of the three opinions.

Occidental College, a California liberal arts college, was fourth at 73.6%, followed by the University of Rochester in New York with 73.3%.

The rest of the top 10 most intolerant campuses included two more in Massachusetts, with Wheaton College and Clark University taking sixth and seventh place respectively, followed by two more California Institutions, Pitzer College and Scripps College.

Oberlin College in Ohio also made the top 10 list.

Michigan Tech was the most tolerant campus, with just 26.2% of its undergrads supporting banning all three conservative topics, followed closely by Kansas State at 29.5% and Montana State with 29.6%.

Ivy League institutions were also well represented in terms of tolerance, with Princeton, Stanford and Harvard all featuring in the top 10.

The University of Wyoming, Iowa State, Washington and Lee in Virginia and Utah State made up the rest of the top 10 most tolerant campuses.

Unsurprisingly, the study found that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was the most controversial topic in 2025, with 53% of students nationally admitting to expressing difficulty discussing it.

Abortion was the second most controversial, with 46% expressing difficulty, followed by the 2024 presidential election at 42%, transgender rights with 41% and racial inequality coming in at 34%

“Students are reluctant to speak their minds, especially on controversial political issues,” the study said. “Many report that they self-censor regularly, avoid certain topics entirely, and doubt their administrators would defend free expression if controversy struck.”