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While students at Wake Forest University are barely into the fall semester, their campus has already been handed a grade — an F.
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For the fifth year in a row, the university’s campus speech climate received a failing grade from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE. It’s the only North Carolina school in FIRE’s 2027 College Free Speech Rankings to do so poorly. Its score did, however, improve between this year and last.
Elsewhere in the state, FIRE considers students to be among the most empowered in the nation. Appalachian State University in Boone came in at No. 8 overall in the ranking of more than 260 college campuses.
FIRE surveyed nearly 63,000 students to come up with its scores. It asked students how comfortable they are expressing their ideas, whether they tend to self-censor, how they feel about “disruptive conduct” being used to shut down events, whether they believe administrators want to protect their freedom of speech, how difficult certain topics are to discuss, and whether they’d be willing to welcome liberal and conservative speakers to campus.
The most controversial topics on American campuses, according to the report, are the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, abortion, transgender rights and immigration.
App State told The News & Observer in a statement that the school is “committed to advancing free speech and free expression across our campuses, and our focus remains on the continuous work ahead.”
Wake Forest did not respond to a request for comment.
Here are FIRE’s grades for all the North Carolina schools in the report. The average score for campuses this year was a D-, so while these aren’t grades a student might be overjoyed to see on a test, many of them are above FIRE’s average.
Five of them landed in the top 20 out of 261 schools.
According to FIRE, “the [overall] findings suggest some improvement in campus free speech climates, while also showing that many students still report difficulty discussing controversial topics and remain skeptical of allowing controversial speakers on campus.”
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For Duke law professor Jeff Powell, who is a member of FIRE, the grades are “very harsh” but he thinks “that’s a good thing.”
Powell says that because the rankings take into consideration the opinions of the most vulnerable members of the university community, they “may overstate the extent to which freedom of speech is being hampered.” But he says he doesn’t “disapprove of that, because freedom of speech needs to work for everybody.”
“We should lean over in the direction of freedom of speech and freedom of thought,” he said. “I’m embarrassed for Duke.”
The University of Chicago ranks first in FIRE’s scores, while New York University ranks last.
North Carolina receives a stray mention in the section of FIRE’s report detailing an incident at Texas State University from 2025, in the report’s section on “speech controversies and outcomes at lowest-ranked schools.”
“Idris Robinson, a professor of philosophy [at Texas State], was first placed on leave and then later informed his contract would not be renewed nearly a year after he was accused on social media for inciting violence by delivering a talk titled ‘Strategic Lessons from the Palestinian Resistance’ at the Another Carolina Anarchist Book Fair in Asheville, North Carolina,” the report reads.
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This story was originally published September 9, 2026 at 9:24 AM.