Harvard University has again been ranked as the country’s worst school for free speech following an extremely divisive year on campus with protests amid the Israel-Hamas war.

The Cambridge campus is this year’s bottom-ranked school for free speech for the second year in a row, according to the rankings from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). Harvard has an “Abysmal” speech climate and received the lowest score possible of 0.00, FIRE said in the report.

The other schools in the bottom five are Columbia University, New York University, University of Pennsylvania, and Barnard College.

“Why do the schools in the bottom five do so poorly? For starters, they each experienced a number of controversies in which expression was censored, suppressed, or shouted down,” the FIRE report reads.

“For instance, since 2020 we documented 20 speech controversies at Harvard that resulted in a deplatforming, a scholar sanction, a student sanction, or an attempted disruption of an event,” the report states.

In terms of political tolerance, students at the bottom five schools are considerably more willing than students at the top five schools to allow controversial liberal speakers on campus. They are considerably less willing to allow controversial conservative speakers on campus.

The free speech nonprofit surveyed college undergraduates about their perceptions and experiences regarding free speech on their campuses.

This year’s survey includes 58,807 student respondents from more than 250 colleges and universities.

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So how do other colleges in Massachusetts rank in the FIRE free speech report?

Worcester Polytechnic Institute had the highest ranking (46th overall) with a 54.55 average score. Then UMass Amherst came in 106th overall with a 49.58 average score. Amherst College across town was ranked 124th overall with a 47.65 average score.

Wellesley College came in 142nd overall with a 45.60 average score. Williams College had a slightly below-average score of 43.97, coming in 156th overall. Wheaton College was also ranked slightly below average, with a 43.84 score in 158th overall.

Boston University and MIT were also in the slightly below-average group. BU was ranked 162nd overall with a 43.49 score, and MIT was ranked 164th overall with a 43.32 score.

Northeastern University and Smith College were the next Bay State schools in the slightly below-average category. Northeastern was ranked 178th overall with a 42.08 score, and Smith College was ranked 179th overall with a 41.97 score.

Tufts University and Boston College round out the slightly below-average group. Tufts was ranked 182nd overall with a 41.60 score, and BC was ranked 189th overall with a 40.76 score.

Mount Holyoke College was the first local school to get ranked below average. Mount Holyoke came in 207th overall with a 38.11 score. Clark University was also below average in 214th overall with a 37.08 score.

Brandeis University was also below average in 231st overall with a 31.96 score. And finally, Harvard comes in last place, 251st overall, with a 0.00 abysmal rating.