Greg Lukianoff at The Dispatch:
For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or—least of all—among administrators in higher education.
In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure. The federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech. In the data my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tracks—our Students Under Fire database—incidents involving censorship attempts from politicians or government officials jumped to roughly a third of all cases this year. In 2024, those incidents didn’t crack double digits.
It’s just as bad for faculty. This year, a record 525 Scholar Under Fire incidents occurred, far eclipsing the previous high of 203 in 2021. One mass-censorship incident at the U.S. Naval Academy accounts for almost three-fifths of the entries. However, even if we treat this event as a single incident, 2025 was still a record year in our Scholars Under Fire database, with 216 entries. Worse, from 2000 through the end of 2024, we recorded 102 entries with politicians as one of the sources of a cancellation campaign. This year alone, we recorded 114.
This produces the bleakest speech landscape imaginable: Government pressure is skyrocketing, while the internal campus coalition that helped create this vulnerability in the first place hasn’t disappeared—creating a worst-of-both-worlds squeeze on the expressive rights of students and faculty.