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2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction—especially the MAGAverse.
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.
There is a growth sector in American higher education. The number of “Civics Centers” has exploded in the last decade, and especially since 2021.
What are these civics centers, and what explains their proliferation now?
Heterodox Academy (HxA), the leading non-partisan higher education reform organization in the US for faculty, staff and students, championing open inquiry, viewpoint diversity and constructive disagreement, has decided to provide some answers.
In February of this year, a few colleagues and I co-founded a group called Concerned Jewish Faculty & Staff (CJFS), which now has more than 200 members on more than two dozen campuses. Our group, which is predominantly made up of academics at Massachusetts colleges and universities but includes members from across New England, is one of several such efforts nationwide that have coalesced into a new National Campus Jewish Alliance.
We recognize that Jewish safety is inseparable from the safety of all people, and we work to foster academic environments that reduce antisemitism by treating educators as partners, not as suspects.
At the University of North Florida, where I serve as a professor of education, I was told, along with my colleagues, to alter our syllabi to remove the terms “diversity” “equity” “inclusion” and “culture.” “It’s only three or four words,” the university administrators said. “It’s the law and we must follow the law.”
This semester, it became clear to me that Florida universities, and the faculty who teach there, are being muzzled by zealous policy makers and by over-complying administrators. These four words – “diversity,” “equity,” “inclusion,” and “culture” – have been deemed inappropriate as subjects to discuss in a college classroom at University of North Florida. This censorship is a harbinger of what’s to come: a threat to the pursuit of knowledge and academic inquiry everywhere.
The past two years have exposed a fundamental tension in higher education. Most universities are committed to both diversity and free speech, yet many are unable to cope with the social consequences of passionate disagreement.
As protests over Israel and Gaza spread across campuses, administrators called for a return to civility, as though civility were a switch that could be flipped back on. But the confusion, anger, and institutional paralysis that followed suggest that universities aren’t just struggling to maintain civility on campus; they have no consensus about what civility requires.
J.D. Tuccille
Reason
Of all the stupid ideas that have emerged in recent years, there may be none worse than the insistence that unwelcome words are the same as violence. This false perception equates physical acts that can injure or kill people with disagreements and insults that might cause hurt feelings and potentially justifies responding to the latter with the former.
After all, if words are violence, why not rebut a verbal sparring partner with an actual punch? Unfortunately, the idea is embedded on college campuses where a majority of undergraduate students agree that words and violence can be the same thing.
