Over the past decade, many professors have lived in the fear of progressive beliefs about challenges in elite college campuses, which is often gained religious status, as linguist John McWhorter believes. Saying the wrong thing, or liking the wrong social media posts, especially if a vocal member of an inappropriate minority like Jews can cause peer rejection, and even a Twitter mob asks for a termination, followed by a star-sum hearing led by an unacceptable administrator.
This is an inevitable result of the concepts that constitute “hazardousness” and various ideologies (racism, gender discrimination, etc.). The authorization for universities to investigate allegations of “hazardousness” or “bias” inevitably inspires some progressives who are overnumbered in academia to allow bureaucratic procedures to arm their condemnation, demonize and punish those they believe are violating divine values. Greg Lukianoff, chairman of the Foundation for Personal Rights and Expression, reported that in 2014-2023, more professors committed “crimes” than the entire McCarthy era.
A 2024 fire teacher survey found that 14% of approximately 5,000 respondents reported that their institutions were disciplined or threatened for their teaching, research or other remarks. If this reaction generalizes the population of U.S. faculty, it means that tens of thousands of such surveys (or threats) have been conducted over the past decade.
Fear is unequal, much more than liberals who report self-censorship. American universities have suffered a decade of cancellation, termination, harassment, and even the most left-wing strange death threats.
Fear of fairness?
Now, thanks to the Trump administration (which we think is doubtful) policies regarding general and elite institutions such as academic institutions such as Columbia and Harvard, many believe that these policies are political revenge on leftist radicalism, and higher education is rapidly approaching Fear of fairness: The presidential right joined the campus, using intimidation to punish those who don’t like speeches. Now everyone in academia is afraid of being cancelled, or at least cancelled the grant. Non-citizen students and faculty must also worry about being expelled to express the Trump administration’s opposition. Conservative and centrist scholars still have good reasons to worry about their colleagues and students since 2014, but now progressive peers have similar reasons to worry about what will happen next in Washington.
Is this an opportunity for free speech advocates? At first glance, it seems that there is no. Solutions to the protective erosion of heterogeneous freedom of speech and academic freedom may not be a retaliatory limit on progressive speech. This is the path to expanding authoritarianism and eroding the free speech environment for everyone, and the current Washington leader seems to be welcomed.
Academic failure to protect non-progressive speeches
Still, it is bad for academia to limit the record of scrutiny from its rankings over the past decade. The American Association of University Professors, once a nonpartisan bastion of censorship, abandoned the principle support for freedom of speech, focusing almost exclusively on the threat to the right, and in higher education, our (and AAUP) main focus, most censorship comes from the left. The latest statement from AAUP acknowledges the use of DEI standards in recruitment and promotion and the legitimacy of academic resistance appear to be to consolidate progressive orthodoxy for professors.
In just a few months, President Trump has proved the AAUP position of “freedom of speech to me, but not for you”, as Nat Hentoff put it. Of course, it remains to be seen whether AAUP will interpret it as “taking a principled stance of speech and academic freedom for all our teachers” rather than “Trump is the embodiment of evil, so we should redouble our efforts to impose progressive politics).
Freedom of speech on campus has been disastrous over the past decade. As Jake Mackey, a professor at Western University and co-founder of Free Black Thought, wrote recently in “The Last Four Years Are the Most Repressed Life of My Life”, “The fear of revenge from the left, not the fascist leaders, has made me awake at night, which has made me more misunderstood than I think about my misunderstanding of the class, I have opposed me and canceled my campaign.
Sean Stevens and his co-authors in a chapter in our co-edited book, the voting data proves this Free file query (AEI Publishing House,,,,, 2025). Conservative professors are more than twice as likely to report self-censorship than free peers. This is a reasonable response to the report, suggesting that within academia, “cancel” attacks (to punish teachers’ speeches) are more likely to come from their left than on the right. Adventures are usually not worth it.
There is also evidence that the possibility of support for censorship and anti-Semitism is spread to some extent through dark foreign donations. A 2024 report, one of us (Jusim) co-wrote the report, found that the university reported billions of dollars in funding from foreign sources (disclosed after the Ministry of Education investigation). Worse, the acquisition of authoritarian regimes and funding from the OIC member states is linked to the deterioration of freedom of expression and the intensification of anti-Semitism on campus.
Follow-up studies ongoing are examining the hypothesis that this foreign financial aid helps organise anti-Israel student groups and the entire academic sector. As Lukinov reported in the recent censorship at the University of Southern California at a science conference, protests by such groups are almost “fully responsible” for the 2024 campus speaker interruption, which he called “we’re the worst year in the history of campus displatformmpormenting called “we know.” (To the credit, the fire protected the right to support Israeli spokespersons.)
It is worth noting that some campuses with free speech are much worse than others. A fire teacher survey released last December showed that at least 63% of Colombian teachers reported self-censorship. They believe that the Israel-Hamas conflict is the most difficult issue to discuss on campus, followed by affirmative action. There is no doubt that the most left has imposed a regime of condemnation and fear on many university campuses.
Trump’s attack on freedom of speech and academic freedom
But under President Trump, rights make up for wasted time. The Trump administration’s attempt to cut the cost of grants could be seen as a real attempt to reduce wasted taxes. However, given that they did not report any analysis of the indirect usage, many viewed this as a direct attack aimed at reducing the academic community to the scale of their leftist politics. The government has also cut academic research on topics related to diversity, equity, bias, inequality and oppression by funding nearly all grants to study these important issues. Although faculty and staff are not entitled to funding from federal grants, and the federal government has legal funding priorities, the Trump administration has also tried to ban any funding on the subject of owning a DEI program, which the university owns a DEI program, which believes the program is involved in discrimination. These policies will relax academic discourse.
Furthermore, even if ultimately considered legal (we suspect), the Trump administration’s deportation target was an immigrant who allegedly expressed support for Hamas, further delaying strong exchanges of ideas on campus. These efforts are being successful; the rapid surrender of institutions in Colombia such as Trump’s demands has been called the “Grand Grode” politics.
Rediscovering principled defenses for speech and academic freedom
Is it possible that the new fear of equality is afraid of speaking out their own thoughts, and is this a necessary prerequisite for paving the way for the free speech Renaissance? There is a historical precedent for this possibility. This would be a mirror image of the McCarthy era crackdown that laid the foundation for a series of Supreme Court cases that dramatically enhanced the legal protection of freedom of speech. However, judges cannot be everywhere, and litigation cannot change the culture.
Now, censorship is both parties, with incentives on both sides rediscovering the principled defense of freedom of speech, including opponents. As James Madison consulted in federal paper No. 51, the best protection of freedom is self-interest, and now, in terms of freedom of speech, all parties have it. In addition, take a more positive view, centered on political education, which may threaten your own speech, or the speech of allies, and then fully understand the value of constitutional protection of freedom of speech and institutional protection of academic freedom.
Action agenda
How to revitalize a culture of free and open inquiry, debate and speech on American university campuses? a lot of. Last year, as reported here, House Republicans passed a terrible title (“End Higher Education Act”), but conceptually, the Campus Free Speech Act prohibits ideological testamentary testing in teacher recruitment and institutional certification to protect the rights of faith-based groups to protect their membership and to determine that within a conservative scope, in a conservative scope, ensure that “conservative scope” or “conservative scope” is guaranteed. Pro-Palestinian speaker. Only four Democrats voted for Yea, and the Democratic Senate at the time had no interest. (To be fair, the House bill passed after the end of the congressional session.) Utah Republican sponsor Burgess Owens is expected to reintroduce the bill and give the House, Senate and Democrats a newly discovered Republican majority on free speech that should improve its passing prospects.
However, federal legislation can never solve the entire problem. Norms and social practice are more important than laws that establish a culture of free speech on campus. What can higher education institutions do to strengthen the intellectual culture of freedom to reverse discourse, inquire and debate? First, they can make formal statements about their commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom, such as the Chicago Principles or the Princeton Principles.
Second, campuses can limit the bureaucratic over-the-country of DEI bureaucracy and institutional review committees, both of which can threaten and erode teachers’ free expression. Third, the best way to limit the excessiveness of existing bureaucratic units may sometimes be to create another bureaucratic unit to explicitly design for this. An office designed to ensure that faculty rights are not violated by DEI units, IRBs, chairs, deans or anyone else, may be of great help in protecting faculty.
We hope that a profound and principled commitment to freedom of speech and academic freedom will become the font of this reform. But if the only way we get reform is through fear fairness, we will accept it.
