Universities treated free speech as expendable in 2025
The fight over free expression in American higher education reached a troubling milestone in 2025. According to data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, efforts to censor speech on college campuses hit record highs across multiple fronts — and most succeeded.
Let’s start with the raw numbers. In 2025, FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire, Students Under Fire, and Campus Deplatforming databases collectively tracked:
- 525 attempts to sanction scholars for their speech, more than one a day, with 460 of them resulting in punishment.
- 273 attempts to punish students for expression, more than five a week, with 176 of these attempts succeeding.
- 160 attempts to deplatform speakers, about three each week, with 99 of them succeeding.
That’s 958 censorship attempts in total, nearly three per day on campuses across the country. For comparison, FIRE’s next-highest total was 477 two years ago.
The 525 scholar sanction attempts are the highest ever recorded in FIRE’s database, which spans 2000 to the present. Even when a large-scale incident at the U.S. Naval Academy is treated as just a single entry, the 2025 total still breaks records.
The common denominator across these censorship campaigns is not ideology — it’s intolerance.
Twenty-nine scholars were fired, including 18 who were terminated since September for social media comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Student sanction attempts also hit a new high, and deplatforming efforts — our records date back to 1998 — rank third all-time, behind 2023 and 2024.
The problem is actually worse because FIRE’s data undercounts the true scale of campus censorship. Why? The data relies on publicly available information, and an unknown number of incidents, especially those that may involve quiet administrative pressure, never make the public record.
Then there’s the chilling effect.
Scholars are self-censoring. Students are staying silent. Speakers are being disinvited or shouted down. And administrators, eager to appease the loudest voices, are launching investigations and handing out suspensions and dismissals with questionable regard for academic freedom, due process, or free speech.
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Some critics argue that the total number of incidents is small compared to the roughly 4,000 colleges in the country. But this argument collapses under scrutiny.
While there are technically thousands of institutions labeled as “colleges” or “universities,” roughly 600 of them educate about 80% of undergraduates enrolled at not-for-profit four-year schools. Many of the rest of these “colleges” and “universities” are highly specialized or vocational programs. This includes a number of beauty academies, truck-driving schools, and similar institutions — in other words, campuses that aren’t at the heart of the free-speech debate.
These censorship campaigns aren’t coming from only one side of the political spectrum. FIRE’s data shows, for instance, that liberal students are punished for pro-Palestinian activism, conservative faculty are targeted for controversial opinions on gender or race, and speaking events featuring all points of view are targeted for cancellation.
The two most targeted student groups on campus? Students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA. If that doesn’t make this point clear, nothing will.
The common denominator across these censorship campaigns is not ideology — it’s intolerance.
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So where do we go from here?
We need courage: from faculty, from students, and especially from administrators. It’s easy to defend speech when it’s popular. It’s harder when the ideas are offensive or inconvenient. But that’s when it matters most.
Even more urgently, higher education needs a cultural reset. Universities must recommit to the idea that exposure to ideas and speech that one dislikes or finds offensive is not “violence.” That principle is essential for democracy, not just for universities.
This year’s record number of campus censorship attempts should be a wake-up call for campus administrators. For decades, many allowed a culture of censorship to fester, dismissing concerns as overblown, isolated, or a politically motivated myth. Now, with governors, state legislatures, members of Congress, and even the White House moving aggressively to police campus expression, some administrators are finally pushing back. But this pushback from administrators doesn’t seem principled. Instead, it seems more like an attempt to shield their institutions from outside political interference.
That’s not leadership. It’s damage control. And it’s what got higher education into this mess in the first place.
If university leaders want to reclaim their role as stewards of free inquiry, they cannot act just when governmental pressure threatens their autonomy. They also need to be steadfast when internal intolerance threatens their mission. A true commitment to academic freedom means defending expression even when it is unpopular or offensive. That is the price of intellectual integrity in a free society.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Princeton’s president lectures America on free speech — and omits his own failure
At a moment when elite universities are under intense scrutiny for how they handle speech, protest, and ideological conformity, Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber has entered the debate with a defense of the status quo. His new book, “Terms of Respect,” argues that the crisis of free speech on campus has been overstated and that colleges are, in fact, getting it mostly right. The argument is polished, earnest, and in crucial places, deeply evasive.
I have no particular affection for Eisgruber. Still doubt deserves a hearing. In that spirit of restrained generosity, I read “Terms of Respect” with real interest. Would he distinguish himself from the failed presidencies of Claudine Gay, Liz Magill, and Minouche Shafik? Would he say something candid, new, or clarifying about free speech on campus?
Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Eisgruber seems to disagree.
The book is, as expected, careful, lawyerly, and saturated with constitutional doctrine. Eisgruber is a serious scholar and writes like one. His prose is sober, the tone measured, the citations abundant. He spends considerable time walking the reader through legal history before arriving at his central claim: that colleges are not failing at free speech nearly as badly as critics allege. The real problem, he argues, is a broader “civic crisis” afflicting American society.
Free speech, Eisgruber insists, must be understood alongside equality, civility, and respect. Truly constructive speech, he claims, must be both “uncensored and regulated.” Colleges, in his telling, deserve higher marks than they receive.
So far, so plausible.
Then comes chapter four, page 65.
There Eisgruber repeats the long-debunked “very fine people on both sides” libel regarding President Donald Trump’s remarks after the 2017 Charlottesville rally. He cites a New York Times article by Glenn Thrush and Maggie Haberman and reproduces the claim without qualification.
This is not a trivial slip. The full transcript of Trump’s remarks has been publicly available for years. Eisgruber is a constitutional lawyer and university president. He could have made his point without repeating a known falsehood. But apparently the fruit was just too juicy to leave unharvested, so he ventures into the dark land of “lying for justice.”
Why?
The most charitable explanation is tribal comfort. Eisgruber knows that no one within his ideological circle will challenge him for repeating the lie. The same insularity that led Ivy presidents to offer evasive, lawyerly, and absurd testimony before Congress is at work here. Inside the tribe, bureaucratic language suffices. Outside it, in the sunlight, the hubris falls easily to the nemesis of scrutiny.
And Eisgruber is only getting warmed up.
Does he tell the whole truth?
The most consequential failure of “Terms of Respect” is not what Eisgruber says but what he refuses to confront.
Absent from the book is any serious reckoning with the July 4, 2020, Princeton faculty letter — a document signed by roughly 350 professors accusing the university of “rampant” racism and demanding sweeping institutional changes. Among those demands was the creation of a faculty-run “racism tribunal.”
As the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf observed at the time, such a tribunal is inherently incompatible with academic freedom — the very subject of Eisgruber’s book. Friedersdorf contacted signatories and asked them to cite a single instance of “rampant racism” at Princeton over the preceding 15 years. Not one could.
Nevertheless on September 2, 2020, Eisgruber responded by largely capitulating. He validated the accusations, adopted the rhetoric, and opened the gates to the DEI regime now entrenched at Princeton. This was not principled leadership. It was submission under moral intimidation — a textbook example of what psychologists describe as “virtuous victimhood,” a confidence game designed to extract resources by moral threat.
Yet Eisgruber treats this episode as if it never occurred.
That silence is not accidental. It is bureaucratic self-protection.
As literary agent Susan Rabiner has noted, the distinction between lying and withholding the truth is merely technical. Any attempt to cause others to believe something one knows to be untrue is a lie. Eisgruber’s omission of the defining crisis of his presidency is a classic case of lying by omission.
Criticism for thee, not for me
Returning to “Terms of Respect,” we find that Eisgruber does not much care for criticism — especially when it comes from outside the academy. External critics, in his telling, are almost invariably “right-wing.”
He traces this lineage back to William F. Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale” (1951), dismissing it as a “diatribe” that inspired generations of conservative “muckrakers.” He names Campus Reform and the College Fix as exemplars of an “odious strand of pseudojournalism” that ridicules faculty, disproportionately targets women and minorities, and undermines free discourse.
The irony is difficult to miss. Eisgruber decries ridicule while deploying precisely the tactics Saul Alinsky championed in “Rules for Radicals”: personalize, polarize, and delegitimize. He offers exactly one example of this supposed intimidation — nearly a decade old.
Meanwhile he waves away the pervasive ideological capture of higher education as a “myth.”
It is no myth. The evidence is supplied daily by the institutions themselves. Eisgruber either does not know what is happening on his own campus, does not care, or counts himself an ally of the coterie of extremist dullards populating the Princeton bureaucracy now enforcing these programs.
Posturing above the fray
Throughout the book, Eisgruber adopts a posture of measured balance — “on the one hand, on the other.” But the pose does not hold. He speaks the language of civility while excusing coercion. He invokes academic freedom while ignoring its most serious internal threats. He treats accurate reporting on campus excesses as “ugly media frenzies” rather than sunlight.
Justice Louis Brandeis famously argued that sunlight is the best disinfectant. Eisgruber seems to disagree.
In the epilogue, his agenda becomes clearer. Vague invocations of the “shocking rise of white nationalism,” “heartless treatment of undocumented children,” and “anti-LGBTQ+ bigotry” appear, unmoored from specifics and immune to scrutiny. Criticism of his policies is transmuted into moral threat.
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Does this sanctimony disqualify Eisgruber from expressing it? Of course not. But neither does his status shield his arguments from judgment — especially when they rely on half-truths and conspicuous omissions.
The bureaucrat unmasked
In the end, “Terms of Respect” reveals less about free speech than about its author. Eisgruber is not a radical. He is something more familiar: the consummate bureaucrat — fluent in moral rhetoric, insulated from consequence, and committed above all to preserving the system that empowers him.
He resembles the warden of Shawshank Prison, assuring Andy Dufresne that appeals are pointless while maintaining the fiction of order as the institution decays around him.
Instead of “Terms of Respect,” higher education needs more Brandeisian sunlight — and yes, more of the “ugly media frenzies” that unsettle administrators who prefer darkness to accountability.
If that discomfort troubles the wardens of Shawshank University, so be it.
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