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.

RELATED: Liberals’ twisted views on Charlie Kirk assassination, censorship captured by a damning poll

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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.

RELATED: Teenager sues high school after tribute to Charlie Kirk was called vandalism

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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.