The vibe shift in campus censorship
TL;DR conservatives have joined the party
For years, most efforts to silence controversial speech on campus came from the left, but new data reveals a startling shift. Increasingly, these efforts are coming from the right — frequently with federal backing.1
Looking at FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire and Students Under Fire databases, Heterodox Academy senior researcher
found that, while censorship attempts from the left have declined, efforts from the right have gone up. Data from FIRE’s College Free Speech Rankings over the past six years, including the forthcoming 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, supports these findings.That said, this year’s spike in efforts from the right, targeting scholars, is largely due to a single event: the Naval Academy’s removal of 381 titles from its library, per a Pentagon directive tied to the Trump administration’s DEI rollback. Most of the titles are by authors who qualify as scholars for FIRE’s database, and almost all were reshelved by late May, after public blowback.2
A similar incident recently took place at George Mason University, where all 55 members of the faculty senate have been placed under investigation by the federal government for drafting a resolution in support for Gregory Washington, the university’s president, who is also under federal investigation for allowing the university to allegedly engage in discriminatory diversity programs.3
This trend is profoundly disturbing, especially given that both these incidents were the direct result of federal government pressure or intervention.
In FIRE’s CFSR survey, students are asked if their school should allow a speaker on campus who has previously expressed a controversial opinion. The survey then lists the following opinions, one at a time, in a randomized order:
Abortion should be completely illegal.
Black Lives Matter is a hate group.
Transgender people have a mental disorder.
The Catholic Church is a pedophilic institution.
The police are just as racist as the Ku Klux Klan.
Children should be able to transition without parental consent.
This year, for the first time ever, at least half the students surveyed oppose allowing any of the above controversial speakers — primarily due to a drop in tolerance among conservative students for the three conservative speakers.
Each year, we’ve also asked students if they would support or oppose allowing controversial speakers on campus, and whether they think it’s acceptable for other students to disrupt a campus speech by shouting down a speaker, blocking entry to the event, or using violence.
The percentage of students saying that it is “never” acceptable to engage in such behavior are all at record lows and, as with political tolerance, this is primarily due to a decline in conservative students who say each behavior is “never” acceptable.
In other words, the vibe shift in campus censorship is real, and free expression is now under threat from both sides.
If American higher education’s commitment to academic freedom is to mean anything, it must defend it against censors of every stripe — especially when that censorship carries the weight of federal power.
To be clear, “from the left” means that even if a controversial student or speaker was on the left themselves, they were more likely to be targeted by someone further to the left than by someone to their political right.
FIRE defends individual rights, therefore we count each scholar as an individual entry, resulting in 111 of the 151 entries recorded in 2025 so far — and we’ve only reviewed about a third of the titles on the list for removal.
 | A guest post by
|
 | A guest post by
|
So now they're all Diogenes with a hammer looking for a nail, and the nail that sticks out will get hammered down. Authoritarian systems work by creating a sufficient climate of fear that people police themselves; the thought police cometh. There is nothing either liberal or conservative in what is happening.
My suspicion is that there's two key factors going on here.
1. Culture war exhaustion. Regardless of one's position on any of these 6 hot button topics, there's an awareness that a prominent guest speaker speaking on it is likely to bring a lot of chaos and disruption and heated divisions to their college. Likely a lot of students simply don't want *the fallout* from people speaking on these topics, regardless of their position on the topic itself.
2. "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Many conservatives feel like being free speech absolutists just leads to them getting the worst of both worlds - their political rivals get to take advantage of their free speech principles while many of their political rivals *also* get to shut down unwanted conservative speech.
An analogy I would use here is a game of sports. Think of uniform free speech absolutism being similar to a ref consistently calling the game with a lot of leeway for both teams - only the most flagrant of violations get penalized. Now, think of Team A enjoying such leeway while the other team (Team B) has the rulebook called very strictly on them. This is obviously to Team B's disadvantage, regardless of how the players feel about how strictly the rules should be followed in an universal sense. "If they refuse to not be strict on our team, then we need to convince the refs to be strict on *both* teams."
Sadly, I think the fight for free speech is going to get increasingly hard in the years to come, as both of the factors I mentioned will play on the minds of many conservative and right-leaning people.