The Campus Free Speech Wars Are Over. MAGA Won.

A new batch of documents published by The Chronicle of Higher Education reveals widespread censorship of course content at Texas A&M, one of many public universities where MAGA politicians—not faculty and department heads—now determine what can and can’t be taught. It is the latest example, among many since President Trump’s reelection, that the campus free speech wars of a decade ago are now over. The right has won. Following the passage of a Texas law that requires governing boards to review academic programs—one of several state laws based on Trump’s January 2025 executive orders against “gender ideology” and diversity, equity, and inclusion—Texas A&M is subjecting course titles, descriptions, and syllabuses to an opaque review process to decide which courses will go forward and which will be canceled. For the coming fall semester, 45 courses were referred from an initial review committee to the university president’s office for a final decision, of which 31 were approved as “exceptions,” eight were approved under conditions of specifying or removing reading materials, and two—an English course on “LGBTQ Literatures” and a Women’s and Gender Studies introduction to “LGBTQ Studies”—were denied outright and removed from the curriculum. A similar process is unfolding at Auburn University, where faculty received a form referencing Alabama legislation that bans public universities from teaching “divisive concepts,” again based on anti-DEI directives from the Trump White House. When a sociology course on “Crime and Justice in America” drew the ire of conservative website 1819 News and then Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville (“ZERO REASON taxpayer funds should go to teaching our students to HATE law and order. Woke indoctrination has NO PLACE in Alabama or our taxpayer-funded universities”), the sociology professor was removed from the course. Unlike Texas A&M, where the president ultimately makes the decision, Auburn puts the onus on faculty to self-police their courses to remain in compliance with a state law forbidding the teaching of “divisive concepts.” As the Chronicle reports, an Auburn geosciences professor said of the course surveillance forms, “in terms of feeling like you are free to do your job—following scientific rigor, academic rigor, all of that—instead you have to think about the political ramifications of what you’re doing.”Surveillance and censorship of faculty is not confined to large, land-grant universities or Southern states. At West Point, Tim Bakken, the academy’s longest-serving law professor, has brought a lawsuit against his employer for its adoption of Trump administration directives that, Bakken claims, “chill and suppress speech and censor viewpoints that might be contrary to the views” of West Point, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Trump. The Washington Post recounted a chilling scene in which Bakken arose in a faculty meeting to speak against the policy of requiring faculty members to get administrative approval for giving talks and publishing their work. “Stop talking,” said a deputy department head who outranks Bakken, “and sit down.”It would be tempting to think all of this is nothing more than the shoe on the other foot. Between 2015 and 2020, conservatives fomented a national panic over the idea that left-wing college students and professors had turned universities into places of censorship and ideological intolerance. After Yale students protested against a professor over her response to a campus-wide directive about offensive Halloween costumes, The Wall Street Journal editorial board called them “little Robespierres”—a reference to the French revolutionary whose eighteenth-century Reign of Terror led to some 17,000 executions. In 2021, New York Times columnist Brett Stephens compared a ham-fisted bias training at Smith College to Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution in China, whose violent purges resulted in death tolls estimated between one and two million.Centrist commentators embraced such right-wing characterizations of students and faculty as coddled authoritarians who couldn’t live with speech they didn’t like and would resort to violence to stop it. Jonathan Chait, writing for New York magazine, compared campus “political correctness” with Marxist authoritarianism, adding, “American political correctness has obviously never perpetrated the brutality of a communist government, but it has also never acquired the powers that come with full control of the machinery of the state.” For Chait, the college campus was an experimental window into a dark future, a place where “the p.c. left can muster the strength to impose its political hegemony upon others” because of its institutional dominance. At the time, many of us argued in response that although left-wing college students and faculty could be wrongheaded and intolerant, most campus free speech controversies were either actual debates involving speech on all sides—with ordinary social consequences—or debates about access to platforms, not access to free speech as such.But we also saw unfolding a greater and more dangerous threat to free speech. By pushing hyperbolic portrayals of the campus left as budding murderous authoritarians, the right was normalizing grounds for its own exercises in violent repression. Surveillance and attack-dog organizations, like Turning Point USA, created “watchlists” to publicize (and sensationalize) professors’ statements and courses, leading to intimidation and death threats. Armed, reactionary militia groups began taking up the mantle of defenders of free speech and “Western values,” turning up at campus events with the aim of provoking students and left-wing agitators into violence. All of this amounted to a twofold assault from the right on free speech itself, albeit one couched as a necessary response to left-wing overreach: First, portray the critical but protected speech of a left majority on campus—student protests, open letters, denials of speaking platforms—as suppression of free speech akin to authoritarianism; then, with that bad-faith characterization as an excuse, rachet up efforts to silence those students—through threats of violence, if necessary—and claim to be defending free speech. It’s clear now, if it wasn’t then, that the right was always the biggest threat to free speech. The MAGA-pilled Republican Party has moved at the federal and state levels to censor the very content of what professors can teach and students can learn. In some cases, the Trump administration has gone even further to silence speech. A Tufts University student was arrested by masked federal agents, detained for weeks, then forced to “self-deport” for writing a pro-Palestinian column in the student newspaper; a Georgetown professor was arrested and jailed for also expressing pro-Palestinian views.No exaggeration is necessary here. We can now see the difference between students contesting speech—that is, open debates about the value of certain speech on campus—and real authoritarian suppression of speech, because the latter is happening every day in America. No longer are we using censorship as a metaphor for when a marketplace of ideas picks winners and losers, nor authoritarianism as a hypothetical. The MAGA right has the power to legislate and otherwise enforce censorship on campus, and that’s exactly what it’s doing. Of course, this Trump-led crackdown on free speech extends well beyond campus too. ICE protesters have been arrested and in some cases imprisoned. Vice President JD Vance fueled a witch hunt that led to more than 145 people being fired for protected speech criticizing Charlie Kirk, the Turning Point USA leader who was murdered. Journalists have been barred from the halls of power in Washington, subjected to federal investigations, and even arrested and charged with bogus crimes. And so on.It wasn’t very long ago that the right at least pretended to care about First Amendment freedoms. That pretense is out the window. The MAGA assault on free speech is unlike anything we’ve seen since at least the McCarthy era, but it’s also the kind of slow-building political story that we can too easily lose track of amid the daily chaos of the Trump administration. The story is now too big to be ignored: The Republicans are against liberty. They do not believe in freedom. They are enemies of the First Amendment, on and off campus.