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Greg Lukianoff
The Dispatch
2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades, and that’s because it’s coming from every possible direction—especially the MAGAverse.
For most of my career, the biggest threat to free speech on campus came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish “wrongthink.” The right pushed, too, but those pushes overwhelmingly originated off campus. This makes sense, given that there simply aren’t that many conservatives in the student body, on the faculty, or—least of all—among administrators in higher education.
In 2025, what changed was the balance of power and the source of the pressure. The federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech. In the data my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, tracks—our Students Under Fire database—incidents involving censorship attempts from politicians or government officials jumped to roughly a third of all cases this year. In 2024, those incidents didn’t crack double digits.
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At a time when the average tenure of a college president has dipped below six years, Ronald J. Daniels is beginning his 18th year at the helm of the Johns Hopkins University. He’s weathered numerous crises, though perhaps none as severe as the second Trump administration.
As part of the leadership of the Association of American Universities, Daniels had several discussions with members of the Trump administration about its recent open letter, “A National Call to Action to University Presidents and Governing Boards.” I spoke to Daniels over Zoom about his decision to advise on that open letter, how conservative scholars have been “systematically excluded” from the academy, and whether his emphasis on political diversity has come at the expense of racial diversity.
Questioning colleges is normal. There are outstanding concerns about the experience, the education, and the enterprise of higher education: How much does it cost, and is that more than families can pay? Who gets in, and why? Are faculty members treated with dignity? What is college even for? So, although college leaders argue that a few of the concerns voiced in the document are legitimate, they also see within it the bane of Ilium.
On this week’s Radio Atlantic, I’m joined by Jack Stripling, the host of the College Matters podcast at The Chronicle of Higher Education, to consider higher education in the Trump era, and the purpose of college itself.
What is college for? If you ask four different people, you’re likely to get four different answers. Universities teach students how to think. They produce groundbreaking research. They create citizens. They prepare students for jobs. They archive the wisdom of the past. And so on.
However, beneath the veneer of diversity, all university goals ultimately come down to the same thing. At their core, universities are epistemic institutions, committed to the creation, preservation, and transmission of knowledge.
