Tag: censorship

  • State Lawmakers Enacted 21 Censorship Bills in 2025

    State Lawmakers Enacted 21 Censorship Bills in 2025

    Fourteen of last year’s 21 enacted bills contain gag orders, which PEN defines as direct censorship.

    Last year was a record-setting one for education censorship; more than half of U.S college and university students now study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how college campuses can operate, according to a new report from PEN America, a nonprofit that advocates for campus free speech and press freedom.

    Last year, lawmakers in 32 states introduced a combined 93 bills that censor higher education. Of those, 21 bills were enacted across 15 states: Arkansas, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.

    “Censorship is, sadly, now an intractable reality on college and university campuses, with serious negative impacts for teaching, research, and student life,” Amy Reid, program director of Freedom to Learn at PEN America, said in a news release. “With threats of formal sanctions and political reprisals coming from both state and federal governments, campus leaders and faculty feel they have no choice but to comply, and are increasingly acting preemptively out of fear. Politicians are expanding a sweeping web of political and ideological control over higher education in American campuses, reshaping what can be taught, researched, and debated to fit their own agenda. That’s dangerous for free thought in a democracy.”

    The report highlighted Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, a sweeping higher education bill that mandated institutional neutrality on “any controversial belief or policy,” established a post-tenure review policy, banned DEI initiatives and required institutions to demonstrate “intellectual diversity.” It also called out Indiana’s House Bill 1001, Ohio’s House Bill 96 and Texas’s Senate Bill 37, which all curb or eliminate faculty senates’ decision-making power.

    Fourteen of last year’s 21 enacted bills contain gag orders, which PEN defines as direct censorship. Seven of those laws apply to higher education (the others apply only to K–12 education). In addition to the enacted laws, PEN documented five gag-order policies set by state or university system boards, including Texas Tech’s rules that effectively ban teaching on transgender topics and Texas A&M’s weaponized ban on teaching race or gender “ideology.”

    Most of the proposed bills introduced last year contained some kind of indirect censorship, the PEN report states. It divides such bills into six categories: curricular control; tenure restrictions; institutional neutrality mandates; accreditation restrictions; diversity, equity and inclusion bans; and governance restrictions.

    “Our research shows that legislators are more frequently adopting indirect means to achieve their end goal of censoring higher education, effectively expanding their web of control over the sector in numerous directions,” the report states. “Indirect censorship measures exploded in popularity, with state legislators introducing more than twice as many of them as they did educational gag orders (78 vs 33).”

    In total, state lawmakers passed 20 out of 78 bills that contained indirect censorship—some of which also included gag orders. The 26 percent rate of passage is “remarkably strong,” the report states. Among the new laws are Indiana’s aforementioned HB 1001; Idaho’s Senate Bill 1198, which prohibits faculty from making “critical theory” courses a requirement for majors or minors; and Kansas’s Senate Bill 78, which allows institutions to sue their accreditor if punished for following state law—useful primarily because several of Kansas’s state laws violate accreditors’ academic freedom standards.

    The PEN report also covers federal pressure to censor colleges and universities. In 2025, the Departments of Justice and Education launched more than 90 investigations into alleged Title VI violations. The Trump administration targeted $3.7 billion in research funding and Trump signed 19 executive orders related to education, including an order to end DEI initiatives at colleges and universities. Also last year, the administration suggested 38 universities should be suspended from federal research partnerships because of their hiring practices.

    “The administration frequently justifies its actions in the name of protecting free expression, but the record shows its aim is to censor speech and exert control over the circulation of ideas,” Jonathan Friedman, the Sy Syms managing director of U.S. free expression programs at PEN, said in the news release. “The ‘viewpoint diversity’ they are pushing is not a value-neutral proposition about true debate or diversity of thought, or even free speech. It’s just a coded phrase being used to censor certain progressive ideas, while promoting conservative ones. The apparent aim is to turn colleges and universities into mouthpieces for the government. That’s not what our higher education institutions are supposed to be.”

    Source link

  • Censorship Arrives on Campus

    Censorship Arrives on Campus

    It took 50 years for the secret transcripts of the McCarthy hearings to be released. Within these relics of the Red Scares, you can read all manner of hostile interactions, with people doing their level best to protect their careers and their futures (with some also explicitly fighting for the principles of freedom of speech and expression).

    In one hearing, Langston Hughes testified that his political interests, such as they were, sprang from trying to understand how he “can adjust to this whole problem of helping to build America when sometimes [he] cannot even get into a school or a lecture or a concert or in the south go to the library and get a book out.” That answer, grounded in the betterment of the United States, didn’t matter to his interrogators. Roy Cohn, an attorney working for Senator Joseph McCarthy, continued berating the poet using out-of-context snippets of his work while appearing to advocate for federally funded libraries removing it. This mistreatment was, unfortunately, not a rarity.

    The Red Scares were one of the most repressive periods of the 20th century, and yet we are seeing similar efforts to stifle free speech and punish political dissent in higher education today. As a professor who studies higher education policy, I want to better understand policymakers’ focus on resegregating the country, student protests, and why many key figures in higher education stay silent when political attacks target marginalized groups, especially trans scholars and scholars of color.

    That journey motivates this column, “Echoes in the Quad.” Here, I’ll explore what tethers our current higher education policy realities to past moments in history, leading to potential lessons on crafting an American higher education system that thrives within a multiracial democracy.

    I’ll begin with a three-part series on the Red Scares when, throughout the decades surrounding the World Wars, federal and state governments investigated thousands of people, including more than 100 academics, over their supposed links to the Communist Party. These investigations, or the threats of them, led to thousands of people losing their jobs and their friends and, in some cases, even taking their own lives. Throughout this crucible, most of academia, and the country, went along with or actively encouraged the purges and ostracization of “undesirables.”

    In the 1950s, McCarthyism succeeded because of a two-part system of repression. In No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities, Ellen W. Schrecker notes that the crackdown first required the federal government to identify “suspected Communists” and then higher education institutions to investigate and fire them. This targeting in tandem gives the game away. The attacks and firings were never about scholars’ fealty to Communism (which should have been protected under the U.S. Constitution, as later Supreme Courts ruled several times). Instead, they were about the expulsion of leftist ideals around worker rights, racial integration and more.

    As several characters in the classic 1990s movie Clue proclaim, when it came to the Red Scares, “Communism was simply a red herring.” Charisse Burden-Stelly, in her 2023 book Black Scare/Red Scare, skillfully outlines how Blackness, particularly Black radicalism and the fight for racial justice, became synonymous with Communism and the dreaded moniker of being “un-American.” This scapegoating strategy meant that faculty members could be fired for being a current or former member of the Communist Party or for such transgressions as advocating as a member of a labor union, fighting for racial integration, or being Black or homosexual.

    In No Ivory Tower, Schrecker demonstrates how elite members of higher education either actively worked to ensure that universities censored suspected political dissidents or neglected calls for help from targeted people. At the same time, a substantial share of rank-and-file members of academia allowed their colleagues to be harassed and ostracized, while helping to maintain a version of an academic blacklist—ensuring that people who had even the faintest taint of suspicion would not be hired at their institutions.

    These actions, whether driven by cowardice, complicity or some combination of the two, led to a world where professors and students targeted by the federal government began making plans for their eventual firing or, in some tragic instances, their own death.

    And so, the U.S. House of Representatives devoting precious time to passing bills “denouncing the horrors of socialism,” colleges firing or suspending faculty and staff because of their speech, and students getting grabbed off the street for writing opinion pieces seem like relics of the past. Yet these events are part of our current, dangerous escalation in repression. Auburn University, High Point University, and Texas A&M have all introduced tools or forms that assess whether courses violate vague policies meant to curtail discussions of concepts like racial integration. Just last week we learned that Texas A&M has flagged at least 200 courses& in its review for offenses as grave as assigning students to read Plato. In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, universities investigated, and often ultimately suspended or fired, at least 50 members of the faculty and staff—sometimes simply for the transgression of quoting his own past statements. State policymakers frequently played a role in targeting and threatening either these people directly or the funding for universities that employed them.

    This is not solely a “red state” or “southern” problem. At the same time that University of Texas at Austin was firing staff members to satisfy ideological aims, Muhlenberg College fired a faculty member in a manner that led the AAUP to declare that the institution had “severely impaired the climate for academic freedom.” Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, fired four contingent faculty members, allegedly& due to their advocacy for Palestine. (Perhaps an homage to the 1940s Rapp-Coudert Committee, which led to the firing of dozens of faculty and staff at the City College of New York, also part of CUNY.) While some are quick to note Indiana University’s censorship of speech in the student newspaper, the same flavor of tactics has been used against student journalists at Columbia University, Dartmouth University, and Stanford University. And, who can forget the ignominious list of, at present count, six institutions that have signed agreements with the federal government containing different commitments—large fees, acceptance of recent Executive Orders aimed at reducing medical care and controlling teaching and hiring—all with the goal of curtailing speech and expression on their campuses.

    Most heartrending though, are the lives lost, sacrificed at the altar of authoritarian demagoguery. Middlebury College swimmer Lia Smith, who left the team due to attacks on trans athletes, died by suicide last fall. There is no direct evidence that this was caused by the ever-escalating vitriol hurled at trans people in the United States, but it strains credulity to believe that she was not impacted by this rise in hate, backed by the power of the government, and implemented by blue and red states alike.

    One of the loudest echoes of the Red Scares is perhaps the reality that libraries continue to remove books due to censorship. The federal government interrogated Langston Hughes because the State Department included his work in U.S. libraries abroad. McCarthy’s lieutenants traveled to Europe removing books that they determined to be “subversive” from these libraries. In another hearing, William Mandel, an expert on the Soviet Union forced out of his position at Stanford’s Hoover Institution during the Red Scares, stated, “This is a book-burning! You lack only the tinder to set fire to the books as Hitler did 20 years ago, and I am going to get that across to the American people!”

    The culture of fear created by Senator McCarthy and others served to silence ideas and beliefs that they disagreed with. The future is yet unwritten, but by understanding what political repression looked like then, we can recognize it and figure out how to fight it now. As Mandel noted, once we see censorship for what it is, it’s our responsibility to get that across to the American people.

    The next two columns in this series will focus on the organizations and people that made McCarthyism as effective as it was: the academic elite who worked hand in glove with the rank and file to ensure that, what the government started, higher education would finish.

    (Copies of No Ivory Tower are difficult to find, but several libraries stock it and, if you can’t get access there, here’s a lovely interview with the author.)

    Dominique J. Baker is an associate professor of education and public policy at the University of Delaware. You can follow her on Bluesky at @bakerdphd.bsky.social

    Source link

  • Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire

    Repression deepens in Hong Kong with Jimmy Lai’s guilty verdict and censorship over deadly Wang Fuk Court fire

    Last year, FIRE launched the Free Speech Dispatch, a regular series covering new and continuing censorship trends and challenges around the world. Our goal is to help readers better understand the global context of free expression. Want to make sure you don’t miss an update? Sign up for our newsletter.

    For challenging the CCP, Jimmy Lai may spend the rest of his life behind bars

    The result press freedom and human rights advocates feared has arrived: 78-year-old media tycoon, Chinese Communist Party critic, and Apple Daily founder Jimmy Lai was found guilty in Hong Kong this week. After five years in detention, much of it in solitary confinement, a West Kowloon Magistrates’ Court found him guilty of sedition and collusion with foreign forces on Monday morning.

    He will be sentenced at a later date. Lai, who has suffered deteriorating health amidst his detainment, may very well die in prison. 

    Authorities launch censorship campaign after Hong Kong’s tragic Wang Fuk Court fire

    It’s a page straight out of the authoritarian playbook: Censorship after a crisis to protect the interests of the state from the fallout. Unfortunately, authorities in Hong Kong are not straying away from this strategy. In the aftermath of a deadly residential fire that took at least 159 lives, some of those who have spoken out about the tragedy are now themselves at risk. Hong Kong officials warned they would punish those who “exploit” the tragedy and threatened foreign media against “spreading false information, distorting and smearing the government’s disaster relief and aftermath work” or “provoking social division and opposition.”

    Miles Kwan, a university student, started a petition calling for “four big demands” including more regulation, investigation, and assistance to displaced residents after the fire. His position caught the attention of authorities, but not in the way he’d hoped — Kwan was quickly arrested on sedition charges. Other arrests followed, including of a solicitor who intended to speak at a pre-emptively canceled press conference about the fire and a former district councillor. Hong Kong Baptist University suspended the campus student union and “blocked from sight by tall barriers” a union notice board featuring messages about the fire. Separately, authorities also charged a man with sedition for encouraging others on social media not to vote in the latest “patriots only” election. 

    Proposed Trump admin policy could make self-censorship a condition of entry for tourists

    Last week, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection announced its intention to impose a new policy on tourists from dozens of countries that do not require visas for short visits to the country. Under the proposal, tourists will have to provide five years of social media history in their Electronic System for Travel Authorizations applications, just so they can visit Yellowstone or Disney. Tourists will no doubt worry that their travel plans could be disrupted over years-old tweets and social media commentary.

    “Requiring temporary visitors here for a vacation or business to surrender five years of their social media to the U.S. will send the message that the American commitment to free speech is pretense, not practice. This is not the behavior of a country confident in its freedoms,” FIRE warned in response. Keep an eye out for a forthcoming formal comment from FIRE on the matter.

    China’s censorship targets underground pastors — and the global internet

    After dozens of arrests, 18 leaders of the underground Zion Church were charged with “illegally using information networks,” which can result in up to three years in prison. The church is not sanctioned by the government.

    Meanwhile, Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent is reportedly abusing trademark claims to pressure U.S. based cloud hosting service Vultr to halt operations of FreeWeChat, a censorship watchdog tool run by GreatFire.org. FreeWeChat monitors censorship on WeChat, Tencent’s immensely popular social app. After months of back and forth over Tencent’s allegations, Vultr issued “a formal 30-day notification of termination of services.” FreeWeChat has moved to another hosting provider, but expects the new one to face similar threats.

    Prosecutors seek to reverse important UK free speech victory

    In October’s Free Speech Dispatch, I celebrated the overturning of Hamit Coskun’s conviction for burning a Quran outside the Turkish consulate in London. But that victory, a rare one in the UK these days, may be short-lived. 

    Late last month, the Crown Prosecution Service appealed the Southwark Crown Court’s ruling in favor of Coskun, where Justice Joel Nathan Bennathan said that free expression “must include the right to express views that offend, shock or disturb.” The CPS asserts that Quran burning itself is not a criminal act but Coskun “demonstrated hostility towards a religious or racial group, which is a crime.”

    In Quran burning conviction, UK judge uses violence against defendant as evidence of his guilt

    UK judge cites violence against Quran-burning protester as proof of his guilt, Brazil sentences comedian to over eight years for telling jokes, and France targets porn.


    Read More

    “Our case remains that Hamit Coskun’s words, choice of location and burning of the (Quran) amounted to disorderly behaviour,” CPS said in a statement. “We have appealed the decision, and the judge has agreed to state a case for the High Court to consider.” The CPS may be claiming this doesn’t amount to a restriction on blasphemous expression, but the UK’s National Secular Society rightly worries that “CPS seems determined to establish a blasphemy law by the back door.”

    Meanwhile, former Premier League player Joey Barton was found guilty of 6 out of 12 counts of sending grossly offensive electronic communications with intent to cause distress or anxiety, earning a suspended prison sentence over a series of social media posts. In them, Barton attacked commentators Eni Aluko and Lucy Ward, calling them “the Fred and Rose West of football commentary,” a comparison to a notorious serial killer couple, and photoshopped their faces onto the Wests in a photo.. In another post he said Aluko was “only there to tick boxes” and because of DEI and affirmative action. Barton also called another broadcaster a “bike nonce” and implied he had been on Jeffrey Epstein’s island.

    Trump minimizes Jamal Khashoggi murder, transnational prosecutions, and other press freedom news

    • Last month, President Trump welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the Oval Office — and berated an ABC journalist in the room who asked about MBS’s role in the gruesome murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that,” Trump said to the journalist, and called Khashoggi “extremely controversial.” Trump also said of Khashoggi, “Whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen, but he [gesturing toward Mohammed] knew nothing about it and we can leave it at that.” U.S. intelligence previously confirmed MBS’s involvement in ordering the killing.
    • After Trump’s repeated threats to sue the BBC in U.S. courts for its edits to his Jan. 6, 2021 speech, FCC Chair Brendan Carr announced an investigation targeting the BBC. In a letter to NPR and PBS, which sometimes broadcast BBC material, Carr said he sought “to determine whether any FCC regulations have been implicated by the BBC’s misleading and deceptive conduct.” And this week, Trump did indeed file his suit against the BBC in Florida, seeking $10 billion in damages — yet another frivolous lawsuit filed by the president.

    Carr’s threats to ABC are jawboning any way you slice it

    ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel hours after FCC Chair Brendan Carr suggested they could face consequences for remarks Kimmel made in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder.


    Read More

    • Vietnamese police are targeting a journalist over his reporting — and he doesn’t even live in Vietnam. Authorities have issued an order to prosecute and arrest Berlin-based Le Trung Khoa for “making, storing, spreading information, materials, items for the purpose of opposing the state.”
    • Malaysian authorities are also pursuing a transnational prosecution, with the assistance of Thai courts. Australian academic and Thai resident Murray Hunter will go on trial this month in Thailand on criminal defamation charges over Substack posts about Malaysia’s internet regulator. He could face a fine or up to two years imprisonment.
    • American right-wing journalist Andy Ngo is suing the UK’s Guardian News and Media for libel over its description of Ngo as an “‘alt-right’ agitator” in a Mumford and Sons album review.
    • Bianet editor Tuğçe Yılmaz is facing charges of “insulting the Turkish nation, the state of the Republic of Turkey, and its institutions and organs” for her reporting on Armenian youth today and their relationship to the Armenian genocide.
    • Turkish police arrested a man, and the YouTuber who interviewed and broadcast him, over a poem the man read that prosecutors claim insulted President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and “incit[ed] hatred among the public.”
    • British musical duo Bob Vylan are suing Irish public broadcaster RTÉ for defamation, alleging that RTÉ defamed the duo in a report calling the band’s “death, death to the IDF” chant at this summer’s Glastonbury music festival “anti-Semitic.”

    American writer in Germany receives another visit from police

    Berlin-based American writer CJ Hopkins, whose prosecution FIRE covered last year, is in trouble with authorities again. Hopkins says Berlin police arrived at his home on the morning of Nov. 26 and proceeded to interrogate him and his wife and seize his computer. He is apparently facing new charges over the “publication and distribution” of his book The Rise of the New Normal Reich: Consent Factory Essays, Vol. III (2020-2021). The cover art of the book, which showed a swastika and medical mask, was the root of Hopkins’ previous legal trouble. He had posted the image to social media to compare European COVID policies to Nazism and was charged with “disseminating propaganda.”

    So to Speak Podcast Transcript: CJ Hopkins compared modern Germany to Nazi Germany. Now he’s standing trial.

    J Hopkins is an American playwright, novelist, and political satirist. He moved to Germany in 2004.


    Read More

    Tech censorship news from Australia, India, Russia, and more

    • Reddit is challenging Australia’s age restrictions on social media, citing the country’s free expression protections, and the application of that ban to the message forum. Australia’s government is digging in, though. Health Minister Mark Butler, who promised to “fight this action every step of the way,” said, “It is action we saw time and time again by Big Tobacco against tobacco control and we are seeing it now by some social media or big tech giants.” 
    • The under-16 social media bans are spreading. Following Australia’s lead, the Malaysian government is planning for a system of age verification to limit social media access to people 16 and older. Denmark and Norway are pursuing similar plans. 
    • Due to privacy and security concerns, Apple said it would not comply with an order from the Indian government to require its phones to automatically come with Sanchar Saathi, a cybersecurity app the government says addresses phone theft. The pushback was successful — the government shortly after announced it was rolling back its mandate to phone manufacturers.
    • Claiming to combat “content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children,” particularly LGBT content, Russian media regulator Roskomnadzor cut off access to the popular online game platform Roblox.
    • Italian YouTube channel Parabellum, which has covered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, also says it’s received warnings from Roskomnadzor, particularly over its map of operations within Ukraine. Parabellum analyst Mirko Campochiari shared that he received an order from a Russian court to “remove information prohibited in the Russian Federation, to block traffic from Russia to the map, and to notify the Russian authority of the censorship carried out.”

    Award-winning director Jafar Panahi sentenced in absentia

    Iranian director Jafar Panahi was sentenced in absentia to a year in prison by a Tehran court for “propaganda activities against the system.” Panahi is also subject to a two year travel ban. Panahi filmed It Was Just an Accident, which recently received the Palme d’Or at Cannes, “clandestinely in Iran following a seven-month stint in prison.”

    Source link

  • Snipers, censorship, and unaccountability: Indiana University’s free speech crisis

    Snipers, censorship, and unaccountability: Indiana University’s free speech crisis

    “I had a sniper gun pointed at me when trying to defend a protest that was in compliance with school policies.”

     TAKE ACTION

    The student who wrote that line in FIRE’s annual free speech survey wasn’t using a metaphor. They were describing a spring afternoon in 2024 at Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow — a campus green with a lineage of protest dating to the anti-apartheid “shantytowns” of the 1980s — when officers with rifles took positions on the roof of the Indiana Memorial Union over the heads of student protesters. Indiana State Police later confirmed they had positioned officers “with sniper capabilities” on rooftops.

    The night before, administrators had convened an ad hoc meeting that rewrote IU’s Outdoor Spaces policy to require approval for structures that had long been permitted. By morning, a peaceful protest was recast as a policy violation. By noon, state police had taken a “closed sniper position” above the lawn. 

    Police arrested dozens of students and faculty over two days, and many received one‑year campus bans later challenged in court. Ultimately, the Monroe County Prosecutor’s office dropped the “constitutionally dubious” charges. FIRE wrote IU leadership objecting to the eleventh‑hour policy change and the resulting crackdown, warning IU that manipulating rules to curtail disfavored protest is incompatible with a public university’s First Amendment obligations.

    For a university whose motto celebrates “light and truth,” the optics were unmissable: IU had turned its own tradition of protest into grounds for punishment. Unfortunately, it wasn’t an isolated incident, but a warning for what would follow.

    Act now: Condemn Indiana University’s censorship of student media

    Indiana University fired its student media adviser for refusing to censor the student paper, then banned the paper’s print edition.


    Read More

    The atmosphere that spring clarified what faculty had been saying in whispered discontent for years: academic freedom and shared governance were being treated as obstacles to be managed. On April 16, 2024, nearly 1,000 faculty came together for an unprecedented meeting where 93% of those present voted no confidence in IU’s leadership. At the time, FIRE noted that the no‑confidence movement explicitly cited encroachments on academic freedom and viewpoint discrimination concerns.

    One flashpoint was the university’s handling of associate professor Abdulkader Sinno, suspended from teaching and advising in December 2023 after a dispute over a room reservation — the registered student group he had advised being none other than the Palestine Solidarity Committee. FIRE went on record with a reminder that public universities must not punish faculty for facilitating student expression or for the viewpoints associated with that expression.

    Another flashpoint was art. In December 2023, IU’s Eskenazi Museum abruptly canceled a long‑planned retrospective of Palestinian‑American painter Samia Halaby, notifying the artist her work would no longer be shown in a terse letter curtailing three years of preparation. IU invoked concerns about security and the “integrity of the exhibit.” But as FIRE explained, public institutions cannot cancel art because the artist’s politics are unpopular or because controversy is inconvenient. 

    Meanwhile, cancellations migrated into other corners of campus life. In January 2025, the IU School of Medicine canceled its LGBTQ+ Health Care Conference, initially offering only a bare note on the website. Administrators later cited pending legislation as the reason. One invited keynote speaker, journalist Chris Geidner, publicly confirmed the cancellation. As FIRE frequently reminds universities, preemptively shutting down academic programming due to political headwinds chills debate and undermines academic freedom. Universities exist to give ideas a platform, not to turn them away.

    IU’s Israel-Palestine-related cancellations didn’t run in only one political direction, either. In March 2024, IU officials urged IU Hillel to postpone an event with Mosab Hassan Yousef, a prominent pro‑Israel activist and Hamas critic, citing security threats. Instead of securing the event, IU “postponed” it, but apparently never rescheduled.

    By the publication of FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings, the numbers matched the mood. Indiana University ranked 255th out of 257 institutions surveyed, making it the worst‑ranked public university in America, with bottom‑tier scores in openness, administrative support, and comfort expressing ideas. Roughly one in four IU students reported discipline or threats of discipline for their expression, and nearly three‑quarters of faculty said the administration does not protect academic freedom. 

    This fall, IU’s crackdown reached the newsroom. Student editors at the Indiana Daily Student ran two straightforward, newsworthy pieces: one on IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, another on IU’s abysmal free‑speech ranking. Students say Media School Dean David Tolchinsky pressed them to suppress the coverage. When they refused, the university ordered the paper’s print edition halted just before homecoming. 

    Control at an editorially independent student paper belongs to the students, not to administrators.

    When Jim Rodenbush, the director of student media, declined to enforce content restrictions, he was fired. FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative immediately wrote IU on Oct. 16, condemning the firing as apparent retaliation and the print‑ban directive as unconstitutional censorship by a public university. The students’ response captured the stakes: an image of an empty newspaper rack on campus captioned with a single word in block letters, “CENSORED.”

    IU has since reversed the print shutdown amid national outcry and a federal lawsuit filed by Rodenbush. The chancellor has authorized IDS to print through June 30, 2026, within budget parameters. FIRE’s position remains: Control at an editorially independent student paper belongs to the students, not to administrators.

    Seen together — the midnight rule change at Dunn Meadow, the snipers on the roof, the faculty’s 93% vote of no confidence, the sanctioning of a professor for defending a student group’s right to meet, the cancellation of an artist’s exhibit, the quiet erasure of a healthcare conference, the postponement of a controversial speaker under the elastic banner of security, and finally the order to stop the presses — it is clear Indiana University has a crisis on its hands. This is a campus where students practice self‑silencing to survive the semester, where faculty measure every sentence against the week’s political weather, where the oxygen of inquiry thins until only the safest words remain.

    Today — Monday, Nov. 10 — FIRE answers in one forum the university can’t control: the public square. Our first billboard went up in Bloomington this morning. It’s stark — black, white, and FIRE red — and it names the problem plainly, pointing readers to see the record for themselves. 

    IU has a chance here to do the right thing, but if they don’t, more boards will follow, put up in places where IU’s leaders, alumni, and visitors will pass them on their way to games and meetings and flights. The point is not spectacle but accountability: to hold a mirror up to a public university that has tried, repeatedly, to dodge the image it has made for itself.

    The first billboard in FIRE’s campaign, installed in Bloomington on Monday, Nov. 10, 2025

    FIRE doesn’t launch campaigns like this to score points. We’re launching this campaign because IU, a taxpayer‑funded institution, has betrayed its public duty, believing it doesn’t need to answer to the Constitution or the consequences of ignoring the First Amendment. 

    Any university that posts sharpshooters over a peaceful protest, cancels art for its connotations, shutters a conference because of its politics, and then turns around and tells student journalists they can’t print the truth about any one of these stories hasn’t merely lost its way. It has chosen a different map — one that trades the honest noise of debate for the chilling silence of control. That’s not how we do things in America. 

    What the hell is going on at Indiana University?

    Indiana University just banned its student paper for reporting its awful free speech ranking. You literally can’t make this up.


    Read More

    The rifles are gone from the roof now, but the memory of their presence is as much a part of Dunn Meadow as the grass. The empty newspaper racks may soon be refilled, but national headlines about a campus with no newspaper endure like a warning label.

    Indiana University’s leaders have a choice to make.

    They can continue to censor and pretend it’s not a problem. Or, they can acknowledge what these last 20 months have made obvious and begin to repair what fear has fractured. They can ensure student and faculty speech is not micromanaged, that journalists report without preclearance, that art hangs because it is art, and that a university’s purpose is not to avoid controversy but to teach, especially when the debate is loud and the issue is of great public importance.

    We’re calling on IU to issue a public statement acknowledging its violations of students’ and faculty members’ free speech rights and to meet with FIRE’s experts to begin improving its ranking. Reinstating Rodenbush would also be a meaningful first step in demonstrating that IU is serious about addressing its free speech problems.

    Until then, we’ll keep telling this story where it cannot be edited away — on screens, on pages, and, starting today, on the unmissable canvases that rise beside Indiana’s roads.

    Source link

  • Texas A&M board to vote on sweeping classroom censorship proposal

    Texas A&M board to vote on sweeping classroom censorship proposal

    This Wednesday, the Texas A&M System Board of Regents will vote on whether to give university presidents sweeping veto power over what professors can teach. Hiring professors with PhDs is meaningless if administrators are the ones deciding what gets taught.

    Under the proposal, any course material or discussion related to “race or gender ideology” or “sexual orientation or gender identity” would need approval from the institution’s president. Faculty would need permission to teach students about not just modern controversies, but also civil rights, the Civil War, or even ancient Greek comedies.

    This is not just bad policy. It invites unlawful censorship, chills academic freedom, and undermines the core purpose of a university. Faculty will start asking not “Is this accurate?” but “Will this get me in trouble?”

    That’s not education, it’s risk management. 

    FIRE urges the board to reject this proposal. And we will be there to defend any professor punished for doing what scholars are hired to do: pursue the truth wherever it leads.

    Source link

  • IU Alumni Pull Donations Over Student Newspaper Censorship

    IU Alumni Pull Donations Over Student Newspaper Censorship

    Indiana University’s decision to suspend the print publication of its student newspaper is costing the institution: Alumni are pulling donations in protest. The university ended the Indiana Daily Student’s print edition after firing the paper’s adviser, who refused to comply with administrators’ request to remove news coverage from a homecoming edition of the paper.

    University leaders insist they’re not censoring the student paper but moving it to a digital platform in line with a business plan adopted last year to address the paper’s deficits. But alumni aren’t buying it, IndyStar reported. Some are asking what came of donations they made to a fund dedicated to the student publication after the newspaper reported students faced hurdles to spending the money. Other alumni are pulling their donations altogether.

    Former journalism student Patricia Esgate canceled $1.5 million in bequests she planned to leave to the university. Alum Ryan Gunterman, executive director of the Indiana High School Press Association and the faculty adviser of Franklin College’s student newspaper, posted on Facebook that he and his wife were ceasing all future donations after giving money to the university and newsroom for over two decades. Toby Cole, a fourth-generation alum of the institution, told IndyStar in an email that his family was ending its monthly contributions and a $300,000 planned gift for scholarships.

    “If IU can pay our [football] coach almost $100mm we can fund our IDS,” Cole said in the email. “Problem is ‘they’ don’t want an independent free speaking print newspaper because students actually wield power with it.”

    Source link

  • Campus Censorship Puts American Soft Power at Risk

    Campus Censorship Puts American Soft Power at Risk

    International students see American life portrayed in movies and on TikTok; U.S. universities have built global brands, helped along by Hollywood and merchandising. When it comes time to apply, international students can readily imagine a U.S. college experience, starting with seeing themselves in a crimson sweatshirt studying on a grassy quad flanked by ivy-covered buildings.

    And as the U.S.’s hold on cutting-edge science and innovation slips away to China, and other destinations with more welcoming visa policies offer lower-cost degrees and jobs, soft power might be the only edge American universities have left.

    The desire is about more than bricks and mortarboards. Students from other countries have long sought out American values of academic freedom and open discourse. They are excited by ideas and experiences that are as emblematic of the American way of life as tailgating on game day: criticizing the government, discussing LGBTQ+ rights or learning about the Tiananmen Square massacre in China, the Armenian genocide in Turkey or the comfort women victimized by the Imperial Japanese Army.

    But in 2025, those freedoms are at risk of becoming strictly theoretical. Anti-DEI laws in Utah led to Weber State University asking researchers to remove the words “diversity,” “equity” and “inclusion” from their slides before presenting at a—wait for it—conference on navigating the complexities of censorship. Conference organizers canceled the event after other presenters pulled out in protest.

    University leaders in Texas and Florida are refusing to put in writing policies that prohibit faculty from talking about transgender identity or diversity, equity and inclusion in classrooms, sowing fear and confusion across their campuses. A secret recording of a Texas A&M professor talking about gender in her class led to a successful campaign by a state representative to get her fired and forced a former four-star general to resign as university president.

    This weekend, students at Towson University moved their No Kings rally off campus after school officials told them their speakers’ names would be run through a federal government database. They changed locations out of fear the speakers would be targeted by the Trump administration.

    Meanwhile, dozens of faculty are still out of jobs after being fired for posting comments online about the murder of Charlie Kirk. Repressing free speech on social media is also what the Chinese government does to political dissenters.

    It’s true that colleges are exercising American values by following laws passed by democratically elected legislators. And presidents say they will follow the rule of law without compromising their missions, but overcompliance with vague legislation and policies is incompatible with this aim.

    International students who care about more than a name brand may find the erosion of the country’s global reputation as a democratic stronghold a reason to look elsewhere. That means billions of dollars are also at stake if international students no longer trust in America’s values and choose to stay away. Modeling from NAFSA: Association of International Educators projected a 30 to 40 percent drop in international students this fall that would result in $7 billion in lost revenue and more than 60,000 fewer jobs across the country. Records from August suggest a similar outlook: 19 percent fewer students arrived in the U.S. compared to August 2024.

    International students bring more than just valuable tuition dollars to American campuses. They contribute global perspectives to their less traveled American peers and build relationships that could turn into partnerships when they go home and become entrepreneurs or political leaders.

    Higher ed can track the number of international student visas issued, students who enroll and the economic contributions of these students, but they can’t quantify what it means when a student in Shanghai stops imagining America as a place where all ideas can be expressed and explored. It’s taken decades for this country to build power based on free expression and open discourse, but by the time the loss of students starts to register in economic data and visa applications, the decline may be too late to reverse.

    Source link

  • Act now: Condemn IU’s censorship of student media

    Act now: Condemn IU’s censorship of student media

    TAKE ACTION

    On October 14, Indiana University abruptly fired Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush after he refused to enforce unconstitutional content restrictions on the student paper the Indiana Daily Student. The very next day, IU ordered IDS to halt print publication.

    This illustrates why IU ranked dead last among public universities — and third-to-last overall — in FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings. Firing a student media adviser for refusing to censor a student newspaper, then banning print editions of that paper, sends a message that would chill even the most courageous young journalist: Cover stories we don’t like, and you’ll lose your ability to print — and your faculty support.

    What did the Indiana Daily Student do to provoke this reaction?

    They used their front page to attack IU’s track record on free speech, citing IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee and IU’s ranking as the worst public university in the nation for free speech. In the wake of these stories hitting newsstands, administrators summoned Rodenbush to a meeting to discuss “expectations” for what belongs in the paper. 

    IU’s Media School instructed the student paper to publish an edition exclusively devoted to homecoming flattery with “no other news at all.” When Rodenbush stood his ground, administrators then said they “lost trust” in his leadership — and immediately fired him.

    But public universities can’t order students to publish puff pieces. They can’t shut down newspapers for coverage that makes administrators uncomfortable. And they can’t fire advisers who refuse to play the censorship game. 

    Firing Rodenbush and banning the paper are textbook First Amendment violations that IU claims are part of a digital-first media strategy. But that’s a smokescreen. Cutting the print edition and removing a longtime adviser after critical coverage isn’t a strategy. It’s retaliation. And it’s illegal.

    IU is failing its students, its faculty, and the Constitution it is bound to uphold. FIRE is demanding that IU reverse the print ban, offer Rodensbush reinstatement, and make a public commitment to restore student press freedom on campus.

    Stand with us and tell IU President Pamela Whitten to end this censorship crusade.

     

    Source link

  • Act now: Condemn Indiana University’s censorship of student media

    Act now: Condemn Indiana University’s censorship of student media

    TAKE ACTION

    On Oct. 14, Indiana University abruptly fired Director of Student Media Jim Rodenbush after he refused to enforce unconstitutional content restrictions on the student paper the Indiana Daily Student. The very next day, IU ordered IDS to halt print publication.

    This illustrates why IU ranked dead last among public universities — and third-to-last overall — in FIRE’s 2026 College Free Speech Rankings. Firing a student media adviser for refusing to censor a student newspaper, then banning print editions of that paper, sends a message that would chill even the most courageous young journalist: Cover stories we don’t like, and you’ll lose your ability to print — and your faculty support.

    What did the Indiana Daily Student do to provoke this reaction?

    They used their front page to attack IU’s track record on free speech, citing IU’s suspension of the Palestine Solidarity Committee and IU’s ranking as the worst public university in the nation for free speech. In the wake of these stories hitting newsstands, administrators summoned Rodenbush to a meeting to discuss “expectations” for what belongs in the paper. 

    IU’s Media School instructed the student paper to publish an edition exclusively devoted to homecoming flattery with “no other news at all.” When Rodenbush stood his ground, administrators then said they “lost trust” in his leadership — and immediately fired him.

    But public universities can’t order students to publish puff pieces. They can’t shut down newspapers for coverage that makes administrators uncomfortable. And they can’t fire advisers who refuse to play the censorship game. 

    Firing Rodenbush and banning the paper are textbook First Amendment violations that IU claims are part of a digital-first media strategy. But that’s a smokescreen. Cutting the print edition and removing a longtime adviser after critical coverage isn’t a strategy. It’s retaliation. And it’s illegal.

    IU is failing its students, its faculty, and the Constitution it is bound to uphold. FIRE is demanding that IU reverse the print ban, offer Rodensbush reinstatement, and make a public commitment to restore student press freedom on campus.

    Stand with us and tell IU President Pamela Whitten to end this censorship crusade.

    Source link

  • Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream

    Censorship Is the Authoritarian’s Dream

    On Wednesday ABC announced that it had taken Kimmel’s late-night show off the air “indefinitely.”

    More professors in the United States have been fired for controversial views in the past week than any other week in all of American history. The violations of academic freedom, free speech and due process on campuses in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination have been extraordinary and indefensible.

    The campus firings are too numerous to describe in full, but consider the case of Darren Michael, professor of theater at Austin Peay State University, who was fired because he reposted on social media a 2023 Newsweek headline: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth It to Keep 2nd Amendment.” Tennessee’s U.S. senator Marsha Blackburn reposted Michael’s view on X, asking the university to take action.

    Austin Peay administrators declared, “A faculty member of Austin Peay State University reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death. Such actions do not align with Austin Peay’s commitment to mutual respect and human dignity. The university deems these actions unacceptable and has terminated the faculty member.”

    This is an utterly appalling excuse to punish anyone, and certainly not an adequate reason for a university to terminate a professor without any due process. There is absolutely no rule at Austin Peay banning people from being insensitive or disrespectful, since any rule like that would clearly violate the First Amendment. And the idea that posting a headline quoting Kirk’s views would somehow justify his murder is insane. It’s perfectly legitimate to criticize anyone for favoring or opposing gun control. This critique of Kirk is anything but pro-murder.

    The violations of due process involved in these arbitrary firings, with no opportunity for a hearing or a defense, are terrible in themselves. But the justifications for the firings are so insubstantial that they cannot merit any kind of penalty, let alone an immediate dismissal.

    It is perfectly legitimate to criticize and even insult both the dead and the living. Any conservative who thinks Charlie Kirk hated free speech so much that he would want his critics purged from campuses is making a far worse insult against Kirk than what any offensive leftist has written or said.

    Of course, the suppression of free speech goes far beyond academia.

    The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC on Sept. 17 following FCC chair Brendan Carr’s demands for his removal and threats against broadcast licenses represent an alarming repression of free speech, with the combination of corporate censorship and government suppression.

    On his Sept. 15 show, Kimmel said, “We had some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and with everything they can to score political points from it.” What Kimmel said was, in fact, technically true: Conservatives were doing everything they could to claim that Kirk’s murderer was not one of them. And the murderer was, in fact, a white male college dropout from a Republican family in Utah that taught him to shoot and provided him with guns.

    Of course, conservatives are probably correct to call the murderer a leftist with political motives, and if Kimmel was trying to invoke theories that the killer was actually a right-winger, that seems unlikely now based on evidence released after Kimmel’s show aired. But even if Kimmel was trying to make a dubious claim that has now been discredited, that’s protected by the First Amendment and principles of free speech.

    The second part of Kimmel’s claim—that conservatives were using Kirk’s murder to “score political points”—was never in doubt and has been proven yet again by his removal from the airwaves.

    Kimmel didn’t celebrate any violence or say anything bad about Charlie Kirk. The glorification of Kirk is a cover for an authoritarian agenda to suppress political enemies. Donald Trump immediately celebrated Kimmel’s banishment and called for NBC hosts Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers to also be fired.

    This is the slippery slope of censorship: First they come for those who celebrate murder, then they come for anyone who questions the hagiography of the victim, then they go after anyone who quotes the victim’s own words, then they silence anyone who objects to the repression itself. This is why even offensive and stupid comments about Charlie Kirk must not be punished.

    But when Vice President JD Vance urges everyone to “call their employer” in response to offensive comments, that’s not critique or argument: That’s cancel culture, pure and simple. That’s government-mandated repression.

    The right to free expression must include the right to say horrible and evil things. It protects all of the conservatives (including Donald Trump, his son and Charlie Kirk) who joked about the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi. It protects the Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who urged mass executions of homeless people.

    As David Letterman noted about Kimmel, “You can’t go around firing somebody because you’re fearful or trying to suck up to an authoritarian criminal administration in the Oval Office.”

    Less than two years ago, before he began issuing government commands to silence the media, Carr posted on X, “Free speech is the counterweight—it is the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”

    We are living in the authoritarian’s dream, and it’s a nightmare for free speech and democracy.

    Source link