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.”
