Category: Higher Education
The Spectator P.M. Ep. 182: Elite Colleges Are Back on Top for Job Recruiters
A growing number of job recruiters are returning to relying heavily on elite colleges to find top applicants, a Veritas…
Universities treated free speech as expendable in 2025
The fight over free expression in American higher education reached a troubling milestone in 2025. According to data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, efforts to censor speech on college campuses hit record highs across multiple fronts — and most succeeded.
Let’s start with the raw numbers. In 2025, FIRE’s Scholars Under Fire, Students Under Fire, and Campus Deplatforming databases collectively tracked:
- 525 attempts to sanction scholars for their speech, more than one a day, with 460 of them resulting in punishment.
- 273 attempts to punish students for expression, more than five a week, with 176 of these attempts succeeding.
- 160 attempts to deplatform speakers, about three each week, with 99 of them succeeding.
That’s 958 censorship attempts in total, nearly three per day on campuses across the country. For comparison, FIRE’s next-highest total was 477 two years ago.
The 525 scholar sanction attempts are the highest ever recorded in FIRE’s database, which spans 2000 to the present. Even when a large-scale incident at the U.S. Naval Academy is treated as just a single entry, the 2025 total still breaks records.
The common denominator across these censorship campaigns is not ideology — it’s intolerance.
Twenty-nine scholars were fired, including 18 who were terminated since September for social media comments about Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
Student sanction attempts also hit a new high, and deplatforming efforts — our records date back to 1998 — rank third all-time, behind 2023 and 2024.
The problem is actually worse because FIRE’s data undercounts the true scale of campus censorship. Why? The data relies on publicly available information, and an unknown number of incidents, especially those that may involve quiet administrative pressure, never make the public record.
Then there’s the chilling effect.
Scholars are self-censoring. Students are staying silent. Speakers are being disinvited or shouted down. And administrators, eager to appease the loudest voices, are launching investigations and handing out suspensions and dismissals with questionable regard for academic freedom, due process, or free speech.
RELATED: Liberals’ twisted views on Charlie Kirk assassination, censorship captured by a damning poll
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Some critics argue that the total number of incidents is small compared to the roughly 4,000 colleges in the country. But this argument collapses under scrutiny.
While there are technically thousands of institutions labeled as “colleges” or “universities,” roughly 600 of them educate about 80% of undergraduates enrolled at not-for-profit four-year schools. Many of the rest of these “colleges” and “universities” are highly specialized or vocational programs. This includes a number of beauty academies, truck-driving schools, and similar institutions — in other words, campuses that aren’t at the heart of the free-speech debate.
These censorship campaigns aren’t coming from only one side of the political spectrum. FIRE’s data shows, for instance, that liberal students are punished for pro-Palestinian activism, conservative faculty are targeted for controversial opinions on gender or race, and speaking events featuring all points of view are targeted for cancellation.
The two most targeted student groups on campus? Students for Justice in Palestine and Turning Point USA. If that doesn’t make this point clear, nothing will.
The common denominator across these censorship campaigns is not ideology — it’s intolerance.
RELATED: Teenager sues high school after tribute to Charlie Kirk was called vandalism
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So where do we go from here?
We need courage: from faculty, from students, and especially from administrators. It’s easy to defend speech when it’s popular. It’s harder when the ideas are offensive or inconvenient. But that’s when it matters most.
Even more urgently, higher education needs a cultural reset. Universities must recommit to the idea that exposure to ideas and speech that one dislikes or finds offensive is not “violence.” That principle is essential for democracy, not just for universities.
This year’s record number of campus censorship attempts should be a wake-up call for campus administrators. For decades, many allowed a culture of censorship to fester, dismissing concerns as overblown, isolated, or a politically motivated myth. Now, with governors, state legislatures, members of Congress, and even the White House moving aggressively to police campus expression, some administrators are finally pushing back. But this pushback from administrators doesn’t seem principled. Instead, it seems more like an attempt to shield their institutions from outside political interference.
That’s not leadership. It’s damage control. And it’s what got higher education into this mess in the first place.
If university leaders want to reclaim their role as stewards of free inquiry, they cannot act just when governmental pressure threatens their autonomy. They also need to be steadfast when internal intolerance threatens their mission. A true commitment to academic freedom means defending expression even when it is unpopular or offensive. That is the price of intellectual integrity in a free society.
Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearPolitics and made available via RealClearWire.
Brown Lawyers Up After Bungled Response to Mass Shooting, Retaining Former US Attorney
Brown University has retained former federal prosecutor Zachary Cunha as it bolsters its legal team in the aftermath of last week’s mass shooting that killed two students and wounded nine others.
The post Brown Lawyers Up After Bungled Response to Mass Shooting, Retaining Former US Attorney appeared first on .
Buyer Beware: The College Edition
Buyer beware. Seems like common sense. We’re wary when we buy a power tool on Facebook Marketplace. We don’t assume…
Trump takes a wrecking ball to the woke campus economy
To the far-left loons and anti-American activists who dominate large swaths of the nation’s four-year college campuses, a reminder: Donald Trump is your president. And whether you like it or not, he now functions as your college dean.
The title may be unofficial, and no one expects Trump to hand out diplomas, but the reality is unavoidable. Through executive orders and funding decisions, Trump is now calling the shots in higher education. His administration is dismantling a long list of Obama-Biden-era policies that entrenched DEI bureaucracies, racial discrimination, radical gender ideology, and other woke orthodoxies that turned college campuses into centers of political indoctrination rather than education.
Faculty lounges and administrative offices dominated by liberal orthodoxy have failed students for too long.
Trump, alongside Education Secretary Linda McMahon, is not only shrinking the Department of Education’s bureaucratic footprint but demanding that universities deliver measurable value to students. For the first time in years, outcomes matter again.
End this discriminatory rule
That shift should become unmistakable this month, when the Department of Education launches the Accountability in Higher Education and Access through Demand-driven Workforce Pell Committee negotiated rulemaking. Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act directs the department to establish new accountability measures tied directly to student outcomes, including a uniform earnings premium standard for all colleges and universities.
This reform creates an opportunity to finally eliminate the Gainful Employment Rule, a discriminatory relic of the Obama and Biden administrations’ radical education agenda. Under Trump’s approach, earnings standards would apply across the board, regardless of an institution’s tax status or curriculum.
The goal is straightforward: Colleges should prepare students for productive careers. Programs will be evaluated by comparing graduates’ median earnings to those of working adults with only a high-school diploma — or, in the case of graduate programs, a bachelor’s degree. Programs whose graduates fail to outperform those benchmarks for two out of three years would lose access to federal student aid.
That standard exposes the true purpose of the GER under Democrat administrations. It was never about protecting students. It was about punishing institutions disfavored by the academic establishment — especially career colleges and faith-based schools — while shielding traditional four-year universities from scrutiny.
Biden’s war on for-profit schools
Obama and Biden applied the GER almost exclusively to proprietary schools, even though public and nonprofit universities enroll the vast majority of students. A Wall Street Journal analysis found that if the Biden administration’s debt-to-earnings metrics were applied evenly, nearly 80% of failing programs would be housed at public and nonprofit institutions.
The left sees no problem saddling students with six-figure debt for degrees in fashionable but economically useless fields. But students training to become construction managers, electricians, or caterers must be “protected” from choice — even though they typically graduate with far less debt and far better job prospects.
Selective enforcement reveals the real agenda. By targeting career colleges while exempting elite institutions, Democrat administrations sought to limit educational choice and justify mass student loan forgiveness. The system was designed to funnel students into four-year degree programs regardless of whether those programs matched their skills, interests, or career goals.
RELATED: Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking
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Reversing the damage
It is no coincidence that public confidence in higher education collapsed during this same period. By 2023, a majority of Americans said a four-year degree was no longer worth the cost. Only about 30% of recent graduates found entry-level jobs in their field of study, and roughly two-thirds of Gen Z graduates say they would reconsider attending college if given the chance.
The AHEAD committee now has an opportunity to reverse that damage. By repealing the Gainful Employment Rule and implementing a single, fair accountability standard, it can restore value to higher education and respect the diversity of educational paths students choose.
Higher education should foster intellectual growth, opportunity, and freedom — not ideological conformity or lifelong debt. Faculty lounges and administrative offices dominated by liberal orthodoxy have failed students for too long. Americans should welcome a president who not only recognizes the problem but is finally doing something about it.
Oxford Comms Guru, A Democratic Donor, Very Upset Over Free Beacon Report on Wes Moore
Oxford’s deputy communications chief, Julia Paolitto, was not a fan of the Washington Free Beacon’s report on Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D.), which revealed the potential 2028 Democratic presidential candidate boasted about being a “foremost expert” on radical Islam—though nobody can find his graduate thesis from Oxford, where he attended graduate school as a Rhodes Scholar.
The post Oxford Comms Guru, A Democratic Donor, Very Upset Over Free Beacon Report on Wes Moore appeared first on .
Christian students are pushing back — and universities are cracking
As one of the last conservative Christians serving as a tenured philosophy professor at a public university, I’ve had a front-row seat to the intellectual circus that critical theory and intersectionality have unleashed on higher education. I call it out on X and Substack. Professors from ASU’s Barrett Honors College and English Department have attacked me for doing so, calling me a “joke” and a “sloppy thinker.” This is the abuse anyone receives for defending God’s word.
But something new — and encouraging — is happening.
Christian students are speaking up. They are filing complaints. They openly quote Scripture in their assignments. And in this case, the university backed down.
Students are calling it out, too.
Last week at the University of Oklahoma, two instructors were removed for blatant viewpoint discrimination against a Christian student. If even 5% of cases like this see daylight, the DEI structure will start to crack within the academic year. If the polls are right, 97% of faculty identify as left or far left. What we see now — open disdain for Scripture — is not an anomaly. It’s the visible edge of a worldview that has captured entire campuses.
Beneath the surface sits the full intersectional framework, built on one central assumption: Christianity is the axle around which oppression supposedly turns.
The assignment that exposed the bias
The student’s psychology assignment was simple: a 650-word response to a study about gender norms and bullying among middle-schoolers.
She wrote: “Society pushing the lie that there are multiple genders and everyone should be whatever they want to be is demonic and severely harms American youth.”
She grounded her argument in Genesis, explained God’s creation of male and female, and correctly defined ezer kenegdo as “a helper equal to man.”
In short, she used: Scripture, theology, linguistic analysis, and a historical ethical framework. That is a well-reasoned paper in the humanities. Except when the worldview is Christian.
The instructor’s response?
“Your reaction paper contradicts itself, uses personal ideology over empirical evidence, and is at times offensive.”
And then the tell: “Every major psychological, medical, pediatric, and psychiatric association acknowledges that sex and gender is neither binary nor fixed.”
This is false. No serious biology text claims human sex is nonbinary. Disorders of development exist, but disorders do not replace design.
The deeper problem stood out like a vegan at a Texas barbecue: The Bible does not count as evidence. Even if the rubric justified deductions, dismissing Scripture as “personal ideology” exposed the bias.
Quote Judith Butler or Michel Foucault, and the academy nods solemnly. Quote the Bible, and you lose points.
The modern university’s dogma is simple: The Bible is never admissible. Everything else is.
Christians have known this for decades and quietly self-censored to protect their grades and academic futures. Which raises the question: How did we arrive here?
How we got here
Hostility toward Christianity did not appear overnight. It grew slowly through deliberate gatekeeping. Hiring committees screened out conservatives, shaping departments where 90%-97% of faculty became ideological clones. Administrators learned to view biblical faith as bigotry. DEI offices began to enforce viewpoint discrimination while denying it.
Fair hiring does not produce a 97% monoculture. That is ideological capture.
Christians allowed it because they confused niceness with faithfulness. Niceness — a word that never appears in Scripture — is fear disguised as virtue. It keeps people quiet so they can stay liked.
The left used a strategy straight from Marx, who took it straight from the enemy (“devil,” meaning accuser): Accuse Christians of oppression; rewrite history so the West is defined by its sins, never its virtues; demonize Scripture and its adherents; and weaponize shame to silence dissent.
It worked — for a time. The spell is breaking.
No neutrality
Many Christians assumed universities were neutral. They aren’t. They never were.
Every institution aligns with one of two cities: “the City of God” and “the City of Man.”
The City of Man controls the universities. This is not hyperbole. Romans 1 describes it plainly.
Those who reject God do not become neutral observers. They become evangelists for a rival religion. That rival religion has doctrines:
- The Bible is oppressive.
- Christianity is harmful.
- Gender is unlimited.
- Identity is self-created.
- The highest good is “authenticity.”
- The greatest sin is disagreement.
A new orthodoxy rules the campus, and the Oklahoma student violated it — praise God that she did.
Something has changed
Christian students are not taking the abuse quietly any more. They are speaking up. They are filing complaints. They are quoting Scripture openly in their assignments. And in this case, the university backed down. The instructors were removed.
Even on a left-dominated campus, viewpoint discrimination remains illegal — even if DEI treats it as sacred ritual.
If this continues, the monopoly may begin to break — maybe even by spring break.
RELATED: Why the kids are not all right — and Boomers still pretend nothing’s wrong
Photo by Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images
What you can do
As someone inside the system, here is my advice.
Follow those speaking publicly. We are few, but we are here — and we are not silent.
Equip your children. They will face hostility. They will be mocked. They will be graded down unless they can respond intelligently. Ask pointed questions on campus tours. Get administrators on record renouncing DEI discrimination — then hold them to it.
Consider alternatives. Trade schools, Christian colleges, apprenticeships, online programs — all viable. Many offer a serious education without forcing students through gender theory with Judith Butler 101. Seek professors who teach the great works with a biblical foundation.
Speak boldly. The gospel is not a whisper. “For I am not ashamed of the gospel,” the Apostle Paul writes in Romans, “for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes.”
Christian students are rediscovering that courage. It is long past time the rest of us did, too.
University of Michigan’s Partnership With CCP-Linked Shanghai School Brought Chinese Spies to Campus—And Dozens of US Universities Have Similar Arrangements
A string of national security breaches at the University of Michigan was linked to the school’s research partnership with Shanghai Jiao Tong University, an elite Chinese engineering institution with ties to the Chinese Communist Party. More than two dozen major U.S. universities hold similar connections to Shanghai Jiao Tong, creating vulnerabilities that Beijing may be gearing up to exploit, national security experts and China hawks told the Washington Free Beacon.
The post University of Michigan’s Partnership With CCP-Linked Shanghai School Brought Chinese Spies to Campus—And Dozens of US Universities Have Similar Arrangements appeared first on .
A Talented Student, But the Wrong Ancestry. Why We Filed Suit Against the Hispanic Scholarship Fund.
Imagine a high school senior anywhere in America with a 4.0 GPA, rigorous coursework, and an extensive record of volunteering and community service. He plans to attend a four-year university but, like millions of families, worries about how to afford it. He discovers a prestigious national scholarship fund offering mentoring, leadership training, and up to $5,000 in financial aid.
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America’s Universities: A Multi-Generational Perspective
I recently passed my 85th birthday, having been born on a now constitutionally prohibited event in American history (the Election…
