When John White, a tenured professor of English Education and Adolescent Literacy at the University of North Florida, attended the first department meeting of the fall 2025 semester, he was stunned to hear that four words—diversity, equity, inclusion, and even culture—had been removed from the college’s course catalog. He was further shocked to hear that these words also had to be excised from syllabi.
“We teach with a focus on social justice and making the world a better place for our kids,” White tells The Progressive. “As I saw it, this request was a violation of academic freedom.”
White says that he initially refused to comply and, immediately after the meeting, wrote to the dean of the College of Education, asking to see the rule that prohibited these terms. “I learned that the Florida Board of Governors had conveyed this request verbally,” White says. “The rule had never been codified. We were being censored by a rule that literally did not exist.”
White has been fighting back ever since. Nonetheless, he says that he felt forced to comply, at least partially. “I removed the word ‘culture’ from my Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum class syllabi because I feared that my students would be held hostage if my courses were not counted toward their degree completion,” he says.
Other faculty, he adds, capitulated preemptively, with “one professor changing the name of a course from ‘Language and Culture’ to ‘Principles and Practices.’ ” White, however, continues to oppose the policy, and although he lost his grievance against the university, he is not giving up.
He is also not alone in confronting a rash of attacks on higher education, from federal and state funding cuts to the curtailment of faculty governance, the weakening of tenure protections, and the imposition of curricular restrictions. In fact, PEN America called 2025 “a year of catastrophe for higher education,” reporting that book bans and gag orders—intended to silence discussion of anything pertaining to race, gender, gender identity, or sexuality, or that include negative portrayals of U.S. history—have spread from K-12 schooling to colleges and universities.
PEN’s most recent report, “Expanding the Web of Control: America’s Censored Campuses 2025,” released in mid-January 2026, lays out the scope of the catastrophe. “More than half of U.S. college and university students study in a state with at least one law or policy restricting what can be taught or how campuses can operate,” the study concludes.
The report calls the Trump Administration’s assault on higher education unprecedented, and reveals that last year alone, ninety-three bills to censor higher education were introduced in thirty-two states; twenty-one became law.
Under the guise of promoting “intellectual diversity,” the report says well-established right-wing groups, including the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), Defending Education, the Goldwater Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the Manhattan Institute, and Speech First, have pushed to abolish campus diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and eliminate coursework championing these values.
They’ve also crafted model legislation that can be introduced in state legislatures throughout the country to limit faculty input into decision-making, redesign coursework mandates, and restrict research funding.
The Higher Education Restoration Act, for example, was introduced in December and attacks tenure by taking hiring decisions out of faculty’s hands and giving more power to university regents. The bill further promotes curricula to boost vague concepts such as “Americanism” and “Western Civilization,” and rewards instructors who teach these courses from a prescribed course of study. Other bills seek to eviscerate shared governance by faculty senates—which historically have had the power to oversee curricula and set tenure guidelines—and reduce them to an advisory role rather than allowing them actual power.
Still others establish “civic thought centers” that, PEN charges, “are foisted on universities by politicians” who then exert political and financial control over many aspects of academic life. These ambiguously named institutions are becoming a trend in conservative academia and promote an allegedly race-and- gender-neutral worldview thanks to the backing of oil-magnate Charles G. Koch and Republican state legislatures.
Jonathan Friedman, one of the authors of the PEN report and the organization’s Sy Sims managing director of U.S. Free Expression Programs, tells The Progressive that the right’s efforts are “robbing students of the freedom to learn.” Furthermore, he says these groups and lawmakers are aiming for “political and ideological control of universities. It’s about power and the reclaiming of a supposedly glorious Western canon and history.”
Friedman is also critical of the so-called civic thought centers that are cropping up on campuses throughout the country. “A civic center is not necessarily out of place on a campus, but in a lot of locations, these centers are insulated from typical governance and academic oversight and scrutiny. They tend to operate under their own rules,” he says.
Indeed, while Friedman acknowledges that conservative attempts to control academia are not new, the coordinated attacks, stoked by model legislation, have led some faculty members to self-censor and limit what they teach and research.
Nara Milanich, a history professor at Barnard College, tells The Progressive that the recently relaunched campus chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a faculty union, is working hard to encourage faculty not to be “presumptively subservient” to the school’s administration. But, she says, the campus atmosphere is tense: While Laura Ann Rosenbury, the college’s president, purports to champion viewpoint diversity, she has bent under pressure from conservative Harvard Law School professor and former Jeffrey Epstein attorney Alan Dershowitz, who has dubbed Barnard “the poster child for anti-American, antisemitic, and anti-decent activities.” While there is no definitive link between Rosenbury’s indefinite postponement of a screening of the film Israelism—which is critical of the way Zionism is promoted within Jewish communities—to Dershowitz, Milanich says that Rosenbury has repressed pro-Palestine protests and punished campus activists, both of which are actions that Dershowitz supports.
The college administration is not only restricting activism related to Palestine. “Barnard is a feminist college for young women, so the administration can’t ask us to take gender off our syllabi, but the Barnard Center for Research on Women and the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department have been accused of being exclusionary,” Milanich says. “The Center now needs to put out an open call for events to ensure that different viewpoints get adequate billing.” Although this might not be problematic in other contexts, Milanich says that the top-down imposition reflects “a steady flow of policy changes that have been raining down on faculty from Rosenbury’s office” and could open the door to programs featuring trans-exclusionary and anti-abortion activists.
This shift to include speakers with rightwing viewpoints—on gender, race, activism, and foreign policy—is now more rule than exception, and not just at Barnard.
A former education professor within the University System of Georgia, who asked to remain anonymous because they fear retribution against their former colleagues, tells The Progressive that the erosion of faculty governance that Milanich describes exists at every public college and university in Georgia. “For the past few years, every public program has been under a microscope controlled by the Georgia Board of Regents,” they explain. “When the Board of Regents demands to review syllabi and demands that each college establish a system of faculty performance reviews that require professors to meet vague metrics, excellent scholars and excellent teachers can be fired. It basically gets rid of job security. Georgia is a ‘right-to-work’ state, so the administration can write you up for whatever reason, and the process of evaluation does not need to be transparent.”
Appeals and denunciations of these policies by the Georgia AAUP, they add, have been constant, but “many faculty feel that they need to look over their shoulders. A requirement that faculty post syllabi and reading lists online has meant a tightening of control over what happens in the classroom. Theoretically, we have academic freedom, but practically, how does it work if we’re always being monitored?”
This question, along with the pursuit of academic freedom, has been central to the AAUP since its founding in 1915. AAUP President Todd Wolfson knows that these are hard times for organized labor. Nonetheless, he is not cowed by the enormity of the challenge.
“Look, the fascist playbook is scary, and in some places, faculty have lost jobs for speaking out,” Wolfson tells The Progressive. “A significant number of people were fired from teaching positions or were disciplined by their universities after posting comments critical of Charlie Kirk after his assassination. But there has been absolute success in getting people’s jobs back. Not everyone, but a fair number of people have been reinstated. And while the government wants to punish anyone who is out of line with MAGA ideology, people on campuses all over the country are finding ways to fight back.”
Wolfson notes that these attacks on faculty predate U.S. President Donald Trump. Indeed, although faculty fear reprisals, Wolfson says that workers have recourse when they are organized. “Of course, we can use the courts, but we can also join together and build power to pressure federal and state governments. For years, faculty were essentially asleep at the wheel, but we are finally waking up and using our collective power.”
Professors, he says, are eager to fight back, and 15,000 AAUP members who have joined the organization since 2024 attest to this hunger. “This is the silver lining of the Trump attacks,” Wolfson adds. “When this national nightmare is over, we will have active chapters across the country and will have a chance to build a better public education system, with shared governance and academic freedom that means something. Yes, the attacks we’re facing are enormous. But we are growing as a union, and it is not just campuses in the Northeast and Midwest that are organizing. North Carolina is the fastest-growing state for the AAUP. The higher education unions are also collaborating. We believe that a movement led by students and workers can be a bloc that not only reacts to threats, but fights for what we need.”
For Wolfson, it’s important that the AAUP take the long view. “Our vision of fully-funded public education, where a professor can write and teach freely, and can challenge every vapid, cruel argument federal and state governments make, sustains us. It’s what we’re fighting for.”