A recently released report from PEN America, titled America’s Censored Classrooms 2024, tells a grim story about the right’s ongoing legislative attacks on inclusive public education.
According to the 102-year-old group, the steep rise in the number of book bans during the 2023-2024 academic year—more than 10,000 at last count—and educational gag orders to limit what topics K-12 teachers can teach and what books they can use has now spread to public colleges and universities. In the higher education sector, gag orders intersect with other worrying trends—including the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and constraints on college curricula and shared faculty governance—leading to what PEN calls “an all-out assault on educational speech.”
Jeremy C. Young, director of PEN’s Freedom to Learn program, tells The Progressive that six rightwing think tanks—The Claremont Institute, The Ethics and Public Policy Center, The Goldwater Institute, The Heritage Foundation, The Manhattan Institute, and the National Association of Scholars—are largely responsible for the expansion of book bans and gag orders from K-12 to colleges and universities.
Prior to 2024, Young said, most legislation impacting education was promulgated by Donald Trump’s Executive Order 13791, released during his first administration. Issued in April 2017, it gave states and local governments “control over the curriculum, programs, instruction, administration, and personnel” at all public schools and educational institutions. The outcome, Young says, “was a dizzying array of bills proposed by different states.”
But things changed in 2024. While earlier legislation sought to keep critical race theory and The 1619 Project—the latter created by Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times in 2019—out of the classroom, recent efforts have been more covert, using “camouflage, misdirection, and acting behind the scenes” to control course content, staffing, and more, Young says.
The report concludes that educational gag orders are now “only a small part of a much larger story, as a whole battery of other kinds of legislation” are now targeting everything from faculty tenure to shared governance to teacher training programs.
Young called this new repressive legislation “trend chasing.”
As an example of this, Young cites the right’s newly-adopted focus on fighting antisemitism. “People who have varying political views are concerned about the rise of antisemitism,” Young explains, “so the idea of a bill that requires viewpoint diversity in the classroom sounds reasonable. But these bills do nothing to end antisemitism or promote diverse viewpoints. They instead have a chilling effect on students and professors.”
When it comes to antisemitism, he continues, “so many things have been pulled in under the guise of opposing it that a class on the Holocaust can be barred from including materials that show what the Nazis said and did.”
Young adds, “Letting a college’s board of trustees unilaterally determine what is or is not promoting intellectual diversity in a particular classroom is an attempt to give more power to government officials over what is discussed and taught on campus.”
In South Dakota, a required course on Native American studies for aspiring teachers became watered down when the state Department of Education pressured public, private, and tribal colleges to make the curriculum devoid of material that “establishes a fundamental awareness of race and gender bias, stereotypes, assumptions, etc.”
Equally mind-boggling, PEN reports that in May, the University of North Florida closed four centers operated under the college’s Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion to comply with a state law barring programs or activities “that advocate for DEI or engagement in political or social activism.” The shuttered centers were the Intercultural Center, the Interfaith Center, the LGBTQIA+ Center, and the Women’s Center.
Alabama, Iowa, Texas, and Utah have all seen similar center closures. Young notes that the closings have led to mass layoffs of staff in every state that has adopted a DEI ban.
Even more insidious, he says, is “jawboning,” a strategy developed by conservative activists to bully or threaten college presidents with a loss of state funding so that they give up on promoting DEI or LGBTQ+ inclusion without a statehouse battle. “There are no hearings, no laws proposed or debated,” Young says. “It’s an intimate form of bullying.”
But in an equally significant and perhaps more upbeat development, as awareness of the right’s work—and the dangers to free inquiry and academic freedom that they promote—has increased, resistance has spiked
“Every time a serious bill [promoting censorship and intolerance] is proposed, the hearings about it have been packed with people wanting to raise objections,” he says. “This is why we’ve seen so many stealth strategies in 2024, with the right latching censorship bills onto legislation that sounds innocuous, like a bill that purports to promote ‘individual freedom.’ ”
In addition to PEN, the American Association of University Professors, the ACLU, the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, and the Education Trust have filed lawsuits to stop anti-public education bills, arguing that these measures impose impermissible restrictions on free speech and are often unclear. Progressives have also organized anti-censorship, anti-book ban, and freedom-to-read campaigns.
“It’s a start,” Young says. Nevertheless, he stresses that the challenges remain both enormous and intense. As PEN’s report concludes, between January 1, 2021, and October 1, 2024, forty-seven educational gag orders and ten other higher education restrictions were passed in twenty-two states. That’s a lot of legislation to repeal.