Trump Is Nuking Free Speech in the Name of Fighting Wokeness on Campuses
His draconian crackdown is intended to force MAGA orthodoxy on universities
The White House, no matter its occupant, has long meddled in campus speech. From post-9/11 scrutiny of faculty and student anti-war protestors to pressuring institutions to adopt an overly expansive definition of sexual harassment and punish subjectively offensive speech, every modern presidential administration has pressured campus discourse to serve political ends.
But where past presidential administrations concealed this pressure through layers of bureaucracy, the Trump administration flaunts it. Its use of immigration law, federal grant funding, and thinly veiled—often cunningly vague—threats to colleges and universities is certainly the most brazen effort by a recent administration to bend the academy to its will.
MAGA Thought Police
Few have borne this pressure more directly than Columbia graduate student and lawful permanent U.S. resident Mahmoud Khalil, who has spent the past week and a half behind the concrete walls and double barbed wire of a Louisiana ICE facility. Federal officials do not allege Khalil committed a criminal offense. Instead, they accused him of expressing dissent—characterizing his speech as “anti-American” and “pro-Hamas.” As my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) explains in an amicus brief filed this morning, the government relies not on an accusation that Khalil engaged criminal activity, but instead on a seldom-used immigration law allowing for deportation of anyone whose presence may have “adverse foreign policy consequences.” In other words, they treat his viewpoints as a thought crime.
The chilling effect of Khalil’s arrest, and the crackdown climate that surrounds it, reverberates across campus. On Friday, the dean of Columbia’s highly esteemed journalism school warned international students against reporting on Gaza and the Middle East, remarking, “Nobody can protect you. These are dangerous times.”
Khalil’s detention isn’t meant to be an isolated incident, either—it’s part of Trump’s campaign to discourage “woke” and pro-Palestinian viewpoints on campus, a crackdown that also includes investigating university diversity programming and threatening research funding. This crackdown also includes Trump’s demands that Columbia implement an overzealous and speech-restrictive definition of antisemitism and place an academic department into receivership for at least five years.
Ultimately, this crackdown amounts to policing viewpoints and punishing the ones that the administration has a problem with. But the Supreme Court has long held that when the government targets speakers for their views, it constitutes a “blatant” violation of the First Amendment. This principle underlies the core of our uniquely American conception of free speech: the government cannot punish, investigate, or suppress a speaker simply for disapproval of his viewpoint.
Trump’s Assault on Campus Diversity
This administration’s investigation into more than 50 universities for their diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs offers another stark example of viewpoint discrimination masquerading as policy enforcement.
At FIRE, we’ve long spoken out against discriminatory campus programs, such as racially segregated orientation programs, because separate is never equal, even if intended to support the minority. We’ve also taken on mandatory diversity statements that require professors or students to support a particular campus orthodoxy. Compelled speech violates not just the First Amendment but any recognizable conception of free speech, even when rooted in good intentions.
But this is different.
While the Trump administration alleges that the colleges being investigated unlawfully discriminate against white and Asian students, such as through affirmative action policies, its expansive investigation into campus DEI uses a sledgehammer instead of a scalpel. Instead of narrowly addressing practices that threaten student and faculty civil rights, the government’s vague proclamations send the message that diversity initiatives of any kind cannot take place on campus.
At Michigan State, administrators canceled a Lunar New Year celebration, fearing it might seem preferential to a specific racial group. And this was before Trump announced investigations into particular institutions; instead, MSU canceled the event based on “feelings of uncertainty and hesitation about gathering for events that highlight cultural traditions and communities” after Trump’s flurry of DEI-related executive orders. To its credit, MSU quickly reversed the decision and rescheduled the event in response to public outcry. But such damaging overreactions are to be expected in an environment made newly risky for any events having to do with race or ethnicity.
Or take Grand View University in Iowa, where administrators canceled an International Women’s Day event “in light of orders and policy guidance from the federal government threatening to withhold federal funding for noncompliance,” citing the lack of clarity around the federal government’s definition of DEI. These examples signal a troubling pattern of institutions preemptively censoring themselves and their students to appease executive pressure.
Campus Chilling Crusade
If institutions felt they needed to make such drastic changes based on general proclamations, the chilling effect on campuses nationwide is only about to get worse now that federal attention has zeroed in on particular colleges and universities.
These actions—detaining Khalil, threatening federal funding, promising a dismantling of DEI—don’t just affect those within the immediate line of fire. Instead, they cause fear among wide swathes of students, faculty, and institutions who may see themselves as the administration’s next targets and silence themselves to avoid scrutiny.
Courts recognize that the “chilling effect” promulgated by such threats and recognize it as a violation of the First Amendment. During the McCarthy era, blacklists chilled academic freedom while “communist affiliated” student organizations faced heavy policing. With loyalty oaths requiring government employees pledge “undivided allegiance” to the country, the Supreme Court refused to ignore the obvious threat to free expression, noting that “the threat of sanctions may deter ... almost as potently as the actual application of sanctions.”
That’s what we’re seeing on campuses now: students silenced, faculty fearful, and universities chilled by Trump’s mixture of overt actions and deeply effective threats. We have, of course, seen this before: In the aftermath of 9/11, the Bush administration implemented a quieter form of this strategy as faculty and students who spoke out against the war faced government scrutiny and public intimidation.
Trump’s Campus Crackdowns Violate Core Liberal Principles
What was true then remains true now: The federal government has no business wielding its power to silence dissent, especially on campus. College campuses should encourage students to interrogate their beliefs, to expand their horizons, and to engage with ideas with which they may not agree. To learn and grow, students have to be free to be wrong, and to be corrected. As the Supreme Court insisted more than 50 years ago in Healy v. James: colleges are “peculiarly the ‘marketplace of ideas.’ The First Amendment does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”
Yet that “pall of orthodoxy”—for now, a conservative, pro-Israel, anti-woke orthodoxy—is exactly what threatens our campuses today. Come 2029, a new administration may push a liberal, pro-Palestinian, woke orthodoxy. Neither is acceptable.
You cannot censor your way to greater free speech or ideological diversity. While some herald Trump’s efforts to dismantle campus “wokeism,” we risk normalizing censorial actions that can be repeated by politicians across the political spectrum. When the government targets people and institutions not for what they’ve done, but instead for what they believe, it betrays the core principle of what makes a liberal democracy liberal: that an individual speaker has the right to say what he or she wants to say—even if it is offensive, unpopular, or politically inconvenient.
Free expression has no party. Politicians across the political spectrum will always try to use censorship as a tool for short-term political gain, and will persuasively explain why this time it’s a good idea—not like last time, when “the bad guys” did it. We can’t let that succeed. Instead, we need consistent, principled recognition that the government’s power ends where free speech begins. Trump’s campaign to silence liberal viewpoints on campus is not the defense of viewpoint diversity that he touts. It’s an attack on it.
Our society will remain free, and our academic institutions will remain places of open inquiry, only as long as we defend the rights of others to express ideas we may deeply oppose.
© The UnPopulist, 2025
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I think that more official right-wingers should now rally against MAGA and Trump. Otherwise, it will be one more example of "freedom for me, not for them"