Greg Lukianoff is the president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and writes “Breaking the Academic Filibuster” on Substack.
I’ve spent 25 years watching colleges find new ways to suppress speech. I wish I could say the latest dismal campus record surprises me.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the organization I lead, has tracked more than 200 attempts to shut down campus speakers, cancel performances or otherwise suppress expression in 2026 so far. No previous year reached 200. And for the second year running, of those attempts that had a political tenor, more have come from the political right than from the left: 116 to 64 in 2025, and 96 to 74 so far this year.
For much of the past decade, the campus left was the more powerful censor. Faculties lean overwhelmingly left, often by extraordinary margins. A 2025 report from the Buckley Institute found a ratio of more than 36 Democrats for every 1 Republican across Yale University’s faculty. National surveys have found roughly seven self-identified liberal professors for every conservative. When political scientist Samuel Abrams surveyed roughly 900 student-facing college administrators in 2018, he found that liberals outnumbered conservatives by 12 to 1. Historically, the left has been better at getting its way, too. Censorship campaigns coming from the left worked roughly half the time, compared with about 40 percent for the right.
But there are nuances to this kind of scorekeeping. FIRE measures the political direction of a deplatforming attempt by comparing the person or group pushing censorship with the speech targeted — not the political affiliation of every individual.
After Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, much of the campus conflict was a fight within the broad left. Progressive students and administrators had long been on the same page about what speech was deemed offensive. Now, factions of administrators were in bitter disagreement with student advocates, and other factions of administrators.
When conservatives challenge the campus left on its own turf, they often lose, and the story barely exists outside conservative media. When the campus left starts fighting itself, the dispute often reaches university leadership and drives headlines. Censorship wasn’t new in 2023, but a far wider audience was finally watching.
The ideology of would-be censors might have shifted, but the people in the middle of the fight remained the same: university administrators.
When I arrived at FIRE in 2001, we were already battling speech codes and censorial mid-level administrators. Around 2014, administrators encountered a generation of students more willing to demand that professors, classmates and visiting speakers be punished for offending them. My colleague Sean Stevens and I call that relationship the “unholy alliance.” Administrators had been policing speech for years. The new student activists supplied fresh targets, political cover and sometimes enthusiastic partners. This was never just about student petitions. The people with the power to investigate, suspend and fire people for speech were the administrators. In 2023, students shouted down federal Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan at my alma mater, Stanford Law School. In an unusually blatant display of the alliance, a dean stood up with a prepared speech rebuking him.
For years, much of higher education’s response to criticism was to insist this problem wasn’t real. Reform attempts were met with what I’ve started calling the academic filibuster: endless demands for more proof that reform is necessary. Cases became “anecdotes,” surveys had methodological flaws, and someone always needed another committee.
I’m not immune to these instincts. Early in my career, I was guilty of what I call “political cooties”: treating criticism as suspect simply because it came from somebody more conservative than I was. I sometimes, shamefully, discounted warnings from FIRE co-founder Alan Kors partly for that reason. Unfortunately for me, he kept being right. Government power was already deeply involved in campus censorship. At public universities, the administrators policing speech were themselves government officials. At private universities, administrators often invoked federal civil rights laws and guidance to justify it. What’s new is the extraordinary increase in politicians and government appointees directly demanding censorship, often wielding financial threats against entire institutions. It’s a difference in scope and scale, not the sudden arrival of government power.
From 1998 to 2022, politicians and government appointees were involved in no more than five recorded deplatforming attempts in any one year. The number jumped to 19 in 2023, with 11 involving a single Palestinian literature festival held before Oct. 7. In 2025, it hit 33, more than six times the old peak. The 2026 pace is similar. Nearly all of the recent attempts have come from the right.
And universities are increasingly giving in. In 2023 and 2024, campaigns to censor campus speech involving politicians or appointees succeeded six times out of 30: 1 in 5. In 2025 and 2026, they succeeded 37 times out of 59: nearly 2 in 3.
A good example is the University of Washington’s August decision to cancel a speaking appearance by left-wing firebrand Hasan Piker. Although the school publicly blamed procedural missteps for the event’s cancellation, it was later revealed that at least two state lawmakers reached out to the university to express their objections to Piker’s appearance. In September, another event featuring Piker at the University of Texas’s flagship campus proceeded despite the objections of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott, but the university imposed more than $17,000 in security fees on the student group hosting him.
Government officials have every right to criticize invited speakers, and the officials who rescind those invitations. But the First Amendment prohibits them from using the powers of government to force their desired outcomes.
I keep imagining what might have happened if university leaders had planted their feet in 2014. When censorship came from the campus left, presidents needed to stand up to their own administrators and tell them to stop policing speech. When politicians on the right demanded censorship, they needed to give those same administrators the backbone to resist. The answer in both cases should have been simple: Protest anyone you like. We will not punish professors or students for protected speech. We will not let you shout down invited speakers. No. See you in court.
Had they done that, I believe the free-speech disaster of the last 15 years might have been little more than a blip. Instead, administrators normalized censorship, dismissed decades of warnings and helped destroy public trust. The backlash was foreseeable; its censorial tactics are still wrong.
School leaders spent years failing to rein in their own censorious administrators. Now they must give administrators the backbone to resist politicians who can cut their budgets. The law is on their side — the choice is theirs to make. Free expression is essential to the pursuit of truth, and universities cannot compromise one without compromising the other.
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