Republican-run states have mounted a legislative campaign to restrict what is taught in public universities. The effort echoes Donald Trump's attacks on Ivy League institutions but has drawn less public scrutiny and affects far more students.
A report by PEN America, a non-profit, found that lawmakers in 32 states filed 93 bills censoring higher education in 2025. Twenty-one passed, subjecting more than half of America's college students to such policies. Data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), an advocacy group, show that cases in which student speech was investigated, censored or punished across the country hit a record high. In 2020, the peak year of the Black Lives Matter protests, the vast majority of recorded incidents involved left-wing efforts to curb right-wing speech. By 2025 the opposite was true.
Texas A&M University, America's biggest university with 80,000 students, ordered a professor to strike Plato's "Symposium" from his introductory philosophy course or be reassigned, arguing that reading it exposed students to banned topics on gender and race ideology. About 200 courses were said to be under review for prohibited content. A master's class entitled "Ethics and Public Policy" was cancelled in its first week after its black professor refused to tell the college dean exactly which days he planned to discuss race.
At the University of Texas at Austin, 40% of faculty reported in a survey that they had changed their curriculum in autumn 2025. The faculty council, an elected body advising administrators on curriculums and policy, was dissolved in September 2025.
Brandon Creighton, a former Texas state senator who sponsored the most sweeping higher-education bills of the past two legislative sessions and was appointed chancellor of Texas Tech University, described the reforms as: "DEI removed, tenure revised, governance overhaul and a wholesale review of curriculum." He argued public universities should be understood as "an extension of state government".
Hatred, n.: A sentiment appropriate to the occasion of another's superiority.