New data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) records a record number of campus censorship controversies in the United States in 2025, and a reversal in who is applying the pressure – incidents coded as emanating “From the Right” now make up the bulk of cases, as conservative campaigns and complaints outnumber left-coded drives to sanction lawful speech.
FIRE’s Students Under Fire Database logs 252 incidents in 2020, falling to 173 in 2021 (–31.3%), before settling into a high plateau: 208 (2022), 214 (2023) and 207 (2024). Then comes 2025, the first year of President Trump’s second term, which breaks out of that range entirely. At 273 incidents, it sits 30.2% above the 2022–24 average (about 209.7 incidents per year). It is also unusually high relative to the preceding four years: across 2021–2024, under Joe Biden’s presidency, FIRE records 802 incidents – an average of 200.5 per year – putting 2025 36.2% above that mean.
The change in topic-mix is just as striking. 2023 and 2024 are, structurally, Israel/Palestine years in this dataset: incidents tagged “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” rise to 102 (47.7%) in 2023 and 131 (63.3%) in 2024, meaning that by 2024 almost two-thirds of all recorded student controversies were being pulled into that single orbit. In 2025 the same topic remains large in raw terms – 95 incidents – but its share falls to 34.8%, because the year becomes multi-topic again.
Two categories in particular surge. “Gender” tagged incidents rise to 70 in 2025 (25.6%), up from 20 (9.7%) in 2024. Political-views incidents rise to 59 (21.6%), up from 10 (4.8%) the year before.
That widening of the flashpoints also coincides with an unusually interventionist White House posture towards higher education. On 20 January 2025, President Trump signed an executive order titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government”, which states that it is the policy of the United States to recognise “two sexes, male and female” and rejects “gender ideology”.
Since then, the administration has signalled a willingness to tie access to federal partnerships and programmes to compliance with its priorities. In October 2025, the Department of Education circulated a draft “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education”, inviting universities to commit – on pain of jeopardising federal relationships – to fostering a “vibrant marketplace of ideas”, including by “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully punish, belittle, and even spark violence against conservative ideas”.
The 2025 shift also unfolds against a darker backdrop of campus polarisation. In September 2025, conservative activist and commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University, an episode that became a national flashpoint in its own right.
All of which raises an obvious question: who is applying the pressure? FIRE’s database tries to code this directly, through a variable it calls “political direction”. On that measure, 2025 marks the sharpest reversal in the series.
In 2020, incidents coded “From the Left” account for 63.9% of cases, while incidents coded “From the Right” account for 15.9%. By 2025, the distribution is effectively inverted: “From the Right” accounts for 65.2%, while “From the Left” falls to 16.8%.
Nor are the spike topics politically symmetrical. Gender is the cleanest illustration. In 2024, gender-tagged incidents skew left-coded (15 “From the Left”, and just 1 “From the Right”). In 2025, the centre of gravity shifts decisively: 52 gender incidents are coded “From the Right”, against 17 “From the Left”, with 1 marked “Not Applicable”. “Political-views” incidents rise on both sides, but still tilt rightward in 2025: 37 “From the Right”, 19 “From the Left”, and 3 “Not Applicable”.
Those shifts are visible not just in what students are fighting over, but in how the fights are prosecuted. Between 2024 and 2025, the biggest movers in FIRE’s “type of expression” field are Legitimacy – challenges to standing, affiliation, credibility, or the right to speak – which rises from 21 to 61 (up 40); Direct interaction – face-to-face confrontation, often in the context of protests or live campus events – which rises from 8 to 27 (up 19); and Email, as a channel for complaints, demands or disciplinary escalation, which rises from 2 to 18 (up 16). In 2025, legitimacy disputes coded “From the Right” rise from 10 to 41, while direct interaction goes from essentially absent on the right in 2024 to 18 cases, and email becomes predominantly right-coded (12 right; 1 left; 5 not applicable).
The result is not merely a larger caseload, but a qualitatively different one: more legitimacy challenges and more direct, procedural conflict, disproportionately associated with right-coded pressure.
Reflecting on the data in an op-ed for The Dispatch, Greg Lukianoff, FIRE’s president and CEO, argues that the centre of gravity in campus speech battles has shifted. For most of his career, he wrote, the biggest threat to free speech “came from inside higher education: the on-campus left (students, yes, but more importantly administrators) using the power of investigation and discipline to punish ‘wrongthink’.” The right, he adds, was never absent, but its pressure tended to be applied from outside the institution, rather than being embedded in the day-to-day administrative machinery of universities.
In 2025, by contrast, what changed, he says, “was the balance of power and the source of the pressure”: federal and state authorities are now “the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech”, using the levers of state power.
There is, however, a slight tension in Lukianoff’s diagnosis. If 2025 is being reshaped primarily by state power, why does FIRE’s student-level dataset show the year skewing so heavily towards right-coded pressure, with 65.2% “From the Right”, against 16.8% “From the Left”? One plausible reading is that government action is functioning as a permissive signal: a shift in what students, donors and administrators expect will now be rewarded or punished. In that environment, government pressure can amplify and legitimise campus-side campaigns and complaints – a dynamic consistent with the surge of right-coded attacks on categories such as gender and political views in 2025.
In Lukianoff’s view, that produces the bleakest configuration imaginable: “Government pressure is skyrocketing, while the internal campus coalition that helped create this vulnerability in the first place hasn’t disappeared — creating a worst-of-both-worlds squeeze on the expressive rights of students and faculty.”
This article forms part of the Committee for Academic Freedom’s monitoring of developments in UK higher education. To receive monthly updates and analysis on cases affecting academic freedom, click the link and subscribe to our newsletter.