2025 sets new record for attempts to silence student speech, FIRE research finds

PHILADELPHIA, Dec. 16, 2025 — The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression reports a record number of campus incidents involving attempts to investigate, censor, or otherwise punish students for protected expression in 2025.

FIRE has documented 273 efforts — so far — this year in which students and student groups were targeted for their constitutionally protected expression. This breaks the previous record of 252 set back in 2020, the first year of the Students Under Fire database, during the unrest prompted by Covid-19 lockdowns and the murder of George Floyd.

"These findings paint a campus culture in which student expression is increasingly policed and controversial ideas are not tolerated,” said FIRE Senior Researcher Logan Dougherty. “College is supposed to be a place where ideas are freely shared, not where students should be concerned about whether their comments will be subject to university scrutiny.”

Some especially grievous incidents include the arrest of Columbia University pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil; Indiana University’s censorship of its student newspaper (and firing of the director of student media) over an editorial dispute; the University of Alabama’s decision to shutter two student outlets because they supposedly ran afoul of U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s guidance about D.E.I. programs; and, for good measure, a student at Weber State University in Utah who was directed to censor a presentation — about censorship.

FIRE’s Students Under Fire tracking relies on publicly available information to document various details about these controversies, including but not limited to the source calling for punishment, the speech topic of controversy, and the political direction of the attempt in relation to the targeted speech. Consistent with other FIRE research, the Students Under Fire database observed an uptick in attempts by the political right to silence speech in 2025.

The database is unprecedented both in type and scale, offering the most detailed collection of campus controversies involving students’ protected speech to date.

FIRE also noticed another troubling trend in 2025: A surge in attempts by government officials to influence how universities respond to student speech — especially following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Some recent examples include:

• Indiana’s attorney general urged constituents to pressure Indiana University to terminate a student from their campus job after they posted, “[T]he world just got a little better today” in response to Kirk’s murder.
• Rep. Derrick Van Orden announced on X that he introduced legislation to strip federal funding from Oberlin College unless the university expelled a student over their social media activity, which included posting a video in which she said, “I don’t feel bad” about the shooting and that “we need to bring back political assassinations.”
• Texas state representatives demanded that the University of Texas at Austin investigate and ban a student group and expel its members from the university after the group posted images of an anti-Trump rally to Instagram—including one showing a student holding a piñata of Donald Trump with its head split open.

We also saw executive orders at the state and federal level used as justification to impose system-wide bans on student-organized drag shows, cancel student film festivals, and outright disband numerous student groups. 

In all these cases, students were targeted or punished not because their speech was unlawful — but because it caused controversy.

“Aside from the harm on the individual students involved in these incidents, such actions could have the effect of chilling speech across an entire campus — and across an entire generation,” Dougherty said. “What kind of lesson is that? That the safest move in college is to keep your head down and your mouth shut?”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought — the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.

Karl de Vries, Director of Media Relations, FIRE: 215-717-3473; media@fire.org