Education

How the G.O.P. Went From Championing Campus Free Speech to Fighting It

Published

1 year ago

March 21, 2025

How the G.O.P. Went From Championing Campus Free Speech to Fighting It

As conservatives fought against cancel culture on college campuses, they developed a particular fondness for the First Amendment. It was un-American, they argued, to punish someone for exercising their right to speak freely.

Today, however, many of those same conservatives, now in power in state and federal government, are behind a growing crackdown on political expression at universities, in ways that try to sidestep the Constitution’s free-speech guarantees.

President Trump and Republican lawmakers say that new laws and policies are necessary to protect students from harmful and objectionable content, to prevent harassment and to discourage conformity.

To that end, Mr. Trump has threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of federal dollars from universities because they moved too slowly to quell protests that left many Jewish students feeling threatened. And Republicans in state legislatures have drafted sweeping prohibitions against classroom “indoctrination” and the display of certain L.G.B.T.Q. symbols. They have also demanded the removal of art they consider inappropriate.

In some cases, the Trump administration has said existing federal law already gives the president all the power he needs to act. When Mr. Trump said he would deport student activists, for example, he claimed to be acting in the interest of American foreign policy.

Tellingly, administration officials have said they are not bound by the First Amendment when it comes to noncitizens.

“This is not about free speech,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “This is about people that don’t have a right to be in the United States to begin with. No one has a right to a student visa. No one has a right to a green card.”

Critics of this broad approach, including some on the right, say Republicans are being just as heavy-handed and censorious as they claimed the left was toward them.

“That makes the situation so much worse,” said Greg Lukianoff, chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a free-speech group that often represents moderates and conservatives who claim they’ve been retaliated against for their political views.

“Now we have all this federal pressure and pressure from state governments — sometimes really direct and clear, and sometimes hazy and confusing,” he said, adding, “There’s a lot fewer people who care about the nonpartisan defense of free speech now.”

For many First Amendment experts and academics, the new laws and orders reveal an especially insidious threat: Public officials who are willing to marshal the power of the state against people whose views they dislike.

“A number of people in elected office have gotten extraordinarily comfortable with the idea that they should use that office to control the spread of ideas and information,” said Jonathan Friedman, a managing director at PEN America, a free speech advocacy group.

“And at a fundamental level, that’s what makes all of this so dangerous,” Mr. Friedman added.

While the federal government’s role in some aspects of education is fairly limited, it does hold powerful tools that the Trump administration has been eager to use. It can launch civil rights investigations, for instance, or withhold research grants.

States, which provide more funding for public schools and universities than the federal government does, have greater leverage and control.

Legislation approved last month by the Ohio State Senate sets parameters for the discussion of any “controversial belief or policy” at state universities — including climate change, electoral politics, abortion and immigration. The bill demands that faculty members “shall not seek to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious point of view.”

Sponsors say its purpose is to “allow students to exercise their right to free speech without threat of reprisal.” If it becomes law, universities would also be required to post all undergraduate course syllabuses online, along with the professor’s contact information and professional qualifications.

Many states have taken aim at diversity, equity and inclusion programs in university hiring and admissions. But Republicans in Arizona are going further, by trying to remove the subject entirely from the classroom. The State Senate approved a bill this month that would deny funding to any public college or university that teaches about contemporary American society through the academic framework of concepts including “critical theory, whiteness, systemic racism, institutional racism, antiracism, microaggressions.”

A bill awaiting the governor’s signature in Utah would outlaw pride flags at public schools and on government property.

In some cases, Republicans have directly interfered with campus activities. Students at the University of North Texas took down a pro-Palestinian art exhibit last month after a Republican lawmaker complained that it referred to genocide in Hebrew.

At Texas A&M University, officials banned drag performances on campus, saying it was “inconsistent” with the university’s values to host events that “involve biological males dressing in women’s clothing.”

The American education system has long been a target for conservatives, many of whom see it as hostile to their values. In the last few years, the country’s most explosive political and cultural clashes — over Covid policy, racial inequality, gender identity, immigration, Gaza — have played out with intensity on campus quads, at school board meetings and in the classroom.

Disruptive student protests have been an animating issue for Mr. Trump. In 2017, he suggested revoking funding from the University of California, Berkeley, after the university canceled an appearance by the professional right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos.

Today, Mr. Trump — who declared in his recent address to Congress that he had “brought back free speech” — continues to antagonize academia, but this time he is using the power of the presidency.

After his administration announced that it was canceling $400 million in funding for Columbia University, accusing it of failing to protect students and faculty members from “antisemitic violence and harassment,” legal scholars called the move an existential threat to academic freedom.

“Never has the government brought such leverage against an institution of higher education,” said Lee C. Bollinger, the former president of Columbia University.

Some conservatives said this kind of action is overdue and unsurprising.

“When you take federal funds, you agree to abide by all kinds of rules,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional studies at the conservative Manhattan Institute. Universities agree, for instance, to abide by certain accounting standards and anti-discrimination policies.

Those rules are not always enforced consistently, Mr. Shapiro said. Nor is the Trump administration “exactly being legally precise” in a lot of what it has done, he added.

“But part of this vibe shift that elected Trump is wanting law and order in a lot of ways,” Mr. Shapiro said. “And that includes on college campuses.”

The arrest earlier this month of Mahmoud Khalil, a green-card holder who was born in Syria and studied at Columbia, was one of the most aggressive moves yet by the Trump administration in its effort to punish pro-Palestinian demonstrators. Mr. Khalil served as a spokesman for a student group that embraces hard-line anti-Israel rhetoric and says it supports liberation for Palestinians “by any means necessary, including armed resistance.”

In announcing the arrest, the Department of Homeland Security accused Mr. Khalil of aligning himself with Hamas, a designated terrorist organization. Voicing support for such causes is not, however, a crime, and the Supreme Court has declared all manner of hateful speech to be protected by the First Amendment, including cheering the deaths of soldiers at their funerals and, in certain cases, cross burnings.

“It can’t be a crime — or even a civil offense — simply to hold and express heinous views,” said Ann Coulter, the conservative firebrand whose college speeches have been the targets of protesters and have sometimes been threatened with violence.

Ms. Coulter, an immigration hard-liner who acknowledged that she had rarely heard of a deportation that she didn’t support, said the president would be setting a terrible precedent by making protected speech — as offensive as it may be — a reason for deporting a legal green card holder like Mr. Khalil.

But Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, said that the law is not always clear when the speech of noncitizens is at issue. And he said that Mr. Trump’s attempts to punish noncitizens seemed consistent in many ways with powers that Congress had already given presidents.

Does that mean that Mr. Khalil can be deported for protesting, which is a constitutionally protected act? “The only honest answer,” Mr. Volokh said, “is we don’t know.”

Conservatives have tested the scope of the First Amendment in other ways recently. Ed Martin, the Trump-appointed interim U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, told the dean of Georgetown University Law Center that he had begun an “inquiry” into the school’s teaching and promotion of diversity, equity and inclusion — and insisted that he would not hire students from any university that continues to offer such programs.

In response, the school’s dean, William Treanor, wrote in a letter that the First Amendment guarantees Georgetown, a private, Catholic institution, “its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it.”

“This is a bedrock principle of constitutional law,” Mr. Treanor continued, “recognized not only by the courts, but by the administration in which you serve.”

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Education

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Published

20 hours ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

She Tried to Help Schools Build Healthier Playgrounds. Then Her E.P.A. Grant Was Canceled.

Lost Science is an ongoing series of accounts from scientists who have lost their jobs or funding after cuts by the Trump administration. The conversations have been edited for clarity and length. Here’s why we’re doing this.

Kirsten Beyer: We had a three-year study, funded by the Environmental Protection Agency, focused on environmental health among children. We had two main aims. The first was to develop a curriculum so that Milwaukee Public Schools teachers could teach about environmental health, environmental health disparities and climate change.

The second aim was to look at the impact of schoolyard greening on health and environmental outcomes. There’s this greening initiative in Milwaukee to redevelop schoolyards. Many of them were sheets of asphalt. A lot of them were in disrepair. The redevelopment plans included things like planting trees, adding outdoor classrooms, improving storm water drainage with green infrastructure and improving sports fields and natural play spaces.

We built a study to collect data before and after. There are lots of schools around the country that have similar situations, so we were excited about sharing our results and informing other jurisdictions about the impact of this redevelopment.

We had the kids complete surveys. We measured things like social and emotional health, environmental health literacy, attitudes toward outdoor play. We also had sensors that measured their physical activity levels, time spent outdoors and where they spent time in the schoolyard. We went out and observed recess. How are kids playing? How is conflict being resolved? How engaged are the teachers or monitors? We measured air pollution and how hot those schoolyards were before greening.

We were in the field in May 2025, collecting our final post-redevelopment data, when the grant was canceled. It was a shock. We had hired people as data collectors and had a month of data collection left.

I decided to rustle up some other resources just to get data collection done. But then we had no more money to support our community partners, staff or graduate students. We had to take people off this project.

Now we’re trying to do something with all of this data that we’ve collected: process it, analyze it and, importantly, share it.

We have just piles of data. There are papers that won’t get written and data that won’t be shared because this happened.

But I can’t just abandon this work. This is important to my community partners. This is important to other schools. And this is important to all of the kids who gave us their time, all the parents who allowed us to do research with their kids. There’s a moral imperative to continue the work, albeit slowly.

Kirsten Beyer is a health geographer at the Medical College of Wisconsin.

Education

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

Published

1 day ago

May 8, 2026

Press Room

Art Abounds on Campuses Outside of New York City

The Princeton University Art Museum recently made Time magazine’s top 100 list of The World’s Greatest Places of 2026. James Steward, director of the museum that reopened on Halloween in an acclaimed new building designed by Adjaye Associates, said of the ranking, “It normalizes the idea that we are a world-class destination.”

In its first five months alone, the museum has received 250,000 visitors — more than half from outside campus (Princeton’s old museum averaged 200,000 annually).

The surge of public interest in the Princeton museum’s new home, spotlighting a global collection of more than 117,000 objects, is a timely reminder that university and college art museums are filled with unexpected treasures — often showcased in architecturally significant buildings — and are free and accessible to all. Here are several standout exhibitions at academic museums in range of New York City that are worth a visit this month, when campuses are looking their spring best for reunions and graduations.

The glorious modernist home of the Yale Center for British Art — Louis I. Kahn’s last design, completed in 1977 after his death — reopened in March 2025 after a two-year architectural conservation. In the year since, the museum has welcomed 100,000 visitors and almost 300 class visits to study its collection of more than 100,000 works from the 15th century to today that present an expansive understanding of British art and its imperial history.

“British art isn’t an island story, it’s a global story,” said Martina Droth, the center’s director. A contemporary installation by Rina Banerjee, a recent acquisition on view for the first time through Sept. 13 in the museum’s entrance court, and the exhibition “Painters, Ports, and Profits: Artists and the East India Company, 1750-1850,” up through June 21, both speak to a deep connection to India.

“If British art is shaped by movement and exchange, then in ‘Painters, Ports, and Profits’ you see British artists who traveled to India because of the East India Company and found themselves working alongside Indian artists,” Droth said. “New things happen in terms of the aesthetics of the work, and you can really see that in the exhibition.”

The 115 works are mostly drawn from the collection and almost half are by Indian artists and workshops, including “Lucknow from the Gomti,” a 37-foot panoramic scroll of life along the river in that city in Northern India and a star of the show.

Banerjee, who was born in Kolkata and lived in London before moving to New York, has remade the form of the Taj Mahal in hot-pink semi-translucent plastic. Visible from the street through the glass doors and dangling from the ceiling, her playful floating sculptural palace allows visitors to enter and discover all sorts of colonial relics and commercial baubles embedded within.

The Johnson Museum opened in 1973 in an I.M. Pei-designed building, which rises seven stories and frames spectacular views of the landscape with its expansive vertical and horizontal windows and fifth floor cantilevered over an open porch. The global collection numbers more than 40,000 objects, with particular strength in Asian art, and college classes made 335 visits in the last academic year.

Students from Cornell’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences have spent considerable time with the exhibition “Naples: Course of Empire,” a series of seven panoramic canvases by Alexis Rockman on view through June 7, according to the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art, Andrea Inselmann. Over the last four decades, Rockman has been a leading voice in the art world raising awareness about climate change through his paintings focused on all forms of life on Earth.

The works in this show were “inspired by Thomas Cole’s 19th-century cycle ‘The Course of Empire’ about the rise and fall of civilizations,” said Inselmann, who organized the exhibition. Taking Naples as a case study of a port city vulnerable to rising waters, Rockman used his signature style of deeply researched and lyrically rendered history painting to reimagine this landscape over geologic time starting from the Mesozoic Era. Paintings depict animals fleeing the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 A.D.; a rat flying over Naples spewing a noxious plume during the bubonic plague of the 1650s; and a whale breaching before the ruins of the city in a speculative post-human future.

“I thought this would be a very appropriate show for a college context,” Inselmann said. “Especially for younger generations, I think it provides a context and an environment to talk about climate change and to express their anxieties or their hopes for the future.”

On Skidmore’s campus in Saratoga Springs, famous for its horse racing and natural mineral springs, the Tang punches above its weight for a small liberal arts college museum with an ambitious exhibition program in a striking building designed by Antoine Predock. The museum generates about a dozen shows annually — often from its collection of nearly 20,000 objects, with strengths in contemporary art and photography — and drew more than 220 class visits from across disciplines this school year.

Anchoring the Tang’s 25th anniversary season this spring is “Kathy Butterly: Assume Yes,” a three-decade retrospective of the artist’s playful, inventive and sometimes jarring small-scale ceramic sculptures on view through July 26. “Kathy bridges the generation of Robert Arneson and Viola Frey, who were her teachers and innovators that moved ceramics from a purely craft environment to a museum and art conversation, and the world we’re in today where we see ceramics in lots of different ways all over gallery exhibitions,” said the Tang director Ian Berry, who organized the show. “Kathy is a real inspiration and key figure for this current moment.”

Forty-five of her eccentric vessels — miniature three-dimensional canvases for experimental glazes and textures, often crumpling expressively on their bases — are grouped chronologically across three huge platforms serving as the “rooms” of the show. Within the constraints of small shifts in scale, from four to eight inches say, “an entire universe changes,” Berry said. The title of the show comes from one of Butterly’s works. “‘Assume’ adds a little twist to the exclamation point of ‘Yes’,” he said. “It’s optimistic, it’s upbeat, but also it has a complexity to it.”

Alongside Princeton’s encyclopedic collections, displayed throughout the museum’s stunning complex of nine interlocking modernist pavilions, is “Willem de Kooning: The Breakthrough Years, 1945-50” — the first temporary loan exhibition in the new building — on view through July 26.

The show is built around Princeton’s own 1948 painting “Black Friday” — exhibited that year in de Kooning’s debut show at the Charles Egan Gallery in New York after he had struggled there in poverty for 15 years.

“It emerged as one of the essential pictures in de Kooning’s career,” said Steward, Princeton’s museum director, who agreed to loan “Black Friday” to the Museum of Modern Art for its major de Kooning retrospective in 2011 organized by the chief curator emeritus of painting and sculpture, John Elderfield.

Now, in turn, Elderfield has co-curated this exhibition of 18 paintings, drawn from more than a dozen museums and private collections and focused on the pivotal period when de Kooning found his artistic voice and helped to pioneer Abstract Expressionism.

“It is just such an incisive project that is physically modest in scope, but not modest at all intellectually or artistically,” Steward said. “That’s a sweet spot I really want us to occupy as a great academic museum.”

Education

Today, In Short

Published

2 days ago

May 7, 2026

Press Room

One of my favorite podcasts is “So True With Caleb Hearon,” hosted by Hearon, a comedian. He recently appeared in “The Devil Wears Prada 2” as Miranda Priestly’s assistant. Having grown up, as Hearon put it, “fat, gay and poor” in rural Missouri, he never dreamed of booking the role “a million girls would kill for.”

Here’s what you need to know

Middle East: Iran said yesterday that it was reviewing an American proposal to end the war. Washington is still awaiting Tehran’s response.
California: Last night was the final televised debate before the primary for the state’s governor. The face-off between seven candidates was tame at first, but they eventually furiously attacked one another. See what went down.
Hantavirus: Should you worry? Public health officials say the threat to the general public remains low based on what we know. Read more about the hantavirus.
Jeffrey Epstein: A federal judge released a suicide note believed to be written by the convicted sex offender that had been sealed for years.
Ted Turner: Turner, the media mogul, yachtsman and creator of CNN, died yesterday at his home in Florida. He was 87.

On an online note …

A few things you didn’t really need to know but now do:

It’s been nearly 20 years since Guy Goma’s BBC appearance became an early viral internet moment. Goma thought he was interviewing for a job when he suddenly he found himself on air. He pulled it off much better than I could have.
How are people getting their information about health and wellness? For at least half of U.S. adults under 50, it’s through influencers or podcasters, according to a new analysis.
Clavicular, the looksmaxxing influencer, has been charged with shooting at an alligator during a livestream.

The New York Knicks hung on to the series lead in a 108-102 thriller against the Philadelphia 76ers. Game 3 is set for tomorrow in Philadelphia.