Tuesday, April 23`, 2025
Year : 2, Issue: 34
by Robert Maranto
Until it won the election in November, the GOP was the First Amendment party; establishment Democrats were censors.
President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance campaigned on free speech. Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris didn’t mention it.
In fairness to Harris, the mainstream news media overcovered Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” but underreported more widespread leftist censorship such as California’s diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) rules that micromanage college teaching.
Voters are concerned about free speech
Swing voters smelled hypocrisy. A poll conducted by the University of Chicago and commissioned by FIRE indicated that free speech concerned many voters in the 2024 election.
Polling by other researchers, reported in “The Free Inquiry Papers,” of which I was a contributor, found that more than three times as many Americans self-censor today than at the height of the McCarthy era.
The free speech recession began at colleges, the places that most need free speech to seek truth.
House Republicans were right in 2024 to pass a bill prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation, protecting the rights of faith-based groups to determine their membership and assuring that speech limitations cannot be selectively enforced, as when conservative speakers must pay “security fees” waived for anti-Israel speakers.
Just four Democrats voted for the legislation, and the Democratic-controlled Senate showed no interest.
In fairness to Democrats, the House bill passed late in the session, and its name, the End Woke Higher Education Act, was not designed to reach across the aisle.
Even so, as Inside Higher Ed reported, Democrats who opposed the bill used anti-regulation arguments normally made by Republicans, saying it “would create a ‘regulatory quagmire’ ” and “micromanage state university policies at the federal level.”
Republicans must do better on free speech
Given the Trump administration’s actions to end DEI funding, to deport noncitizen pro-Hamas activists like Mahmoud Khalil and to censor terms like “disability,” 2024 seems long ago.
The right may be starting to copy the left, politicizing research and teaching to support supposed national interests and censoring to “protect” the vulnerable. They could go a lot further. The federal government could condition research dollars on scientists showing how their work will “make America great again,” with conservative consultants paid to help.
After all, as Robert George and Anna Krylov detail in “The Ruthless Politicization of Science Funding,” the Biden administration used executive orders to politicize $90 billion in annual scientific research by forcing applicants to incorporate DEI, even encouraging scientists to hire DEI consultants, patronage for Democrats at the expense of science.
In an area I research, police reform, ideologically driven research encouraged police cutbacks, which seemingly increased violence, costing thousands of (mainly) Black lives. Thus to “prevent harm,” the Trump administration could encourage colleges to defund Black Lives Matter research. Department of Education regulatory guidance could enable students to file complaints when their campuses create “hostile climates” for police or Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Students whose families suffered under communism could report professors defending China or Cuba, perhaps using the same campus hotlines now used to anonymously allege racism, sexism and ableism.
Jewish students could report supporters of Hamas, a group that calls for (and acts on) killing Jews. After all, the left used Title IX and DEI rules to set expansive precedents protecting “vulnerable” students, as when administrators drove biologist Carole Hooven out of Harvard for allegedly creating a hostile climate for trans students and their allies by teaching that biological sex is binary.
To be clear, my fellow Republicans should not do this. GOP, don’t be that party. Republicans should downsize leftist censors − not create MAGA equivalents.
Both parties should unite to pass a (renamed) End Woke Higher Education Actto champion everyone’s rights and to create a U.S. First Amendment Commission with state-level affiliates to promote free expression as an American value that unites us all.
I’m optimistic that Congress and the president will act because swing voters like me will punish whichever party consistently supports censors. Politicians, beware.
Author Robert Maranto, the 21st Century chair in Leadership in the Department of Education Reform at the University of Arkansas
