For years, the threat to free speech on American campuses was an inside job — a crisis defined by rows of administrators better suited to a daycare than a university, and crowds of activist students holding up placards, eager to police “wrongthink” and silence dissent.
But as 2025 became a record-breaking year for campus censorship in the USA, a new player has emerged: the state.
With the federal government beginning to fight fire with fire (using funding freezes and visa revocations to ensure ideological enforcement), many reformers have come to believe that the only way to save the “marketplace of ideas” is through top-down government intervention.
Americans should think again. This looks a lot like the “solution” we have attempted here in Britain that has spectacularly backfired, as state intervention often does. We have inadvertently handed our censors a more effective mask: the blank cheque of “safeguarding.”
This year, the UK officially began enforcing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, a law aimed at establishing administrative accountability through mechanisms including a Free Speech Director at the Office for Students and a complaints system allowing students to sue universities for censorship. The law has already become a paper tiger since the Labour government paused the essential scheme that would allow students to hold these institutions accountable, creating a regulatory vacuum that administrators have been all too happy to fill.
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