America’s Censored Classrooms 2024

Refining the Art of Censorship

America’s Censored Classrooms 2024

October 8, 2024

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Since 2021, PEN America has tracked state-level educational censorship legislation in our Index of Educational Gag Orders. In this report, we analyze the educational censorship laws introduced and passed in the now mostly concluded 2024 legislative sessions, with a particular focus on higher education.

Our top-line numbers:

In 2024, state governments enacted 8 bills or policies that PEN America defines as educational gag orders—direct restrictions on educational speech in the classroom.

Of these, 3 focused solely on colleges and universities, 3 focused only on K-12 schools, and 2 included restrictions on both.

State governments also enacted 5 additional higher education bills that endanger academic freedom in ways that are not direct censorship, such as politicization of university governance; bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion; and restrictions on faculty tenure.

In all, 47 educational gag orders and 10 other higher ed restrictions were enacted in 23 states between January 1, 2021, and October 1, 2024.

Our key findings:

In 2024, higher ed censorship policies went underground—and became even more dangerous. Supporters of censorship largely abandoned open calls for restricting faculty speech; instead, they embraced—to great effect—camouflage, misdirection, and actions behind the scenes.

The campaign to censor higher ed adopted or continued three key tactics: (1) disguising educational censorship laws by attaching them to other popular goals; (2) expanding their targets to undermine the broader system that sustains academic freedom, such as shared governance, faculty tenure, and accreditation agencies; and (3) bullying universities into adopting restrictions without a law.

The impact of 2024’s educational censorship laws has been devastating, but resistance continues to grow. Both legal challenges and activism have been successful, and educational censorship laws have been revealed as unpopular, forcing supporters of censorship to change their approach radically.

Educational Gag Orders, K-12 and Higher Ed, 2021-2024

Higher Education Restrictions, including educational gag orders and other restrictions, 2021-2024

PEN America Experts:

Jeffrey Adam Sachs

Research Consultant, PEN America

Jeremy C. Young

Program Director, Freedom to Learn

Introduction

Educational censorship is changing. The educational gag orders of 2021 that directly prohibited teaching specific topics are largely a thing of the past. In 2024, most educational censorship bills don’t fulminate against critical race theory or the New York Times’ 1619 Project. Instead, they are more likely to attach themselves to a worthy goal, like promoting “institutional neutrality” or “viewpoint diversity,” combating antisemitism, or treating all students equally.

But Americans should make no mistake: This is censorship by stealth.

Since 2021, PEN America has tracked and analyzed educational gag orders: state legislation and policies that restrict teaching about topics such as race, gender, and LGBTQ+ identity in educational settings.¹ Over that time, most educational censorship bills and policies followed a settled pattern. Certain terms and phrases appeared over and over in legislative text. Even the rhetoric of “anti-wokeness” used by lawmakers had a familiar shape and drew on recognizable tropes.

But in 2024, the playbook changed. In this year’s state legislative sessions, most of which took place between January and June, policymakers largely abandoned straightforward calls for censorship, opting instead to disguise their intentions through euphemism and misdirection. This tactic was essential for continuing the campaign to censor America’s classrooms, amid a gauntlet of legal challenges, mounting evidence that gag orders are unpopular and carry no political benefit, and growing momentum for efforts to block censorship legislation.

From Stop WOKE to Censorship by Stealth

From its earliest stages in 2020—when President Trump issued Executive Order 13950, on “combating race and sex stereotyping,” with the initial list of so-called “divisive concepts” —the state legislative campaign to censor educational speech appeared to be motivated by a simple political calculation: that moderate and swing voters would rally to conservative candidates who were seen as opposing “wokeness” in public education.² Following the popularity of the 1619 Project, and in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd, many Republicans, including President Trump, sought to foment and sustain a backlash against discussing race and racism in public schools, to harness the issue for political gain. With fiery rhetoric and the force of state and federal law, they targeted a widening array of topics in schools, moving from the 1619 Project to critical race theory (CRT), as well as sexuality, gender, American history, and even social-emotional learning (SEL). “I look at this and say, ‘Hey, this is how we are going to win,’” former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon said in 2021. “I see 50 [House Republican] seats in 2022. Keep this up.”³

For these strategists, the come-from-behind victory of Glenn Youngkin in the November 2021 Virginia gubernatorial race seemed to be proof of concept.⁴ Youngkin’s campaign was based in no small part on the slogan of “parents’ rights” in education, particularly following a debate where his rival said, “I don’t think parents should be telling schools what to teach.”⁵ This comment was widely seen as an unforced error, one that Youngkin and his fellow Republicans hurried to exploit. In a memo titled “Lessons from Virginia,” House Republican Study Committee chair Rep. Jim Banks⁶ urged candidates to fight “racist CRT curricula” in schools and to promise to pass something called the “CRT Transparency Act.” Six months later, a second memo from the RSC bluntly titled “Critical Race Theory Memo” urged Republican House members to “lean into the culture war” because “the backlash against Critical Race Theory is real.”⁷

That was the theory, at any rate. In practice, Youngkin’s victory proved difficult to replicate. In the 2022 midterm elections, Republicans picked up only nine of the fifty House seats Bannon had forecast, and Republican gubernatorial candidates who followed the Youngkin playbook lost key races in Arizona, Kansas, Michigan, and Wisconsin.⁸ Of course these outcomes turned on many factors, but the “anti-woke” strategy also came up short in some races where education was front and center, like elections in several states for local school boards.⁹ Finally, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who had done more than any other elected official to implement bans on CRT and diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices and programming in public educational institutions, saw his 2024 presidential campaign flame out as voters abandoned his “war on woke” rhetoric and record.¹⁰

By 2024, it became clear that supporters of educational censorship, especially at the K–12 level, had seriously underestimated how much Americans support their local schools and the teachers who work there. Yes, approval for public schools in general is declining, particularly among Republicans.¹¹ However, when parents of K–12 students are asked about their feelings toward their own school and its teachers, their responses are overwhelmingly positive.¹² Some 76 percent report being satisfied with their local schools, and 73 percent rate their children’s teachers as “excellent” or “good.” Moreover, while some parents have concerns about what their children are learning in the classroom, the vast majority emphatically reject any attempt by state legislators to influence curricula on these issues.¹³ Meanwhile, 88 percent of public school parents and 78 percent of all adults trust local public schools to select books for school libraries; most are more concerned about book restrictions than about the appropriateness of available materials.¹⁴

For all these reasons, lawmakers in 2024 largely abandoned the splashy press conferences of the DeSantis era and pulled back from direct and explicit censorial legislation. Instead, they embraced a campaign of stealth censorship—a more devious approach that was more difficult for free expression advocates to expose or oppose.

The three key tactics of this campaign were as follows:

Disguise educational censorship legislation by allying it with some worthy or popular cause.

Censor indirectly, by undermining the support structures at universities that protect intellectual freedom in the classroom, rather than directly, by placing official restrictions on speech.

Whenever possible, accomplish censorship by informal pressure, bullying, or threats rather than formal legislation.

In what follows, PEN America explores how lawmakers are refining the art of educational censorship by putting these tactics into practice.

Readers will note that the total number of educational gag orders proposed in 2024 was lower than in recent years. The number that became law was also lower. But these facts conceal a much more disturbing reality. Increasingly, educational gag orders are only a small part of a much larger story, as a whole battery of other kinds of legislation, targeting everything from faculty tenure to shared governance to teacher training programs, have actually expanded an all-out assault on educational speech. And even this does not tell the whole story, as more and more censorship takes place off the books through informal intimidation and backroom pressure.

As PEN America has noted in the past, these restrictions, for the most part wielded by conservatives to target elements of progressive speech, have far-reaching consequences that cross ideological and partisan lines. They set a precedent for political interference in education that could easily be turned against conservatives in the future and, indeed, has been in the recent past. Preserving the freedom to learn, teach, and share ideas in educational settings benefits everyone and every viewpoint; threatening those things risks a vast chilling effect that constrains not only diversity of identity but diversity of thought across all categories and viewpoints.

Fortunately, several positive trends first identified in 2023 continued to gain steam in 2024. Legal resistance to gag orders has scored a number of major wins, dealing significant setbacks to would-be censors. Political resistance to these proposals has also increased, amid growing public skepticism toward restrictions on educational speech and recognition that these laws are damaging to students’ education.

An important note: After years of overlap between educational censorship legislation targeting the higher education and K–12 sectors, in 2024 only two educational gag order laws, Alabama’s SB 129 and Utah’s HB 261, contained restrictions on both higher ed and K–12 settings. The strategies behind censorial legislation in both arenas diverged, too, with educational intimidation bills—described in our 2023 report of that name—increasingly the focus of those advocating legislative censorship in K–12.¹⁵

Accordingly, in America’s Censored Classrooms 2024, PEN America has chosen to focus primarily on educational censorship in higher education settings, although we still include K–12 gag orders in our Index, in the Appendix of new laws and policies enacted, and at selected points in the text.

Increasingly, educational gag orders are only a small part of a much larger story, as a whole battery of other kinds of legislation, targeting everything from faculty tenure to shared governance to teacher training programs, have actually expanded an all-out assault on educational speech.

Outline

America’s Censored Classrooms 2024 has a different structure from that of previous years. We begin with the sort of overview of the 2024 legislative session by the numbers that will be familiar to readers of earlier reports. But thereafter, the focus shifts. Instead of a typology of this year’s educational censorship legislation, we organize the following sections by tactic.

Tactic I explores how lawmakers have begun to disguise educational censorship legislation by pairing it with worthy causes, like promoting “viewpoint diversity” and combating campus antisemitism.

Tactic II investigates continuing efforts by lawmakers to exert ideological control over university governance and decision-making in order to undermine the support structures in higher education that make academic freedom possible. DEI restrictions continued to be a major type of this kind of legislation, but they were joined by others, including mandatory institutional neutrality bills and attacks on shared governance.

Tactic III looks at the mechanics of jawboning, the set of informal ways that government officials bully, threaten, or intimidate educators into silence.

The report concludes by analyzing the resistance to educational censorship, where major victories have been won and new strategies developed. It also offers some predictions of what to expect in 2025.

Educational Censorship by the Numbers

Fifty-six legislative educational gag orders were filed in 2024. This marks a decline compared to the last two years, when nearly twice as many were introduced by lawmakers. Seven became law and one was implemented via executive order, a total that is also among the lowest in recent years. Yet the gag orders adopted in 2024 include some of the most pernicious assaults on educational speech that PEN America has encountered.

The overall decline in educational gag orders also masks some of the more subtle— but no less alarming—ways that lawmakers are attacking our country’s educators. Indeed, 2024 seems to have been a year of experimentation. During the state legislative sessions, lawmakers tried out a range of tactics to stifle academic freedom and free speech in the nation’s classrooms.

Finally, this past year also saw the introduction of 29 bills with higher education provisions that, while not constituting direct censorship of educational speech the way gag orders do, would have eroded institutions and practices that make academic freedom in colleges and universities possible. Provisions of this type include attacks on tenure, shared governance, and DEI offices, along with a host of other restrictions on the independence of universities from direct ideological control by the government. This is an acceleration of a trend that PEN America first noted in 2023. Five bills of this type became law.

Finally, 2024 saw a renewed focus on higher education. The same number of bills and policies that became law targeted colleges and universities as K-12 institutions, making higher education, for the first time, a primary site of educational censorship. Three higher education gag orders became law or policy, compared with 3 that restrict speech in K–12 institutions, and 2 that would do so in both.

K–12 schools remain an area of focus for would-be censors, and bills censoring the nation’s schools still narrowly led those censoring higher ed in the number of bills introduced. Thirty-five K–12 gag orders were introduced in 2024, the lowest number since PEN America began tracking such legislation in 2021. Of these, 5 became law, including a “Don’t Say Gay” –style bill in Louisiana and a quartet of bills banning instruction on certain concepts related to race and sex in Alabama, Louisiana, South Carolina, and Utah.¹⁶

Why the decline in K–12 educational gag orders compared with previous years? First and foremost, they are not particularly popular. As PEN America noted in America’s Censored Classrooms 2023, national surveys show widespread and bipartisan opposition to state lawmakers deciding what gets taught, read, or discussed in K–12 schools.¹⁷ Second, much of the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked. K–12 educational gag orders of one form or another have been adopted in 23 states; attention in many of those states has now shifted toward other sorts of school “reform” bills—for example, book banning legislation, educational intimidation bills, and school voucher programs.¹⁸ Finally, for the first time in 2024, students, teachers, and other free speech advocates have successfully challenged K–12 gag orders in court.

Not all gag orders proposed or passed in 2024 adopt the prevailing “censorship by stealth” approach. Some, like Alabama’s SB 129 and Florida’s HB 1291, were quite brazen about their censorial intent.¹⁹

Policy Spotlight: Alabama’s SB 129

Alabama’s SB 129 prohibits public K–12 schools and colleges and universities from requiring that students attend or participate in coursework in which certain ideas related to race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin are promoted. SB 129 is a “classic” educational gag order, with language drawn from the Trump administration’s 2020 executive order “combating race and sex stereotyping.”²⁰

SB 129 also includes a few unique features. Not only would its language prohibit teachers or professors from encouraging students to feel guilt for historical wrongs committed by members of their identity group, as do most educational gag orders of this type; it would also ban them from assigning readings whose authors describe feeling this sort of guilt. Since “national origin” is one of the protected categories, the law would in effect ban a reading by a German citizen expressing guilt that her country perpetrated the Holocaust.

Moreover, while SB 129 does not ban DEI programming in its entirety, it does include explicit restrictions on any programming “where attendance is based on” identity category—which could restrict, among other things, programming for international students, or formal recognition of a Black student union.

Other gag orders proposed in 2024, like New Hampshire’s SB 1153, were too bizarre to fly under the radar.²¹ This bill, which purported to mandate a curriculum on the evils of communism, would have required public K–12 schools to teach students about “Western intelligence agencies’ links to the private island of Jeffrey Epstein” and how “Marxist cult beliefs” have “parasitized sects of Judaism.” Oklahoma’s SB 1305 did such a poor job banning something it called “DEI-CRT” content in higher ed that it would actually have required faculty in every department to discuss “historical movements, ideologies, or instances of racial hatred or discrimination including, but not limited to, slavery, Indian tribe removal, the Holocaust, or Japanese-American internment.”²² And West Virginia’s HB 5656 would have prohibited public K–12 schools and institutions of higher education (and, via restrictions on state funding, private ones as well) from “allowing” any class, speech, or presentation where the presenter “states that there are more than two genders.” This prohibition would likely have applied to students making a “presentation” in class.²³ Thankfully, none of these bills became law in 2024.

Policy Spotlight: Florida’s HB 1291

Florida, at the epicenter of previous years’ educational censorship legislation, remained active on this front in 2024. Florida’s HB 1291, which became law in 2024, attacks the speech of both K–12 teachers and higher ed.²⁴ That is because HB 1291 goes after teacher preparation programs, the university departments and schools where the next generation of Florida K–12 teachers is trained. And what it does to these programs is alarming.

Under the law, these university programs may not “distort significant historical events or include a curriculum or instruction that teaches identity politics, violates [the Stop WOKE Act], or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.”

According to Governor DeSantis, HB 1291 is meant to “prohibit the indoctrination” of prospective teachers.²⁵ In truth, it does the opposite. First, it directly censors both public and private college and university faculty who work in these programs. What constitutes a “significant historical event,” and what does it mean to “distort” one? The law does not say. Into that void, universities and faculty will project their own fears and paranoia. Some will respond by parroting whatever stance they think will best please the Florida government, which in 2023 approved a K–12 curriculum arguing that some slaves benefited from slavery.²⁶ Others will simply skip over certain topics altogether. Same with the ban on “identity politics,” a concept whose meaning is so contested that it could encompass everything from the US civil rights movement and the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II to contemporary immigration policy.

All of the above is flatly unconstitutional.²⁷ But that has never stopped Florida’s government before. Indeed, HB 1291 also requires faculty to follow the Stop WOKE Act, a law so repugnant to the First Amendment that in 2022 a federal judge declared it “Orwellian” and blocked the state from enforcing it.²⁸

HB 1291 will have a dramatic effect on how the K–12 teachers of tomorrow do their jobs.²⁹ Graduates of Florida’s teacher training programs who become history and social science and language arts teachers will enter the classroom with a more constricted and doctrinaire view of the world than they otherwise might.

Tactic I: Censorship in Disguise

One key tactic deployed by censorship advocates in 2024 was to camouflage their censorship legislation. Rather than openly advertising the ways their bills would restrict speech, as they did in previous years, they instead claimed such bills would advance laudable and broadly popular goals for higher education. Below, we examine some of the most egregious—and successful—examples.

“Viewpoint Diversity” as Camouflage

Before 2024, Indiana was surprisingly resistant to higher education censorship. Despite the GOP’s control of the governor’s mansion and both chambers of the Indiana legislature, lawmakers had enormous difficulty passing any sort of bill to restrict college and university faculty, a perennial object of criticism for many of the state’s conservatives. Of the 16 educational gag orders filed in that state since 2021, 10 target its colleges and universities—yet before this year, none had ever become law, including a high-profile failure in 2022.³⁰ No other legislature in the country has made so many attempts to censor higher education, and no other state has failed so often. Not Florida, Texas, or even Missouri—which, despite leading the country with 46 educational gag orders introduced since 2021, has only ever directed 7 at higher education.

From a numerical standpoint, in other words, the Indiana legislature is unique—in its obsession with trying to restrict faculty members’ speech, and in its inability to get the job done.

Until now.

Not only did Indiana pass a higher education gag order in 2024; it passed one of the most censorial pieces of legislation that PEN America has come across since our tracking began in 2021. How? By disguising the bill in the language of “viewpoint diversity.”

Under the law, SB 202, in order to maintain employment at a public college or university, Indiana faculty have to carry out all sorts of standard academic duties: teaching courses, supervising students, conducting research, and so forth.³¹ But starting this academic year, they will also have to demonstrate to the satisfaction of their board of trustees that they have:

helped the institution foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution;
introduced students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within the curricula established by the [college or university]; or,
while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, refrained from subjecting students to views and opinions concerning matters not related to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.

Failure to meet these criteria can mean loss of tenure status, demotion, a reduction in salary, or even termination. Junior scholars just beginning their careers can also be denied tenure if, in the estimation of the board, they are “unlikely” to meet these criteria at some point in the future.

This sort of language may appear innocuous or even salutary, at least at first glance. And indeed, that is the entire point. The bill’s supporters in the Indiana senate framed it as an “intellectual diversity” bill that would promote neutrality in the classroom.³² It was on that basis that Indiana politicians, despite vocal opposition and their own long record of similar failures, succeeded in making SB 202 law.³³

Students at Ball State University protest forced neutrality bill SB 202, which became law this spring. (Photo: Olivia Ground/Ball State Daily News)

The consequences of this language, however, are dire. First, SB 202 will incentivize bad teaching.³⁴ Contrary to what the bill’s supporters claim, the smart professor will not teach students a variety of political or ideological viewpoints. Rather, many are likely to teach them the viewpoints that students expect them to teach. The goal will not be to expose students to something new; it will be to convince them that the professor has checked every box. Otherwise, how can she persuade them that all viewpoints have been addressed? And persuade them she must, as the law allows students to lodge formal complaints with the university’s governing board if they feel she has omitted some necessary theory or point of view.

Second, SB 202 will stifle faculty speech.³⁵ By enabling governing boards to enforce a ban on expressing a view or opinion “not related to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction” —instead of leaving this determination up to faculty themselves, as suggested by the American Association of University Professors—the law hands trustees the power to impose a subjective standard on faculty.³⁶ How do the trustees determine whether a line has been crossed? However they please. Faculty will need to anticipate their preferences and adjust accordingly, with no recourse to academic freedom protections.

SB 202 is a stunning violation of academic freedom and campus free speech. That it nevertheless became law is a testament to the appeal of “viewpoint diversity” as a smoke screen for censorship. State Senator Spencer Deery, the author and prime force behind SB 202, used this rhetorical frame to defend the law prior to passage. “By any measure,” he writes, “the current [university] system fails to adequately recruit, retain, and cultivate conservative scholars who are then empowered to foster robust, unretaliated debate.”³⁷ SB 202, he goes on to predict, will “help an overlooked group on campus feel like they are respected and belong.”

The problem of viewpoint diversity on campus is real, and has existed for some time.³⁸ But SB 202 will not solve it. Indeed, there is a very good chance that SB 202 will boomerang on its conservative supporters, censoring the very people and ideas they hope to promote. As an example, Christopher Rufo, a leader of the educational censorship movement and himself a trustee at Florida’s New College, has famously declared that “the goal of the university is not free inquiry.” Could an Indiana professor who agreed with him on this point convince a trustee that they “foster[ed] a culture of free inquiry”³⁹ in the classroom, and therefore deserve tenure? Plainly not.

For that matter, what about Todd Rokita, the Indiana attorney general? In a legal brief defending this very law, Rokita dismissed the notion of faculty free speech. Instead, he argued that “any speech pursuant to the teacher’s ‘official duties’ and ‘professional responsibilities’ is subject to state direction.”⁴⁰ It is difficult to see how this position helps “the institution foster a culture of…free expression…within the institution,” to quote from SB 202. Could Indiana’s attorney general receive tenure at one of its law schools? Perhaps not, especially if he repeated these arguments to his departmental colleagues or advocated for them in the faculty senate.

By and large, the bills introduced have not been carefully crafted. Nor are many consistent with the First Amendment or academic freedom. Instead, they have been sloppy, vague, and often cruel exercises in academic censorship.

And what if, in the future, the state elected a Democratic governor who appointed left-leaning trustees to the state’s various university governing boards? Conservative scholars could suddenly find themselves the primary target of SB 202’s enforcement.

In many ways, SB 202 is the conservative counterpart to the California Community Colleges’ Title 5 “DEIA” Amendment, an unusual liberal educational gag order from 2023.⁴¹ Under new regulations, the system’s faculty are required, as a condition of tenure, promotion, or retention, to weave an intricately detailed group of “diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility” themes into their teaching and research.⁴² PEN America came out against these rules at the time, explaining that they threaten “to gag the research and pedagogy of tens of thousands of California community college faculty.”⁴³

Our position on Indiana’s law is no different. Diversity, whether of viewpoints or anything else, is vital to a university’s health. But the state has no business appointing itself the arbiter of what true intellectual diversity looks like in the college classroom, and no ability to do so without imposing a political agenda on faculty.

Indiana is not alone. Bills like SB 202 became more common this past year. In Arizona, lawmakers proposed legislation to establish a volunteer-run “grade challenge department” at every public university in the state.⁴⁴ Students who believed that they were unfairly graded due to their instructor’s “political bias” would have been able to complain to this department; if they were successful, their instructor would have been required to reevaluate their grade. Oklahoma’s SB 1983 would have given public K–12 students a legally enforceable right to “an unbiased education…that is free from anti-American bias.”⁴⁵ And under Ohio’s SB 83, still being considered after its introduction last year, university faculty would be forbidden from “seek[ing] to indoctrinate any social, political, or religious political point of view.” Students who believe that this rule has been violated would have an opportunity to indicate as much on their course evaluations, which in turn would have to be considered by tenure review committees.⁴⁶ As in Indiana, each of these proposals runs counter to the actual goal of promoting intellectual diversity, and would be ripe for political weaponization and abuse.

The Wrong Way to Combat Antisemitism

Meanwhile, a new—or renewed—genre of educational gag order emerged following the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas. As protests swept America’s college campuses, state legislators raced to introduce bills to censor speech they deemed antisemitic.

Such legislation might be permissible or even laudable, provided the speech in question is unprotected by the First Amendment or principles of academic freedom—harassing speech, for example. And given the many incidents of indisputably antisemitic harassment on campuses following the attacks, as well as the corresponding sense of vulnerability among many Jewish students and faculty, a carefully crafted legislative response makes sense.⁴⁷ The initial version of Maryland’s HB 1386, which would have mandated training on antisemitism and Islamophobia for university faculty and staff, is one such example.⁴⁸ Similarly, lawmakers could encourage universities to prioritize efforts to support vulnerable students and promote respectful campus dialogue about antisemitism.

But by and large, the bills introduced have not been carefully crafted. Nor are many consistent with the First Amendment or academic freedom. Instead, they have been sloppy, vague, and often cruel exercises in academic censorship.

For instance, at least a dozen states introduced bills in 2024, copied or modified from the Goldwater Institute’s 2016 model legislation, to adopt or expand the use of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism for the purpose of investigating alleged hate crimes, harassment, and discrimination.⁴⁹ These bills would apply across all levels of state government, including at public higher education institutions. Five of these that were proposed in 2024 are now law: Florida’s HB 187, North Carolina’s HB 942, South Carolina’s HB 4042, South Dakota’s HB 1076, and Georgia’s HB 30.⁵⁰

Free speech advocates, including PEN America, have long argued that the IHRA’s working definition was never meant to become a binding legal standard, and incorporating it into statute poses a serious threat.⁵¹ That is primarily because of a series of examples it offers to illustrate what antisemitic speech could, depending on the overall context, look like. These include:

denying the Jewish people their right to self-determination (e.g., by claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor);
applying double standards by requiring of [Israel] a behavior not expected or demanded of any other democratic nation;
using the symbols and images associated with classic antisemitism (e.g., claims of Jews killing Jesus or blood libel) to characterize Israel or Israelis; and
drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis.

The danger here is easy to see. Statements like the ones listed in the definition might be offensive or inflammatory to some, but on their own, such expressions would undoubtedly be protected by the First Amendment. To cite this definition and list in statute as constituting evidence of illegal harassment or discrimination is a threat both to free speech broadly and, on a college campus, to academic freedom. In fact, the problem is so severe that even Kenneth Stern, the lead author of the IHRA working definition, has called these legislative efforts “a travesty.”⁵²

And indeed they are. In Florida, which in 2019 enacted the IHRA definition into statute specifically for K–12 and university campuses, the state government has instructed the leaders of its 12 public universities to use the keywords Israel, Israeli, Palestine, Palestinian, Middle East, Zionism, Judaism, Jewish, and Jews to screen course syllabi for “antisemitism or anti-Israeli bias.”⁵³ After Texas adopted the IHRA definition on campuses via executive order, an official at the University of Texas–San Antonio, citing the order, told a group of protesters that if they continued to utter the phrase “from the river to the sea,” they would be referred to law enforcement.⁵⁴

As these examples make clear, the adoption of the IHRA’s working definition of antisemitism into law risks enabling the chilling and punishment of a wide array of protected speech, infringing on people’s rights. And this risk has been acutely heightened amid the strain of war, where tempers flare and criticism can be directed indiscriminately at a state, government, military, or people.

Not all of the bills described above are educational gag orders under PEN America’s definition. In some cases, while the bills would rewrite state law in ways that invite censorship, they would not all explicitly mandate it. However, other bills introduced after the October attack were straightforward bans on any kind of antisemitic speech, even for instances where no allegation of discrimination or harassment is made and the speech in question is constitutionally protected.

For example, New Jersey’s AB 1288, and the similarly worded SB 3340, would have required (to quote AB 1288) that “an institution of higher education shall not authorize, facilitate, provide funding for, or otherwise support any event or organization promoting antisemitism or hate speech on campus.”⁵⁵ New York’s AB 8284 would have done something very similar, declaring that “no state aid shall be granted to any college or university that authorizes, facilitates, provides funding for, or otherwise supports any event promoting anti-Semitism on campus.”⁵⁶ Finally, Pennsylvania’s HB 2001, along with the initial version of Indiana’s HB 1002, proposed to rewrite state law so that any expression of antisemitism in a college or university, as defined by the IHRA, would have been ipso facto a harassing or discriminatory act.⁵⁷ In effect, faculty and students would have been legally prohibited from, for example, applying “double standards” to Israel—a vague concept that would inevitably chill speech or be used to censor Israel’s critics. Fortunately, none of these bills became law.

Policy Spotlight: Texas’s Executive Order GA-44

On March 27, 2024, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued Executive Order GA-44, a confusing policy aimed at combating campus antisemitism.⁵⁸ It requires public colleges and universities in the state to do three things:

Review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses and establish appropriate punishments, including expulsion from the institution.

Ensure that these policies are being enforced on campuses and that groups such as the Palestine Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine are disciplined for violating these policies.

Include the [IHRA] definition of antisemitism…in university free speech policies to guide university personnel and students on what constitutes antisemitic speech.

While it is possible to apply these rules, which are themselves vague and imprecise, in a manner consistent with free expression, that is not the path that Texas has chosen. According to records acquired by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, multiple state colleges have newly revised their speech policies in blatantly unconstitutional ways.⁵⁹

For instance, Dallas College students are being warned that any “antisemitism” outdoors or in a common area can lead to expulsion. Howard College’s “Expressive Activities” policy no longer protects “expression that is considered…antisemitism.” At South Texas College, the faculty handbook has been amended to state that “employees or groups engaged in antisemitism shall be disciplined.” And Laredo College’s new “Distribution of Literature” policy forbids faculty from distributing any material that “contain[s]…antisemitism.” In each instance, “antisemitism” is defined using the IHRA working definition.

These policies are not just antithetical to the First Amendment; they endanger education about antisemitism itself. How can a course on the Holocaust proceed if course readings that contain antisemitism are forbidden? Despite its ostensible purpose, if it restricts education about antisemitism, Texas’s executive order may wind up making the problem worse.

Given the censorial ways that Texas colleges are applying Executive Order GA-44, and considering how easily the executive order lends itself to that application, PEN America categorizes it as an educational gag order.

Tactic II: Indirect Censorship

A second tactic embraced by lawmakers seeking to censor higher education in 2024 was a continuation of an approach begun the previous year: legislation that technically leaves faculty speech untouched, but instead undermines the university structures that make academic freedom possible, placing university administrators and governing bodies under the direct ideological control of the government. This approach has steadily grown in popularity among lawmakers. In fact, the number of such bills proposed in 2024 exceeded the number of direct higher education gag orders for the first time since PEN America began keeping track.

To be sure, governments have a legitimate oversight role over public universities regarding topics such as budgets, completion rates, job preparedness, and relationships with the community. But when it comes to imposing ideological dictates on the ways universities are run, governments risk knocking the support beams out from under academic freedom and campus free expression.

In America’s Censored Classrooms 2023, PEN America first outlined the emergence of legislation that imposes such dictates on universities:

Academic freedom and campus free speech have many defenders… Tenure protections, enshrined in collective agreements and defended by faculty unions, ensure that faculty cannot be disciplined or dismissed for political reasons. Accreditation bodies can downgrade or decertify institutions that repeatedly violate academic freedom, costing these institutions millions of dollars in federal funds. Principles of shared governance, such as the 1966 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, ensure that “the faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process.”

And long-standing norms around institutional autonomy insulate public higher education institutions from undue political interference, enabling them to craft their own mission statements and make their own programmatic decisions, and preserving them as spaces where ideas both popular and unpopular can be discussed, studied, and learned from… Together, these defenses function as a kind of academic immune system, shielding individual faculty from censorship. It is this system on which educational gag order supporters are now training their fire.⁶⁰

Bills undermining this support structure continued to increase in frequency in 2024. Popular types included bills to limit or abolish faculty tenure, erode shared governance, and restrict university leadership from discussing certain topics. Many bills contained provisions that restrict several of these targets at once. Taken as a whole, lawmakers displayed new creativity in attacking this academic freedom support structure.

DEI Restrictions

Efforts to ban and restrict diversity work in universities began with the Trump administration’s Executive Order 13950 in September 2020. But after years of efforts aimed largely at educational speech, course assignments, and book bans, the 2023 and 2024 legislative sessions saw a rash of official government actions against DEI writ large as a field of practice, culminating with a series of official bans of DEI in higher education.

PEN America defines a DEI restriction as a bill or executive order that prohibits colleges and universities from establishing or maintaining an administrative office charged with promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion, or that prohibits DEI-related public or student programming on campus. The specific language varies from bill to bill, but typically DEI restrictions make a point of excluding academic courses, student supervision, and other purely academic, faculty- or student-led spaces from these legislated prohibitions.

This means that a common feature of DEI restrictions is that they do not technically censor educational speech by faculty. This fact has made them more popular with lawmakers and less vulnerable to litigation on First Amendment grounds. Yes, they restrict speech on campus, but not speech by educators or students or in the classroom. Academic freedom remains intact. At least in theory.

In practice, though, something much more sinister tends to happen.

Sixteen state-level DEI restriction bills were proposed in 2024, of which three became law: Iowa’s SF 2435, Utah’s HB 261, and Alabama’s SB 129 (which does not ban DEI offices completely, but does restrict some of their functions).⁶¹

Each of these laws purports to strike a balance between banning DEI offices (which the legislators accuse of bias) and respecting academic freedom. In March 2024, the journalist Conor Friedersdorf singled out Utah’s HB 261 for special praise.⁶² He called it a “worthy experiment” and wrote that it bans DEI outside the classroom while also “trying to protect academic freedom with carve-outs for research and course teaching.” He also claimed that the law makes “real compromises with DEI supporters” and predicted that institutions like the Black Cultural Center at the University of Utah would remain open.

Unfortunately, that is not how it worked out. In the months after HB 261 became law, public colleges and universities across Utah scrambled to put the law’s vague language into practice, resulting in rules that infringe on core educational speech.

For example, Utah Tech University is warning faculty to “avoid using any of the terms ‘diversity,’ ‘equity,’ or ‘inclusion’ individually in connection with any policy, procedure, practice, program, office, initiative, required training, or with titles of other committees, activities, or interview questions.”⁶³ Southern Utah University also forbids “any combination” of those terms by academic departments or programs.⁶⁴ How faculty are expected to self-edit in this fashion—the words “diversity” and “inclusion” at least being fairly common in the English language—is unclear, but the state higher education system has established a hotline for reporting violations.⁶⁵ Utah Tech also tells faculty that any grant application containing a DEI concept (for instance, one that “asserts that socio-political structures are inherently a series of power relationships and struggles among racial groups”) will now require approval from the board of trustees.⁶⁶ And at the University of Utah, faculty are now prohibited from mentioning their own commitment to or understanding of DEI on course syllabi.⁶⁷

A current screenshot of the website of the former Black Cultural Center at the University of Utah reveals the impact of Utah HB 261 on the state’s public universities.

And the Black Cultural Center at the University of Utah? It no longer exists.⁶⁸ Its website has been dismantled, and the resources it once offered students have been assigned elsewhere. This is part of a widespread post-HB 261 trend in Utah, one that has seen the forced closure of dozens of university cultural centers serving Black, women, LGBTQ+, Native American, and many other kinds of students.⁶⁹ Similar closures have occurred in every state that has passed DEI restrictions, including Florida, where the University of North Florida responded to a new anti-DEI law there by closing its interfaith center.⁷⁰

Texas offers another illustrative example. Lawmakers there also promised that their DEI ban, SB 17, would not threaten faculty speech. Yet shortly after it came into effect in 2024, it was cited by UT Austin’s legal team when the university canceled a former faculty member’s lecture on the experience of queer students.⁷¹ Around the same time, the University of Houston blocked a student from organizing LGBTQ+ events on campus, also on the grounds of SB 17.⁷² And during testimony this past spring before the Texas state senate, the University of Texas System’s general counsel warned that SB 17 was wreaking havoc with faculty members’ ability to apply for federal research grants, many of which require diversity statements and DEI work as part of the application package.⁷³

As these examples in Utah, Florida, and Texas demonstrate, it has thus far proven functionally impossible for a legislature to craft a DEI ban that does not undermine, restrict, or weaken academic freedom or campus free speech. Indeed, in some cases, that may be the point. At the end of the day, such bans either directly restrict some aspects of academic freedom or create such a broad chilling effect that administrators feel compelled to implement such restrictions on their own. And in places where DEI offices or initiatives work to incorporate viewpoints across the ideological spectrum, conservative, religious, or other heterodox voices may join the list of casualties of these bans. Ultimately, a legislature cannot ban some ideas on campus without chilling and silencing all ideas there.

It has thus far proven functionally impossible for a legislature to craft a DEI ban that does not undermine, restrict, or weaken academic freedom or campus free speech. Indeed, in some cases, that may be the point.

Mandatory Institutional Neutrality Bills

A related threat to the support structure for academic freedom—often found in the same legislation as DEI restrictions—is language mandating institutional neutrality. Bills with these provisions impose neutrality on university administrations, barring institutional leadership (and sometimes subsidiary units like academic departments) from taking public positions on certain issues. Once again, lawmakers often promise that their bills will leave faculty speech untouched. Once again, the facts say otherwise.

Seven bills mandating some form of institutional neutrality were introduced in 2024, and an eighth that was proposed in the previous legislative session continued to advance. Three became law: Indiana’s SB 202, Iowa’s SF 2435, and Utah’s HB 261.⁷⁴

Some mandatory neutrality policies are relatively vague, an approach that comes with its own problems. For instance, a Florida Board of Governors policy, adopted in January based on the state’s SB 266 law from 2023, banned funding for campus activities “intended to achieve a desired result” on “topics that polarize or divide society among political, ideological, moral, or religious beliefs, positions, or norms.”⁷⁵ With the board of governors set to determine what activities or topics meet this test, the regulation amounts to the board giving itself a license to censor any university statement it pleases.

But the new bills that became law in 2024, and many that were proposed, were much more specific in their prohibitions.

Iowa’s SF 2435, for instance, was signed by Gov. Kim Reynolds in May.⁷⁶ Following model legislation developed by the Manhattan Institute, it prohibits public colleges and universities from promoting as their official position “a particular, widely contested opinion referencing unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neo-pronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.”⁷⁷ Given the vagueness implied by that last phrase, virtually any idea whatsoever could be considered forbidden for a university to express.

Again, these bills were and are being marketed to the public as compatible with academic freedom for faculty. In practice, however, the pitfalls are countless. Already in Utah, HB 261 is causing chaos. Administrators at Salt Lake Community College are warning faculty to avoid expressing their own personal viewpoints on topics like structural racism and social justice from a college email account or while “wearing SLCC-branded clothing.”⁸⁰ The University of North Carolina System, which adopted an institutional neutrality policy in 2024, is now telling “university-fostered” student groups not to “stray into political or social advocacy or commentary.”⁸¹

University leaders should not have to consider whether they are breaking the law—for example, whether their official expression of sympathy (allowed) crosses the line into endorsing “allyship” (forbidden). Nor should they have to fear that their policy of encouraging civil discourse (legal) will be misconstrued as promoting “inclusive language” (illegal).

And even if universities are successful in confining the effects of these laws to purely institutional speech—say, an official university web page—very little is actually settled. What about a university president who acknowledges Pride Month, a provost who denounces campus racism, a Jewish studies department that condemns antisemitism, or an office that seeks to combat bias on campus? Is any of that permissible when taking an official position on “gender identity,” “antiracism,” “social justice,” “group marginalization,” and “bias” are off the table? Would any campus leader be willing to risk a lawsuit, loss of state funding, or their job in order to find out?

PEN America does not oppose institutional neutrality policies in higher education, but we believe that colleges and universities should choose for themselves—and in consultation with faculty, staff, and students—whether to adopt such policies, what they should encompass, and how they should be implemented. After all, there are many occasions when university leaders actually have a legitimate need to express their values—in the wake of a campus incident, to confer an honorary degree, to promote faculty scholarship, or to inaugurate some new research center focused on a pressing social issue.

These are challenging questions that require nuance and care on the part of administrators, as both proponents and opponents of institutional neutrality have noted.⁸² But at times like these, university leaders should not have to consider whether they are breaking the law—for example, whether their official expression of sympathy (allowed) crosses the line into endorsing “allyship” (forbidden). Nor should they have to fear that their policy of encouraging civil discourse (legal) will be misconstrued as promoting “inclusive language” (illegal).

Shared Governance Restrictions and Other Attacks on Higher Ed Autonomy

Several other types of bills aiming to undermine the autonomy of higher education institutions advanced in 2024. Among them were three bills that would have restricted or eliminated faculty tenure, seven that would have interfered with faculty members’ control of the curriculum, four that would have eroded shared governance by shifting to administrators duties that were long held by faculty, and one affecting university accreditation. Of these, three became law: Indiana’s SB 202 (anti-tenure), Alabama’s SB 129 (curricular control), and Tennessee’s SB 2528 (accreditation).⁸³ Note that the Indiana and Alabama laws also have other censorial features.

In America’s Censored Classrooms 2023, PEN America explained why attacks on faculty tenure, curricular control, and accreditation undermine the support structure for academic freedom.⁸⁴ For this year’s report, we are adding a new category of legislation with major implications for this support structure: shared governance restrictions. These are bills that restrict or extinguish the power of faculty to shape the policies and practices at their institutions.

Shared governance is a core principle of American academia and a bulwark of academic freedom. As far back as 1966, the American Association of University Professors, the American Council on Education, and the American Association of Colleges and Universities linked shared governance to the expressive freedoms of faculty and students.⁸⁵ According to these groups, “The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process” —along with a right to consultation in virtually every other aspect of university life. It must be faculty and not administrators who decide whether a professor’s grant application is worthy of funding, whether a new course should be approved, and whether a student is qualified to enter an academic program or merits a degree.

This faculty control is what shared governance restrictions try to stop—ever since the first shared governance restriction, a bill championed by Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and signed into law in 2015.⁸⁶ In 2024, bills of this type made a significant comeback.

For example, Arizona’s HB 2735 passed both chambers of the legislature before being vetoed by Gov. Katie Hobbs.⁸⁷ Had it become law, it would have demoted university faculty senates to an advisory role and concentrated all authority over program creation and degree approval in the hands of the president. Arizona’s similarly unsuccessful SB 1477, mentioned earlier in this report, would have given a panel of ordinary citizens appointed by the Board of Regents the authority to review grades for “political bias.”⁸⁸ Iowa’s HF 2558, which cleared the state house before dying in a senate subcommittee, would have prohibited “any faculty senate committee or subcommittee from having any governance authority over the institution.”⁸⁹ And Utah’s failed SB 226, a copy of the model “General Education Act” written by staff at several conservative think tanks, would effectively have granted college presidents unlimited power to close programs they disliked, forcing tenure-track faculty members in those programs to reapply for their jobs in a new “School of General Education” with a fixed curriculum and no system of faculty governance or tenure.⁹⁰

When attacks on shared governance arise from college and university leadership, and especially when they come from lawmakers, they are a threat to the support structure for academic freedom.

Readers should understand these bills as part of a larger trend against shared governance popping up in colleges and universities across the country. This past June, the University of Kentucky’s board of trustees voted to abolish its powerful university senate (on which elected faculty had a sizable presence) and replace it with a new advisory body whose ultimate function and membership will be decided by administrators.⁹¹ In 2023, Bluefield State University, a historically Black university in West Virginia, abolished its faculty senate and stripped faculty of their authority over course approval, admissions decisions, and standards for graduation.⁹² And at Spartanburg Community College in South Carolina, the chief academic officer abruptly dissolved the faculty senate just a few hours before an emergency meeting of that body was scheduled to discuss a new workload policy she had championed.⁹³

When attacks on shared governance arise from college and university leadership, and especially when they come from lawmakers, they are a threat to the support structure for academic freedom. Unfortunately, they are not always recognized as such by the public. This fact has made them a favored tool for those looking to exert ideological control over universities and censor faculty more stealthily.

Tactic III: Informal Censorship

Thus far, this report has focused on types of censorship that, however stealthy or camouflaged, leave some kind of formal documentary footprint: a piece of legislation, a new policy, an executive order. But increasingly in 2024, some state officials decided that formal censorship was not their only option. Censorship laws attract negative attention, require contentious hearings, and produce a paper trail that is frequently challenged in the courts. This is why lawmakers and other state officials are increasingly resorting to jawboning.

Jawboning, in the context of higher education censorship, is the use of one’s political position to bully or intimidate universities to “voluntarily” adopt a policy that censors faculty, undermines academic freedom, or injects the ideological views of politicians into university governance. No bill is ever filed; no law is ever signed. Instead, the university or individual educator simply falls into line. Such episodes are increasing in number and will likely be a major weapon in the censors’ arsenal going forward. Some notable examples from the past twelve months:

In July 2023, Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers vetoed a GOP budget bill that would have eliminated 188 diversity, equity, and inclusion positions in the University of Wisconsin system.⁹⁴ One day later, Wisconsin state assembly speaker Robin Vos launched a public pressure campaign against university leadership, vowing to permanently withhold more than $800 million in state support unless the board of regents gave in to his demands.⁹⁵ In December 2023, the board capitulated, agreeing to freeze all DEI-related hiring, abolish dozens of existing DEI positions, and establish an endowed chair in conservative political thought at UW-Madison.⁹⁶
In April 2024, North Carolina state house speaker Tim Moore speculated that the legislature might pass a law banning DEI in the University of North Carolina System, but added that he would allow university leadership “to take a look at it first.”⁹⁷ UNC’s board of governors took the hint and voted to repeal its system-wide DEI policy the very next month.⁹⁸
During the 2023 legislative session, the North Dakota state legislature tried but failed to pass a bill weakening faculty tenure.⁹⁹ However, in a bid to forestall further legislative attempts, the chancellor of the North Dakota University System assured lawmakers that he was “willing to work with ND legislators to conduct a joint study to examine the post-tenure review process.”¹⁰⁰ In the following weeks and months, the chancellor and his handpicked committee came under enormous pressure to accomplish via university policy what the lawmakers could not do with legislation. The result, first announced in June 2024, is a new tenure restriction that would apply to even more faculty than the one first proposed by the legislature.¹⁰¹
Throughout 2024, Texas university leaders scrambled to overcomply with SB 17, the state’s recently passed anti-DEI law.¹⁰² The trigger was a campaign of intimidation by Republican lawmakers, at the head of which was state senate president Brandon Creighton.¹⁰³ In a March 2024 letter to universities, Creighton warned that without “conscientious efforts” to implement the law, they could face “stringent enforcement provisions, including the potential freezing of university funding and legal ramifications for non-compliance.”¹⁰⁴ Texas universities got the message and have raced to go above and beyond the strict letter of the law. For instance, despite an explicit carve-out in SB 17 for guest speakers, activities organized by student groups, and programs focused on student recruitment, Texas universities have cited the law when canceling a talk on “A Queer Path to Leadership,” blocking a student trying to arrange LGBTQ+ activities on campus, permanently closing a multicultural center that housed six student organizations, ending a program that provided scholarships and support to undocumented students, and firing hundreds of employees.¹⁰⁵
In early 2024, Virginia Governor Youngkin’s administration sent letters to George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University demanding the syllabi of 27 professors whose courses would be featured in new general education diversity concentrations. After Youngkin received the syllabi, his spokesman criticized the courses as a “thinly veiled attempt to incorporate the progressive left’s groupthink on Virginia’s students.” The leaders of both universities took the hint and scrapped the planned concentrations, overriding the faculty committees that had approved them.¹⁰⁶
Months after helping to defeat a proposed DEI restriction in Kentucky, the president of the University of Kentucky disbanded the Office of Institutional Diversity in August 2024. The president explained that he had “listened to policymakers” and concluded the closure was necessary, especially since the legislature would likely attempt another ban next year.¹⁰⁷

Most jawboning happens behind closed doors or through informal mechanisms of power, leaving the public largely unaware of its presence. The censorship it causes may even appear voluntary, as if a university or its faculty elected all on their own to fall silent. It is also far more difficult to challenge in the courts. And because universities are acting on the basis of fear, they often go further than lawmakers demand. For example, the president of the University of Missouri closed the university’s DEI office even though the Missouri legislature was unable to pass a higher ed restriction of any kind in 2024. The president did so, he claimed, because “we’re seeing the actions that have been taken in other states” and he needed to be “proactive.”¹⁰⁸

By normalizing compliance with this type of extralegal pressure, college presidents and administrators are setting a precedent for state governments to wield almost unlimited authority over the choices universities make and the initiatives they adopt—including those that are politically neutral or that benefit the very conservatives who are currently employing jawboning as a tactic.

These are more than just isolated incidents. They are an important new tactic for educational censorship, one that is attractive to lawmakers who are unable to pass a censorship law or would prefer not to act in the open. While difficult to quantify, reported incidents of restrictions enacted through jawboning over the past year come close to matching the number of new laws or state policies enacted in 2024.

Ultimately, jawboning will continue to be an effective censorship tactic until university leaders refuse to comply with legislative threats that are not backed by a law. Thus far, we have seen little evidence that they will do so. But pushing back against this growing threat is imperative. By normalizing compliance with this type of extralegal pressure, college presidents and administrators are setting a precedent for state governments to wield almost unlimited authority over the choices universities make and the initiatives they adopt—including those that are politically neutral or that benefit the very conservatives who are currently employing jawboning as a tactic.

Conclusion: Free Expression Advocates Fight Back

Educational censorship laws and policies have continued to attack free expression in 2024, especially in higher education. The devastating impact of bills like Indiana’s SB 202, Florida’s HB 1291, Utah’s HB 261, and Iowa’s SF 2435 will be felt by thousands of faculty, staff, and students for many years.

But there is hope. We conclude this report with a discussion of successful legal and political resistance against education censorship legislation in 2024, along with predictions for educational censorship in 2025.

Legal Resistance

Currently, there are at least 16 active lawsuits challenging educational gag orders and associated legislation.

Lawsuit	Law/Policy Targeted	Institutions Affected by Lawsuit	Nature of Plaintiff’s Claim (partial summary only)
Johnson v. Watkin (2023)	California Code of Regulations, Title 5	Community colleges	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination and compelled speech)
Palsgaard v. Christian (2023)	California Code of Regulations, Title 5	Community colleges	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, compelled speech, prior restraint) and 14th Amendment (vagueness)
Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott (2024)	Texas Executive Order GA-44	Public colleges and universities	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination)
Novoa v. Diaz (2022)	Florida HB 7	Public colleges and universities	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, prior restraint, right to receive information and ideas), 14th Amendment (vagueness)
Pernell v. Lamb (2022)	Florida HB 7	Public colleges and universities	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, right to receive information and ideas), 14th Amendment (vagueness, equal protection)
Parnell v. School Board of Lake County (2023)	Florida HB 1557	Public K–12 schools	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, right to receive information, overbreadth), 14th Amendment (vagueness)
UFF v. Lamb (2024)	Florida SB 266	Public colleges and universities	Federal Arbitration Act
Smiley v. Jenner (2023)	Indiana HB 1608	Public K–12 schools	14th Amendment (due process)
McDonald and Scheurich v. Trustees of Indiana University (2024)	Indiana SB 202	Public colleges and universities	1st Amendment (compelled speech), 14th Amendment (vagueness)
Carr and Schuster v. Trustees of Purdue University (2024)	Indiana SB 202	Public colleges and universities	1st Amendment (compelled speech), 14th Amendment (vagueness)
Iowa Safe Schools v. Reynolds (2023)	Iowa SF 496	Public K–12 schools	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, right to receive information, association), 14th Amendment (vagueness)
Mejia v. Edelblut (2021)	New Hampshire HB 2	Public K–12 schools	14th Amendment (vagueness)
BERT v. O’Connor (2021)	Oklahoma HB 1775	Public K–12 schools, colleges, and universities	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, right to receive information), 14th Amendment (vagueness, equal protection)
Tennessee Education Association v. Reynolds (2023)	Tennessee SB 623	Public K–12 schools	14th Amendment (vagueness)
Sarah Hernandez v. Board of Governors (2024)	Florida SB 266	Public colleges and universities	Section 7 of the Florida Constitution (powers of board of governors)
Walls et al. v. Sanders and Oliva (2024)	Arkansas SB 294	Public K–12 schools	1st Amendment (viewpoint discrimination, right to receive information), 14th Amendment (vagueness, equal protection, due process)

This has been a very strong year for legal resistance to educational gag orders. Florida’s HB 7, popularly known as the Stop WOKE Act, continues to fail in court. A federal judge in 2022 had already issued a preliminary injunction against the part of the law that censors what private employers can and cannot say in their employee trainings. This past March, a panel of the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld that ruling and a permanent injunction is now in place.¹⁰⁹ Insofar as this provision had applied to private schools, colleges, and universities, this victory marks a major win for the freedoms to teach and learn.

In fact, thanks to an earlier injunction against the parts of the Stop WOKE Act that censor public colleges and universities (now being reviewed by the 11th Circuit as well), the only part of Governor DeSantis’s signature censorship law that remains in force is the one restricting speech in public K–12 schools. The Supreme Court has generally been willing to extend core First Amendment protections to public college and university faculty, but not to K–12 teachers. And while public school students may have some limited First Amendment freedoms in the classroom, indeed, this was the basis for a partially successful challenge to an Arkansas gag order in 2024.¹¹⁰ But courts have been much more hesitant to assert the free speech rights of K–12 teachers.

But 2024 has seen favorable opinions decided on 14th Amendment grounds. In May, federal judge Paul Barbadoro ruled that New Hampshire’s HB 2, one of the first educational gag orders in the country to become law in 2021, was unconstitutional.¹¹¹ This ruling relied primarily on the due process clause of the 14th Amendment, with Judge Barbadoro holding that the law was unconstitutionally vague. A 14th Amendment vagueness claim arises when the language of a law is so vague that it denies citizens “a reasonable opportunity to know what is prohibited.”¹¹² The problem of vagueness grows especially acute, the Supreme Court has ruled, when the law touches on matters of free speech (particularly if it concerns viewpoint discrimination) or levies heavy punishments on violators.

Under HB 2, for instance, New Hampshire schools are prohibited from teaching “that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment solely or partly because of his or her age, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, race, creed, color, marital status, familial status, mental or physical disability, religion, or national origin.” In his ruling, Judge Barbadoro pointed out that this prohibition could readily be interpreted as forbidding teachers from discussing affirmative action, pro-diversity initiatives, and reparations for past racial discrimination. These are important topics in American life and have been at the center of several recent blockbuster decisions by the Supreme Court. Clearly teachers have a legitimate reason to discuss them in the classroom. It is therefore a matter of grave constitutional concern that the law “force[s] teachers to guess as to which diversity efforts can be touted and which must be repudiated, gambling with their careers in the process.”

Even failure by a teacher to repudiate or denounce a student who supports one of these policies might constitute a violation under the law, Barbadoro noted. Little wonder, therefore, that “uncertainty surrounding what [HB 2’s provisions] do and do not prohibit has caused teachers to err on the broad side of caution by self-censoring their lesson plans and, in some circumstances, leaving the profession altogether.”

These concerns about vagueness have also led to a successful federal injunction against parts of Oklahoma’s HB 1775, also passed in 2021.¹¹³ This law states that public K–12 schools and universities shall not “require or make part of a course” certain concepts related to race or sex, including the same two concepts referenced by HB 2 above. Like his counterpart in New Hampshire, Judge Charles Goodwin, an appointee of former President Donald Trump, deemed those concepts unconstitutionally vague, and for identical reasons.¹¹⁴ He also found that the phrase “require or make part of a course” makes no logical sense. What does it mean to say that a school shall not “require” certain concepts? Require of whom? In what way? It might mean that teachers cannot teach the concepts in a required course. Or it could mean merely that they cannot require that students agree with them, or something else altogether. One false step, and those bound by the law can lose their jobs—but how are they to know which step is false?

Finally, free expression advocates scored another major victory in Tennessee, where last May a federal lawsuit challenging SB 623 survived a motion to dismiss.¹¹⁵ This law, also passed in 2021, prohibits K–12 teachers from “including” or “promoting” certain concepts in the classroom—like that “[Tennessee] or the United States is fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist,” or the idea of “ascribing character traits, values, moral or ethical codes, privileges, or beliefs to a race or sex, or to an individual because of the individual’s race or sex.”

PEN America considers SB 623 to be one of the most pernicious gag order laws in the nation, threatening schools with potentially catastrophic funding cuts for not following a vague and politically charged law. Judge Aleta Trauger agrees, and it is worth quoting her at length as to why:¹¹⁶

The Act does not simply use language that is sloppy or overly general; the entire Act is built around unrestrained appeals to abstract principles with contestable moral and political content—such that the practical meaning of the Act must, by definition, depend in significant part on the political, social, and moral assumptions of the party enforcing it. Every or nearly every concept prohibited by the Act is poorly defined in that way, set out in language that might be at home in an angered blog post or an opinion column but which, when imported into a legal code, is manifestly unworkable. What, for example, does it mean to “promote” the concept that Tennessee or the United States is “fundamentally or irredeemably racist or sexist”? What is the difference between ascribing a trait to a nation/state and ascribing that trait to the nation/state’s institutions, leaders, or history? What separates a “fundamental” trait from a non-fundamental one? What does it mean for such a flaw to be “irredeemable”? All of those issues arise before one even reaches the main event: the meaning of the terms “racist” and “sexist.” Anyone who lives in the United States should know that one could fill a library with the disagreements about the meaning of those terms that happen in a single day.…

The Supreme Court has recognized the fact that, in some instances, laws that might seem vague on first reading can be understood, in context, to be “employ[ing] words or phrases having a technical or other special meaning, well enough known to enable those within their reach to correctly apply them.” … The phrases used to define the concepts prohibited by the Act, however, present the opposite case: their vagueness becomes clearer and clearer the more one thinks or knows about them, and the argument that they are not vague can only come from a place of blinkered ignorance about the malleability of the concepts involved. There are undoubtedly people in Tennessee who think it is perfectly obvious what it means to suggest, improperly, that “[a] meritocracy is inherently racist or sexist.” Maybe everyone on those people’s social media feeds shares their understanding. A law, though, is a law for everyone, and the Due Process Clause, therefore, calls on the court to consider what the language of the Act means in the real world, not simply what it might have meant in whatever bubble it emerged from.

All of this, Trauger found, indicates that the law violates the 14th Amendment’s protection against vague and arbitrary legislation. As such, she denied Tennessee’s motion to dismiss and will allow the lawsuit to proceed. SB 623 remains in force, but the judge’s ruling strongly suggests it is living on borrowed time.

Two other partial victories this year are worth mentioning. Both happened in Florida. In the first, a judge rejected the state’s motion to dismiss a lawsuit challenging SB 266, a 2023 law that limits university faculty members’ arbitration rights in employment disputes. The lawsuit involves five faculty members at New College who were denied tenure by the board of trustees following that body’s takeover by conservative activists. When they sought to appeal this decision to a third-party arbitrator—something that their union contract expressly permits—they were denied because of SB 266. According to the judge, their challenge to this denial may proceed.¹¹⁷

The second victory involves Florida’s notorious HB 1557, the original “Don’t Say Gay” bill that became law in 2022. Over the past two years, Florida educators had been imploring the state to clarify the law’s scope: If a teacher revealed their LGBTQ+ identity (say, by mentioning their same-sex spouse), would this violate the law’s ban on instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity? What about a book in the library or a classroom collection with LGBTQ+ characters? Does their mere proximity to students render them forbidden? These were basic questions that the state refused to answer, leading to widespread confusion and panic among educators. But under the terms of a March 2024 court settlement, the state will inform schools that the answer to all of these questions is no—a win for common sense, as well as for educational speech.¹¹⁸

Not all legal action resulted in victories this year. Three lawsuits against educational gag orders were dismissed: Doe v. Fayette County Board of Education, Braasch v. Lamb, and NCF Freedom v. Diaz (though the latter was subsequently replaced by Hernandez v. Board of Governors, which mounts a similar though substantially strengthened challenge).¹¹⁹ Nor are some states hesitating to advance extreme pro-censorship arguments in the courtroom. In a brief supporting the State of Alabama’s lawsuit against the Biden administration’s new Title IX guidelines, Florida’s attorneys argued that “graduate students are arguably more like employees of the university, rather than mere students, so a lower standard might be justified for regulating their speech.”¹²⁰ It is unclear whether Florida intends to develop this argument in the future, but if so, it will mark a new front in its war on academic speech. Meanwhile, in a purposeful echoing of Florida’s defense of the Stop WOKE Act, Indiana’s attorney general recently argued in federal court that public university faculty have no First Amendment rights and that the government has the authority to decide what they say or teach in the classroom.¹²¹

For the time being, though, the record speaks for itself. Educational gag orders that restrict speech in public K–12 schools are at least somewhat vulnerable to Fourteenth Amendment challenges. When coupled with the success of First Amendment challenges to higher education gag orders, along with other legal successes, free expression advocates now have several promising paths to victory.

Political Resistance

Meanwhile, the political resistance to educational censorship is also mounting.

Texas has been one of the states hardest hit by educational censorship laws. In response, faculty there have established 12 new chapters of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the labor union and advocacy group that fights for academic freedom in higher education.¹²² The new chapters nearly double the previous number of chapters in the state and will greatly increase faculty voice in university affairs. It is part of a general trend of new or reestablished AAUP chapters across the country.¹²³ And faculty unions, which are a powerful voice for academic freedom and campus free speech, are linking up and making a comeback.¹²⁴ Even in Florida, where the state government has taken extraordinary steps to drive faculty unions out of business, some are hanging on and even thriving.¹²⁵

The political resistance to educational gag orders also scored some major wins in state legislatures. SB 83, a major gag order bill that passed the Ohio senate last year, continues to face strong opposition in the house and seems unlikely to become law this year. The bill’s sponsor himself noted that the hearings filled with critics of the measure were, at seven and a half hours, the longest on record.¹²⁶ In South Carolina, the marriage of GOP dysfunction and Democratic persistence helped kill a K–12 gag order that was otherwise poised to pass.¹²⁷ While opponents showed up in droves to testify against Missouri’s SB 918, not a single proponent stood up to speak in favor.¹²⁸

DEI represents “very important values that are found in our Bible… Diversity, equity and inclusion is about loving each other. It’s about living out the Golden Rule.…Diversity will always make us stronger. It is an asset and never a liability.”

Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear

And in deep red Kentucky, at a commemoration of a civil rights march led by Martin Luther King Jr., Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear gave an impassioned speech opposing a proposed DEI restriction. DEI represents “very important values that are found in our Bible,” Beshear said. “Diversity, equity and inclusion is about loving each other. It’s about living out the Golden Rule.…Diversity will always make us stronger. It is an asset and never a liability.”¹²⁹ The bill ultimately failed to pass the legislature.¹³⁰

This year as in previous ones, the epicenter for educational censorship efforts was Florida. For the first time since 2021, however, several educational censorship bills supported by Governor DeSantis went down to defeat.¹³¹ These included SB 470, a censorship bill disguised as combating antisemitism, and HB 901, a bill that would have prohibited the display of pride flags by universities or their employees, including student workers.¹³² Even SB 1291, the teacher education gag order that did become law, faced stiff opposition from a coalition of 20 state and national groups.¹³³ Moreover, candidates for school board races who were endorsed by DeSantis and who campaigned on an “anti-CRT” platform were rejected widely by voters this summer.¹³⁴ And while the political takeover of Florida’s New College continued apace, no takeovers on a similar scale were launched in other states.

Much of this success is owed to mobilization among educators, students, and the general public.¹³⁵ That mobilization extends far beyond Florida. Long-standing organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, GLAAD, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, the Academic Freedom Alliance, and the National Coalition Against Censorship have ramped up their efforts to combat educational censorship significantly. They are joined by newly established groups like Unite Against Book Bans, Moms for Libros, and a bevy of local, grassroots organizations founded by members of the public who have had enough.¹³⁶

Finally, state and federal lawmakers are awakening to the dangers of censorship. In 2024, legislation to combat educational censorship was proposed in at least a dozen states and became law in three: Maryland, Vermont, and Washington.¹³⁷ The laws in those states limit or forbid public schools and libraries from banning books or other instructional materials on politicized grounds. They join similar laws from 2023 passed in California and Illinois.¹³⁸ These efforts to combat censorship are welcome, but must be crafted with care lest they inadvertently penalize poor and underserved facilities.¹³⁹ Still, it is encouraging that at least in blue states, which have themselves not always been awake to the dangers of educational censorship, these restrictions are now being taken more seriously.

Future Trends

These lessons from the last few years, coupled with legislative patterns observed by PEN America in 2024, lead us to conclude that the 2025 legislative session may feature the following trends, particularly for higher education:

The trend of censorship by stealth will likely continue in state legislatures. Lawmakers will increasingly shy away from legislation that censors educational speech directly, and will instead seek to disguise censorship in bills ostensibly promoting some laudable goal, enact it indirectly by exerting ideological control over university governance, or engage in jawboning to bring about censorship informally. Lawmakers will continue to try to restrict shared governance, tenure, curricula, and accreditation; ban DEI; and mandate institutional neutrality. Bills will also continue to vary more from state to state, as competing models are introduced and boilerplate “divisive concepts” language fades further into the past.
2025 will likely also see significant intervention by the federal government, a trend that began this year. While a federal bill to restrict educational speech would require that Republicans control the presidency and both chambers of Congress, federal politicians have other tools at their disposal. In the past year alone, university leaders have been subpoenaed and grilled by various congressional committees. A dangerous and wildly censorious vision of higher education has been outlined in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which could devastate higher education via unilateral executive branch action.¹⁴⁰ Lawmakers will also continue to advance federal bills that copy state-level censorship proposals, such as HB 6090 (the “Antisemitism Awareness Act”) and HB 570 (the “CRT Act”), as well as ones that propose dangerous new approaches to censorship, such as HB 7725 (the “EDUCATE Act”), which would have banned DEI work at medical schools.¹⁴¹ And no matter who controls the White House in 2025, aggressive enforcement of Title VI provisions in ways that have troubling implications for campus speech are likely to continue.
It is likely that 2025 will prove to be a decisive year in the courts. The 11th Circuit Court of Appeals will rule on whether the Stop WOKE Act violates the Constitution, and in the process will likely clarify whether speech by public university faculty is protected by the First Amendment. This highly anticipated ruling will have broad implications for faculty in Florida, Alabama, and Georgia, and will be closely read by would-be censors elsewhere. Other cases with major implications for academic freedom and campus free speech may also be resolved in the next year—including cases that could potentially lead to circuit splits across different federal courts appeals, potentially elevating these questions to the Supreme Court.
Finally, university leaders will be forced to make a choice. In the face of jawboning and other threats, the pressures on university leaders will continue to mount, and they will need to determine what version of higher education they are willing to fight for. Only when leaders prove willing to prioritize defending their institutions against ideological control by the government will there be a truly effective counterweight to these pressures.

Appendix: List of New Educational Gag Orders and Other Laws of Concern

Of the 56 educational gag order bills introduced in 2024, 7, or 12.3 percent, have become law. Though the number is lower than in 2023, the percentage is higher, representing the highest rate of passage since 2021. Additionally, one state-level executive order that achieves similar ends has gone into effect. Finally, five new laws contain one or more features that restrict the activities of higher education institutions in a censorial fashion. These laws and policies are summarized below.

Educational Gag Order Laws

Alabama SB 129¹⁴²

Targets: public K–12 schools, public colleges and universities
Type of punishment: professional discipline
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public K–12 schools, colleges, and universities from requiring students to attend or participate in any training or coursework that advocates for certain concepts related to race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin.

Florida HB 1291¹⁴³

Targets: public and private colleges and universities
Type of punishment: none specified
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits teacher preparation programs in public and private colleges and universities from distorting “significant historical events or include a curriculum or instruction that teaches identity politics, violates [the Stop WOKE Act], or is based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” The law also applies to teacher certification courses and school leader preparation programs that some public K–12 schools provide to school employees.

Indiana SB 202¹⁴⁴

Targets: public colleges and universities
Type of punishment: none specified
Legal challenges: McDonald and Scheurich v. Trustees of Indiana University; Carr and Schuster v. Trustees of Purdue University¹⁴⁵

This law authorizes public colleges and universities to deny or revoke tenure if the faculty member is “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution,”; is “unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline,”; or is “likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” In addition to denial or loss of tenure, the faculty member may be terminated or demoted, have their salary reduced, or face some other disciplinary action. Students and employees must be able to submit complaints regarding a faculty member’s performance in these respects.

Louisiana HB 122¹⁴⁶

Targets: public K–12 schools
Type of punishment: none specified
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public K–12 schools from “covering the topics of sexual orientation or gender identity in any classroom discussion or instruction in a manner that deviates from state content standards or” locally approved curricula, or during extracurricular academic, athletic, or social activities under the school’s or public school governing authority’s jurisdiction.

Louisiana SB 262¹⁴⁷

Targets: public K–12 schools
Type of punishment: none specified
Legal challenges: none

This law establishes the parental right to not have a public K–12 school “discriminate against their child by teaching the child that the child is currently or destined to be oppressed or to be an oppressor based on [their] race or national origin.”

South Carolina HB 5100¹⁴⁸

Targets: public K–12 schools
Type of punishment: none specified
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public K–12 schools from using any state funds in fiscal year 2024-25 to provide training or instruction to students, teachers, administrators, or other staff or employees that promotes certain concepts related to race or sex. Identical state budget provisions were passed in 2021, 2022, and 2023.

Utah HB 261¹⁴⁹

Targets: public K–12 schools, public universities and colleges
Type of punishment: monetary fine / loss of state financial support
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public K–12 schools and colleges and universities from requiring employees, students, or prospective employees or students to attend “training” (including an in-person or online seminar, discussion group, workshop, other program, or related materials) in which certain concepts are promoted. These concepts include that a person should receive treatment on the basis of their “personal identity characteristics” or that “socio-political structures are inherently a series of power relationships and struggles among racial groups.” Such trainings may not promote “resentment between, or resentment of, individuals by virtue of their personal identity characteristics” and may not promote any idea “referred to or named diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The titles and syllabi of all mandatory courses must be posted online.

Educational Gag Order Policies

Texas GA-44¹⁵⁰

Targets: public colleges and universities
Type of punishment: none specified
Legal challenges: Students for Justice in Palestine v. Abbott¹⁵¹

This executive order requires public colleges and universities to develop policies to punish antisemitic speech, which they are directed to define using the IHRA working definition of antisemitism.

Other Higher Education Laws of Concern

Alabama SB 129¹⁵²

Targets: public colleges and universities
Restriction type: DEI restriction
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public colleges and universities from sponsoring or maintaining a “diversity, equity, and inclusion program,” defined as a “program, class, training, seminar, or other event where attendance is based on an individual’s race, sex, gender identity, ethnicity, national origin, or sexual orientation,” or an office that promotes a DEI program. Students and employees may not be required to attend any orientation, training, or course where “divisive concepts” related to race, color, religion, sex, ethnicity, or national origin are promoted.

Indiana SB 202¹⁵³

Targets: public colleges and universities
Restriction type: tenure, institutional neutrality
Legal challenges: McDonald and Scheurich v. Trustees of Indiana University; Carr and Schuster v. Trustees of Purdue University

This law authorizes public college and university boards of trustees to deny or revoke tenure if a faculty member is “unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution,”; is “unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline”; or is “likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.” In addition to denial or loss of tenure, the faculty member can be terminated or demoted, have their salary reduced, or face some other disciplinary action. Students and employees shall be able to submit complaints regarding a faculty member’s performance in these respects. Colleges, universities, and their subunits are prohibited from adopting an official position on political, moral, or ideological issues outside of “circumstances that affect the core mission of the institution and its values of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”

Iowa SF 2435¹⁵⁴

Targets: public colleges and universities
Restriction type: DEI ban, institutional neutrality
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public colleges and universities from establishing or maintaining any office of diversity, equity, and inclusion, defined as an office that promotes or provides “differential treatment” on the basis of an individual’s race, color, or ethnicity, or that promotes a program that is implemented with reference to race, color, ethnicity, gender identity, or sexual orientation. Institutions are prohibited from adopting official positions on “unconscious or implicit bias, cultural appropriation, allyship, transgender ideology, microaggressions, group marginalization, antiracism, systemic oppression, social justice, intersectionality, neo-pronouns, heteronormativity, disparate impact, gender theory, racial privilege, sexual privilege, or any related formulation of these concepts.”

Tennessee SB 2528¹⁵⁵

Targets: public colleges and universities
Restriction type: accreditation
Legal challenges: none

Allows public colleges and universities that are “negatively impacted by retaliatory action” taken by an accrediting agency to pursue legal action for damages.

Utah HB 261¹⁵⁶

Targets: public colleges and universities
Restriction type: DEI ban, institutional neutrality
Legal challenges: none

This law prohibits public colleges and universities from requiring employees or job candidates to attend trainings or workshops that promote certain concepts about “personal identity characteristics,”; “influence” an individual to consider such characteristics in the course of any employment decision; or promote any policy, program, office, initiative, or training referred to as diversity, equity, and inclusion. Required trainings or workshops are also prohibited from including that “socio-political structures are inherently a series of power relationships and struggles among racial groups,” or concepts that promote “resentment between, or resentment of, individuals by virtue of their personal identity characteristics.” Universities may not take or express positions on antiracism, bias, critical race theory, implicit bias, intersectionality, or racial privilege, or on policies or trainings that relate to prohibited concepts.

Acknowledgments

This report was written by Jeffrey Adam Sachs and Jeremy C. Young. Laura Benitez, Jonathan Friedman, Hadar Harris, Sam LaFrance, Kasey Meehan, James Tager, and three external reviewers reviewed and edited the report. Jacqueline Allain, Clare Carter, and Amy Reid provided additional assistance. The index accompanying this report was written and maintained by Jeffrey Adam Sachs and Laura Benitez. Geraldine Baum oversaw production and release of the report.

PEN America is grateful to the Mellon Foundation, Lumina Foundation, the Henry Luce Foundation, the Higher Education Forward Fund, the Spencer Foundation, the Open Society Foundations, and the Endeavor Foundation for their generous support of this research. This report and its conclusions reflect the views of PEN America alone.

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Our top-line numbers:

In 2024, state governments enacted 8 bills or policies that PEN America defines as educational gag orders—direct restrictions on educational speech in the classroom.

Of these, 3 focused solely on colleges and universities, 3 focused only on K-12 schools, and 2 included restrictions on both.

State governments also enacted 5 additional higher education bills that endanger academic freedom in ways that are not direct censorship, such as politicization of university governance; bans on diversity, equity, and inclusion; and restrictions on faculty tenure.

In all, 47 educational gag orders and 10 other higher ed restrictions were enacted in 23 states between January 1, 2021, and October 1, 2024.

Our key findings:

In 2024, higher ed censorship policies went underground—and became even more dangerous. Supporters of censorship largely abandoned open calls for restricting faculty speech; instead, they embraced—to great effect—camouflage, misdirection, and actions behind the scenes.

The impact of 2024’s educational censorship laws has been devastating, but resistance continues to grow. Both legal challenges and activism have been successful, and educational censorship laws have been revealed as unpopular, forcing supporters of censorship to change their approach radically.

Educational Gag Orders, K-12 and Higher Ed, 2021-2024

Higher Education Restrictions, including educational gag orders and other restrictions, 2021-2024

Introduction

From Stop WOKE to Censorship by Stealth

The three key tactics of this campaign were as follows:

Disguise educational censorship legislation by allying it with some worthy or popular cause.

Censor indirectly, by undermining the support structures at universities that protect intellectual freedom in the classroom, rather than directly, by placing official restrictions on speech.

Whenever possible, accomplish censorship by informal pressure, bullying, or threats rather than formal legislation.

Outline

Educational Censorship by the Numbers

Policy Spotlight: Alabama’s SB 129

Policy Spotlight: Florida’s HB 1291

Tactic I: Censorship in Disguise

“Viewpoint Diversity” as Camouflage

The Wrong Way to Combat Antisemitism

Policy Spotlight: Texas’s Executive Order GA-44

Tactic II: Indirect Censorship

DEI Restrictions

Mandatory Institutional Neutrality Bills

Shared Governance Restrictions and Other Attacks on Higher Ed Autonomy

Tactic III: Informal Censorship

Conclusion: Free Expression Advocates Fight Back

Legal Resistance

Political Resistance

Future Trends

Appendix: List of New Educational Gag Orders and Other Laws of Concern

Educational Gag Order Laws

Educational Gag Order Policies

Other Higher Education Laws of Concern

Acknowledgments

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