With a Wave of New Bills in 2025, State Legislators Cast a Web of Control over Higher Education

Any way you slice it, 2025 is already a record-breaking year for higher education censorship, with a bumper crop of more than 70 bills and policies introduced across 26 states. Twenty-two of them have become law in 16 states. All of these bills aim to extend a web of state control over higher education, deploying new strategies to restrict classroom teaching and undermine academic freedom on college campuses. 

Headlines often focus on threats posed by the federal government, which has launched devastating attacks on lifesaving research funding, international students and scholars, and programs that promote diversity, equity, and inclusion, among other things. Those threats deserve the attention they are receiving, but the actions of state legislatures, which are largely flying under the public radar, have been just as devastating. 

With remarkable speed and determination, lawmakers have passed a stunning wave of educational gag orders that directly censor academic teaching, as well as laws that target tenure and traditional faculty governance, intervene in how academic and non-academic programs are run and overseen, manipulate accreditation practices, and mandate institutional neutrality in ways that silence important speech.

Censorship of higher education, it seems, is highly contagious. 

The Frenzy to Ban DEI Casts a Chill Over Academia

Educational gag orders affecting higher education – state efforts to restrict what can and cannot be taught in the college or university classroom – have taken different shapes over the last four years. The initial prohibitions focused on expelling from the classroom a vaguely worded list of “divisive concepts” to restrict teaching about race and gender. Over time, legislators have adapted and expanded their scope, explicitly prohibiting certain topics, notably “Critical Race Theory” and The New York Times’s 1619 Project, or dictating how various subjects, such as sexuality, gender, United States history, and even communism, are taught. Since 2021, PEN America has tracked the passage of 24 laws that directly censor teaching in higher education classrooms — seven of which passed in 2025 alone.

Beginning in 2023, these efforts merged with a larger campaign to eradicate “DEI.” These efforts are often framed as solely focused on the operation of DEI offices, hiring and admissions practices, and non-academic programs. In practice, however, many of these bills reach far beyond DEI offices, directly censoring classroom speech or limiting the courses that academic programs can require. In 2025, more of these bills are passing into law – bills that purport to ban DEI, but which limit the freedom with which faculty can teach their students and the flexibility needed to foster robust discussion of complex topics on campuses.

These bills vary from the overly vague to the excessively proscriptive. At a minimum, just by virtue of their prohibitive language, they all cast some chill over campus cultures; but this has been magnified by language in the bills that is impossibly broad or contradictory. For instance, West Virginia’s SB 474 – which at least partially copies from the conservative Manhattan Institute’s model bill against DEI – prohibits any “effort” to promote policies or procedures or conduct trainings, programs, or activities “designed or implemented in reference to race, color, ethnicity, or national origin.” This definition is so extensively broad that it could prohibit even thinking about demographic categories when designing or executing policies, programs, and events.

Ohio’s new anti-DEI law, SB 1, lacks any definition of just what constitutes “diversity, equity, and inclusion” beyond the specific phrase, leaving unclear what ideas or programs are in fact prohibited. Nonetheless, administrators are now required to close “DEI” offices and cease “DEI” programming. Even more perplexing, the law requires universities to avoid “replacing” any of these with an office, orientation, training, or position that “serves the same or similar purposes, or that uses the same or similar means.” Technically speaking, an office charged with welcoming and ensuring the success of all students certainly could be considered “similar” in purpose to some DEI initiatives, and therefore now prohibited. 

It is likely that Ohio legislators did not intend to prohibit tutoring centers, student success trainings, orientations for international students, and all resource centers, including those for women, veterans, or faith groups. But the parameters of what exactly has been prohibited, and what could be construed as “similar,” have been left to administrators to guess. With no guidance whatsoever, administrators will now be more likely to terminate anything that has a chance of being seen by legislators as constituting “DEI” – casting a pall over a wide range of campus initiatives, student clubs, or events.

Another law, HB 1193 in Mississippi, initially echoes the Manhattan Institute in its ban of “DEI” programming, but then casts aside even the most basic respect for academic freedom, eschewing exemptions for academic programs and greatly expanding the range of prohibitions. In addition to familiar language restricting “divisive concepts” and “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” a whole laundry list of topics related to sex and gender are now off-limits in academic and nonacademic programming alike, thanks to the law’s prohibition on programs or courses that “endorse…concepts promoting transgender ideology, gender-neutral pronouns, deconstruction of heteronormativity, gender theory, sexual privilege or any related formulation of these concepts” [emphasis added]. 

Even more difficult to understand is a separate provision in Mississippi’s new law that outlaws public institutions from requiring “diversity training,” which is defined very broadly as “any formal or informal education, seminars, workshops, or institutional programs that focus on increasing awareness or understanding of issues related to race, sex, color, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion or national origin.” This definition makes no distinction or exemption for academic teaching, the very purpose of which is to increase awareness and understanding. 

That legislators enacted this impossibly broad provision exemplifies the extensive damage wrought by attempting to legislate “DEI” out of public education. Might a foreign language teacher have to remove all lessons related to heritage speakers to avoid “increasing awareness” of ethnicity and national origin? Can a lesson on biology or anatomy reference sexual differences — or might that be construed as increasing understanding? What about courses, seminars, programs about specific religions, which often increase awareness and understanding of theological beliefs and practices? 

With this restriction cloaked in language associated with DEI, the casual reader might miss the definition entirely or assume it does not apply to formal courses of study. However, by defining “diversity training” broadly to include both “formal or informal education,” the law leaves faculty and campus administrators uncertain about exactly which classroom discussions or educational activities might be construed as promoting “awareness and understanding,” and therefore might jeopardize university funding.

Mississippi legislators were also not content to just ban a large swath of vital topics. In a move as contradictory as it is limiting, they also require the policies and curricula of both public K-12 schools and postsecondary institutions to be based on statutory, heteronormative definitions of “sex” as exclusively “male” and “female.” However, answering almost any question a student might pose about a rigidly binary definition of “sex” would risk violating the law’s broad bans, under which endorsing “gender theory” – and “any related formulation of the listed concepts” – is strictly prohibited. Contrary to the spirit of intellectual inquiry or give-and-take that we might expect in an academic environment, the law simultaneously mandates teaching sex and gender in one particular way and prohibits any discussion of it. It is hard to imagine a more confusing and contradictory directive to educators regarding what they cannot discuss, and yet also must explain to their students. 

The bill’s irreconcilable provisions, which took immediate effect in mid-April, were paused on July 20th by a U.S. District Court judge’s temporary restraining order, while the decision on a longer-term preliminary injunction is pending. The judge recognized that legislators effectively set a trap for administrators by enacting vague provisions that can be invoked almost any time the institution or an individual acts in a manner or expresses an idea in their official capacity that politicians don’t like, writing in the order: “such ambiguity […] not only deprives individuals of fair notice, but also empowers enforcers to apply the statute selectively.” Anyone who is paying attention understands that, if HB 1193 is allowed to remain law, all faculty and staff in Mississippi are on thin ice – and that will most certainly result in a chilling of free expression on campus. 

From Educational Gag Orders to an Indirect Web of Control

In October 2024, PEN America reported that the number of introduced bills proposing an “indirect” approach to educational censorship surpassed the number of “direct” restrictions on classroom teaching for the first time. As distinct from educational gag orders that explicitly censor classroom speech, bills that indirectly censor higher education include efforts to undermine the structures that make academic freedom possible, placing university and college administrators and governing boards under the direct ideological control of the government.

In 2025, this trend continues. Through the end of June, we have seen at least 60 bills or policies employing varied tactics to undermine academic freedom indirectly. In addition to the DEI bans discussed above, legislators introduced bills that would unduly intervene in academic program requirements, diminish the role of faculty in shaping institutional policies and practices, weaken tenure protections, undermine accrediting bodies, or stymie higher education leaders’ ability to speak publicly on virtually any topic. 

The tactics for disrupting the traditional independence of academic institutions may vary from state to state, but legislators across the country are laser-focused on one goal: to exert new political control over public universities’ and colleges, with serious consequences for their academic missions. In the last six months, 21 bills and policies with at least one of these restrictions have become law across 16 states.

Curricular Control 

Within this category, lawmakers have shown a particular appetite for passing bills that restrict or dictate college-level curricula. These bills censor similar subjects as educational gag orders, but do so through restrictions on academic program requirements instead of through direct restrictions on faculty. This subtle shift has created a way to indirectly control educational speech, and to diminish the traditional role of faculty in overseeing academic matters. 

With the enactment of Idaho’s SB 1198, for example, the “subject matter or pedagogical methodology” of required courses in public colleges and universities across the state may not be derived from or promote “concepts of critical theory or DEI,” except in narrow cases. Kentucky’s HB 4 goes further, stipulating that the state’s Council on Postsecondary Education must eliminate entire academic programs at public universities if they require a course that “indoctrinates” students with “a concept that justifies or promotes differential treatment or benefits on the basis of religion, race, sex, color, or national origin.” North Carolina, West Virginia, and Wyoming each enacted laws or policies that similarly prohibit requiring courses that engage with certain topics or concepts that explore themes of power, societal systems, race, gender, or sexuality. 

These laws essentially suppress courses or even entire disciplines, and extend the reach of legislators into controlling academic teaching in new ways. 

Ohio’s and Utah’s state legislatures went so far as to write out class syllabi in statute. Now, every public Ohio college student will be required to take an American Civic Literacy course that includes a specific set of readings enshrined into law by politicians. Meanwhile, Utah State University is required to pilot a rigid general education model, which requires humanities and “American institutions” classes that focus on themes and materials prescribed by legislators.

These newly-mandated courses may prove useful or appropriate for today’s college students, but when legislators prescribe course content with this level of detail, it amounts to censorship; they effectively wrest decisions over what skills, materials, and knowledge will best prepare students for career success away from faculty, who have disciplinary and pedagogical expertise and who have been traditionally entrusted with such curricular decisions. Inevitably, that means some of the content that faculty determine is important to teach students won’t happen. And in forcing their particular viewpoints on these institutions, their faculty, and their students, these legislators are using their political offices – raw political power – to dictate what students must learn.

Governance

Several laws enacted this spring also chip away at or fully dismantle the broader principles of shared governance – shifting control from faculty, administrators, and governing boards to state officials. While we noted the introduction of proposals to weaken shared governance with alarm in 2024, they gained new momentum this year, with six states enacting them into law through June. A few of these laws use fairly pointed tools to carve other specific decisions away from faculty control: Ohio SB 1 mandates that student assessments must account for a certain percentage of faculty evaluations, while Utah’s SB 334 and Iowa’s HB 437 give administrators outsized power over faculty employment in certain newly established centers. Under North Dakota’s HB 1437, faculty may comprise no more than one-half of a committee for tenure review – subverting the long-established standard that faculty alone have the expertise to evaluate tenure files. In Arkansas, meanwhile, HB 1512 prohibits public universities and colleges from granting students excused absences or otherwise authorizing walkouts for protests or advocacy. 

Seen in isolation, these various laws are limited in scope. But they set a terrible precedent of weakening shared governance principles and eroding the ability of faculty to shape campus policies. And if faculty are being sidelined, who is being tapped to make decisions for public campuses? It’s no surprise that in some cases, state lawmakers are shifting power to those they can readily influence, essentially claiming that authority for themselves. 

The prime example of this is Texas SB 37 – a political power grab undercutting faculty power in every aspect of university life. This new Texas law doesn’t just set absurdly rigid limits on the composition of faculty senates in public universities and colleges, it creates a two-tiered system for service, with appointed senators able to serve longer than those elected by their peers. What’s more, it declares that politically-appointed public university and college governing boards hold ultimate responsibility over institutions, while also establishing an appointed “ombudsman” with compliance powers over the entire state system. This new power structure makes clear that in Texas, public institutions of higher education are not accountable to their academic experts, their students, or even their institutional missions — but to state legislators and their appointees. 

Indiana and Ohio apparently took note of this strategy; each tucked a provision borrowed from Texas into their budget proposals that relegates the role of faculty senates in public universities and colleges to advisory-only. 

Institutional Neutrality Mandates

Legislators are also seeking to muzzle administrators and governing boards by mandating that public university and college administrators refrain from taking certain positions publicly. This is evident in bills that became law in Iowa (HB 856), West Virginia (SB 474), and Ohio (SB 1) – the last of which prohibits official positions on issues of “any political controversy.” Although put forward as protections necessary to foster open inquiry, these “institutional neutrality” restrictions are so broad they hinder an academic institution’s ability to fulfill its obligations. While there are valid arguments for why academic institutions might develop policies to govern when and how they speak, they should be the ultimate arbiters of this, rather than state governments, who have an obvious political stake in trying to control just what academic institutions say. After all, even the University of Chicago’s Kalven report, so often cited as making the case for “institutional neutrality,” recognizes that a university must be able to speak out in defense of “its interests and values.” This ability is being directly curtailed. 

In short, if the goal is to encourage free and open discussion of ideas on campus, then it’s a problem that state governments are instituting formal limits on what institutions can say – and even more so when these restrictions are vague and subject to arbitrary enforcement. Ironically, laws that are being branded as necessary to protect free speech may do more to chill it, with administrators and faculty likely to err on the side of caution when it comes to what they say publicly, both in and outside the classroom.

Accreditation

Finally, matching the Trump administration’s flagrant scorn for independent accreditation, Arkansas, Iowa, and Kansas have enacted new laws that seek to limit accreditation requirements for higher education institutions in their states. Six other states, led by Florida, are also banding together to form an accrediting body with a board of directors – responsible for making the accrediting decisions – that will reportedly be appointed by the university systems themselves. This makes a mockery of the very purpose of accreditation, which is to provide external and impartial oversight of institutional policies and programs. These state moves appear designed, on the contrary, to ensure that political interests prevail, hobbling one of the primary guardrails for protecting academic freedom from overt political interference. This is, in essence, a means of opening the door wider to further state censorship, and leaves only minimal safeguards for the quality of the education available to students.

While not direct forms of censorship, all of these laws unmistakably extend an expanding web of control over university and college operations. As traditions of institutional autonomy for the higher education sector are weakened, there are devastating repercussions to come for the sector’s political independence, for the state of academic research and teaching, and, ultimately, for the broader climate for free expression on campuses.

Conclusion

In 2025, the norms that used to define how colleges and universities operate are being thrown out the window. These traditions and structures have long stood as a bulwark against government censorship of teaching, research, and learning. So, it is not unexpected that, as part of their effort to exert ideological control over college classrooms and campuses, politicians on every level are now seeking to tear those defenses down. And ultimately it is our students – all students, but especially students of color and LGBTQ, first-generation, veteran and non-traditional students – who will bear the brunt of the consequences.

Changes in federal policy may be dominating our collective attention – but state legislatures also have the ability to set policies and budgets that have at once immediate and long-lasting impacts on the higher education sector. The fact is, we are confronting a radical shift in the relationship between state governments and higher education. What we have seen this legislative session is the result of a long game that has taken root in individual states year after year, where legislators introduce bills drafted as model legislation by right-wing policy shops, and where anti-education rhetoric has increasingly normalized the censorship of classrooms and campuses, of faculty, researchers, and students. 

With faculty bodies rendered impotent by efforts to subvert shared governance, and systems redesigned to pressure governing boards and administrators to bend to prevailing political will, there will be fewer defenses against ideologues calling for professors to be sacked, less assurance that faculty expertise guides academic requirements, and negative impacts downstream on a range of campus policies. In this precipitous climate, guarantees of the academic freedom that underpins scientific discoveries, groundbreaking thought, and the right to hold truth to power are becoming increasingly tenuous and uncertain.

If we truly want to maintain the tradition of excellence in U.S. higher education, we need to stand together to fight state censorship efforts, before it is too late. In 2025, a majority of state legislatures – 26 of 50 this year alone – introduced at least one bill or policy aimed at censoring higher education. That is not a track record we should be proud of.