Free speech is dead at the American university. Here’s who killed it.

You gotta hand it to the University of Austin, the experimental and high-profile startup college with a small campus in a former Texas department store but big ambitions for disrupting higher education in America. Backed by right-wing “thought leaders” like Bari Weiss and Niall Ferguson and with a $200 million wad of cash from billionaires like Jeff Yass, the richest man in Pennsylvania, the tiny school known to boosters as UATX has never wavered from its core founding principle.

Utter hypocrisy.

This proved a painful lesson for Ellie Avishai, a Harvard-trained educator who believed there was too-much left-leaning groupthink around an Ivy League education these days. In co-founding the Mill Institute in 2022, Avishai said its goal was to promote free thought and open dialogue in classrooms. The institute partnered with UATX, and Avishai became an evangelist for the startup school whose mission is declared on its website as “the fearless pursuit of truth” and “freedom of inquiry.”

But then she learned that “freedom of inquiry” hits a brick wall when it even gently bumps against the rigid agenda of UATX’s billionaire backers. Avishai’s heresy, as she revealed in a viral essay published this weekend? She’d written in an anodyne post sharing someone else’s article on LinkedIn: “We can have criticisms of DEI without wanting to tear down the whole concept of diversity and inclusion.” But not at UATX, it seems. The school quickly ended its affiliation with the Mill Institute and deleted Avishai from its website.

Avishai and a handful of colleagues who also bought into the school’s opening blather about academic freedom are getting crushed by what she acknowledges in her piece is a dominant political agenda of attacking so-called “woke” doctrine, including diversity, and belittling elite traditional universities in its social media feed.

The absurd contradiction of UATX peaked in a glowing tribute on TV’s conservative Fox & Friends which quoted its “anti-woke” founding prof Michael Shellenberger as praising the university as “a sanctuary of truth-seeking and truth-telling” right before host Brian Kilmeade gushed: “Protests are essentially not allowed.”

Indeed, the seeming naivete of Avishai’s essay prompted a lot of online mocking and references to the popular joke that President Donald Trump’s backers voted for the Face-Eating Leopards Party, never expecting their own face would be eaten. But the story behind UATX, the billionaires and pseudo-intellectuals who back it, and its real, destructive mission highlights a crisis in today’s America that is no laughing matter.

UATX’s Big Lie around free speech is essentially a propaganda op for a much bigger and even more insidious project: The destruction of the American university as a bastion of free speech, an educator of critically thinking citizens, and, when called for, a center of First Amendment-backed political dissent.

The reality that this project is now backed by the president of the United States, his education secretary, the world’s richest people, and the far-right ideologues currently implementing the extremist Project 2025 is only the second-most alarming thing about it. No, the most alarming thing about the murder of college free speech is that they’re getting away with it.

On campuses from blood-red Florida to ocean-blue California, this unpopular front of a hostile federal government, repressive state laws, politically-charged donors and trustees and cowardly administrators has terrified many students and professors away from “truth-seeking and truth-telling,” as controversial classes, seminars — and sometimes people — are cancelled.

It’s happening at the public University of Florida, where a top religion professor recently wrote that “administrators and faculty members alike practice anticipatory obedience to avoid even the appearance of wokeness, stifling the sort of open and civil discussions that lead students to develop their own views.”

But it’s also happening at the private New York University, where cowed administrators are withholding a diploma from a top student over his commencement address. His offense? Voicing support for the Palestinian cause and decrying the ongoing slaughter of civilians in Gaza. These statements drew thunderous applause from those in attendance, for which the school said it was “deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks.”

Four professors at the University of California-Los Angeles wrote in an essay for The Nation that UCLA is now “nearly unrecognizable as a university” because of the massive police presence after last spring’s pro-Gaza encampment, which was attacked by vigilante Israel supporters and then city cops on successive nights. “It has become a fortress, and in so doing, it has profoundly changed what it means to be faculty here,” they wrote.

Since January, it’s been hard to keep track of the all-out assault on the American university: The massive and often legally dubious funding cuts from the Trump regime to elite private campuses like Harvard, Penn and Brown — delivered with suspect claims these schools had done too little against antisemitism or too much for transgender rights — on top of the across the board slashing of scientific research. Red-state laws against teaching about race, or LGBTQ topics. Craven school leaders passing strict rules limiting protests, so terrified of offending either regime officials or their own billionaire donors. And this was before federal ICE agents snatched and detained several students for leading protests or even writing innocuous op-eds about the carnage in Gaza.

You’ll be shocked (not really) to learn that this series of unfortunate events for U.S. academic freedom is no accident. In a major investigation, the New York Times detailed how the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation — whose Project 2025 was a blueprint for the current gutting of the federal government — is also behind a scheme called Project Esther that seeks to use a broad definition of antisemitism not only to crush protests but to cripple the might of U.S. universities.

Project Esther’s one weird trick is the outlandish suggestion that anyone voicing objections to the bombs that have killed more than 50,000 people, many of them women and children, in Gaza is thus a supporter of Hamas and aiding a banned terrorist group. Stefanie Fox, the executive director of Jewish Voice for Peace, told the Times that the Esther strategy is ripped from the authoritarian playbook and that it’s “sharpening those tools for use against anyone and everyone who challenges his fascist agenda.”

Look, no one is disputing that protests have included isolated and ugly moments of actual antisemitism on campuses like at Cornell and Columbia, where the individual perpetrators were ID’ed and rightfully punished. What Trump and the MAGA movement are doing is not only forging an overhyped case to shut down all dissent against human-rights outrages in Gaza, where the populace is currently being starved to death, but to eliminate any hope that colleges might teach a generation of free thinkers to oppose dictatorship in America.

» READ MORE: 60 years after the day college students won free speech, their rights are vanishing

You don’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to solve the mystery of who murdered free speech on college campuses, although you should invoke his famous dictum about “the dog that didn’t bark” — that being the mostly lack of any campus protests throughout 2024-25 despite a wave of repression and anti-academic retribution surpassing anything from the tumultuous 1960s.

To steal a meme that was popular on social media earlier this year, the mass shooters mowing down America’s college classrooms are Trump, anti-learning governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis and Texas’ Greg Abbott, the Heritage Foundation and their fellow travelers like Bari Weiss, and the billionaires backing their meme coin of a university down in Austin. But feckless college presidents, weak Democrats like New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, and false public intellectuals of a decadent center-left are the Uvalde cops in this analogy, running away from the bloodshed they all swore to defend.

David Klion published a story this weekend in The Nation that looked at the fifth anniversary of the so-called Harper’s letter in which a number of leading intellectuals, many of them seen as liberal, essentially charged that left-wing orthodoxy was the biggest threat to academic freedom. He noted that more than three-fourths of the signers have said nothing about the Trump regime’s imprisonment of Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil and other foreign-born student activists for their protected speech. That’s a level of hypocrisy that might earn you an “A” at AUTX.

This is what’s been so infuriating about the discourse over academic freedom for the last several decades. Again, there have been excesses from the left — shouting down speakers or stealing school newspapers — that deserve condemnation, but the real threat to free speech has always been from a too powerful government and a hostile right-wing that has come to oppose the very idea of higher education.

So now any effort to revive free speech at the academy is starting from a hole, six feet under. It can be saved, but it requires a lot of planning, much time and effort, and one thing in particular: Courage. Just over 60 years ago, coming out of the similarly repressive McCarthy era, a formerly stuttering Berkeley undergrad name Mario Savio and his comrades in that school’s Free Speech Movement showed such a level of bravery in winning the rights that students would later take for granted.

But the green shoots of fearlessness reappeared this weekend, in a commencement ceremony at George Washington University in D.C. There, a heroic grad named Cecilia Culver not only called out atrocities in Gaza but harshly criticized the GWU administration for not disclosing its investments or negotiating with students, and misusing their skyrocketing tuition payments. Her closing words, that “none of us are free until Palestine is free,” were almost drowned out with cheers and applause.

It’s going to take hundreds, and probably thousands of Culvers on campuses from coast to coast to channel the ghost of Mario Savio and throw their bodies upon the gears of a repressive regime, knowing that the sanction might be not just a suspension, or a cancelled job interview — that’s bad enough — but possibly a prison cell. Those of us in the outside world must support them. Because, to echo her address, if America’s young people are not free to speak their mind, then none of us are free.

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