Parents are paying $60,000 a year so their kids can learn to shut up and sit down.
That's the reality of American higher education.
And woke colleges' war on free speech was exposed with one scary detail.
Campus censorship just hit an all-time high
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression documented 274 incidents of speech suppression on college campuses in 2025 alone.¹
That crushes the previous record of 252 set in 2020 — during COVID lockdowns and the George Floyd riots.
Colleges are now more hostile to the First Amendment than they were when masks were mandatory and cities were burning.
Since FIRE started tracking in 2020, they've logged 1,327 total incidents of administrators punishing students for exercising their constitutional rights.
And these are just the cases that got reported. How many kids shut their mouths and kept their heads down because they saw what happened to the ones who spoke up?
FIRE's director of research Ryne Weiss says universities could fix this tomorrow if they wanted to.
"Ending restrictive speech codes and ceasing punishments of students for protected speech are the bare minimum," Weiss told The Center Square.²
But they're doing the opposite.
They're targeting Turning Point USA three months after assassinating its founder
California Lutheran University just voted down a proposal to bring Turning Point USA back to campus.
The student government claimed "safety concerns" and worried the club's "rhetoric" might bring "controversy."³
This happened three months after Charlie Kirk was assassinated by a left-wing radical while speaking at Utah Valley University.
A young conservative leader gets murdered for his beliefs. Universities respond by banning his organization from campuses.
They're not worried about safety. They're celebrating what happened to Charlie and making sure his movement dies with him.
At Vanguard University of Southern California, administrators wrote a brand new policy banning student organizations "affiliated with political or ideological movements" — then immediately used it to deny recognition to a Students for Life chapter.⁴
The pro-life students had to hire a lawyer and fight back before the university let them form a watered-down club under a different name.
The pattern is clear. Create vague rules about "safety" or "movements." Give administrators total discretion. Deny every conservative group. Approve every leftist organization.
It's the system working exactly as designed.
Students are learning to be afraid of their own opinions
Half of all college students now say they feel "less comfortable attending controversial public events on campus."⁵
Nearly half report being "less comfortable voicing opinions on controversial subjects in class."⁶
This is someone's daughter learning that defending the unborn in class gets her reported to the dean. This is someone's son discovering that wearing a MAGA hat gets him banned from the cafeteria.
They're being trained — with their parents' tuition dollars — that conservative beliefs equal danger, that debate equals violence, and that silence is safety.
When students do speak up, university presidents issue "wishy-washy statements trying to appease all sides," as Weiss put it, which only invites more pressure to censor.⁷
A real leader would say: "This student has First Amendment rights. The university will not punish protected speech. End of discussion."
But that would require actually defending free speech instead of just fundraising off it.
Most students show up to campus with zero understanding of what the First Amendment protects.
"Their ignorance about their rights might mean that they don't know that they can't be punished for expressing an opinion," Weiss explained.⁸
Or worse — they think screaming down speakers and shutting down events counts as free speech.
That ignorance isn't accidental. It's cultivated.
Universities deliberately teach students that conservative speech is violence. That disagreement is harm. That censorship is justice.
Then they charge parents a quarter million dollars for the privilege.
The 274 incidents aren't mistakes. They're proof the system works exactly as the Left designed it.
Every time a conservative student gets punished for protected speech, it sends a message to a hundred others: keep your head down, don't make waves, don't be the next example.
Three months ago, Charlie Kirk paid the ultimate price for refusing to be silenced. Now universities are making sure his organization can't recruit the next generation of young conservatives who refuse to back down.
They murdered the man. Now they're trying to kill the movement.
And they're using parents' money to do it.
¹ Tate Miller, "Free speech under fire nearly 300 times in 2025 on campus," The Center Square, December 27, 2025.
² Ibid.
³ Ibid.
⁴ Ibid.
⁵ Ibid.
⁶ Ibid.
⁷ Ibid.
⁸ Ibid.
