We were thrilled to have the opportunity to talk to PEN America’s Jeremy Young about what a second Trump administration holds in store for higher education. It was an informative—and sobering—conversation. Over the next four years, we should be prepared for a tsunami of ideologically-driven threats to academic freedom, campus free expression and the basic integrity of higher education. If you would rather read than listen, there is a transcript attached below.

Show Notes

PEN America’s *Educational Censorship* page is a terrific resource

On Christopher Rufo, see Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “How a Conservative Activist Invented the Conflict Over Critical Race Theory,” New Yorker, June 18, 2021 and Michael Kruse, “DeSantis’ Culture Warrior: ‘We Are Now Over the Walls,’” Politico, March 24, 2023. For Rufo’s take on critical race theory, in his own words, see this YouTube video.

Here is the full text of Executive Order 13950, which became the template for most of the anti-CRT (or “divisive concepts”) laws passed in red states.

On the Stop WOKE Act, the marquee anti-CRT law signed into law by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022, check out these two Banished episodes:

The Sunshine State Descends into Darkness (Again)

Will Florida's "Stop WOKE Act" Hold Up in Court?

Jeffrey Sachs and Jeremy Young predict the future: “For Federal Censorship of Higher Ed, Here’s What Could Happen in 2025” (PEN America, January 2, 2025)

For more on the phenomenon of “jawboning,” see this page from FIRE and this page from the Knight First Amendment Institute

On “anticipatory obedience,” see this excerpt from Timothy Snyder’s 2017 book, On Tyranny

On legislative challenges to campus DEI, see the Chronicle of Higher Education DEI Legislation Tracker. (We are quite skeptical of many conventional DEI efforts but state bans are a cure that is far worse than the disease )

For a deeper dive on accreditation, see Eric Kelderman, “Trump’s Vision for College Accreditation Could Shake Up the Sector” (Chronicle of Higher Education, November 26, 2024)

On Title VI investigations by the Office of Civil Rights, see Zach Montague, “Campus Protest Investigations Hang Over Schools as New Academic Year Begins” (New York Times, October 5, 2024)

Here is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism. Kenneth Stern, one of the definition’s main authors, explains why he is concerned it is being used to promote campus censorship

On the prospect of a much heftier endowment tax for the country’s wealthiest institutions, see Phillip Levine, “How Trump Could Devastate Our Top Colleges’ Finances” (Chronicle of Higher Education, January 13, 2025). Levine addresses the normative question—should college endowments be taxed?—here.

Transcript

Jeff: So, we're looking forward to a second Trump administration.

Jeremy: Are we looking forward to a second Trump administration?

Amna: No…towards.

Jeff: We are anticipating…I personally am dreading a second Trump administration.

Amna: This is Banished and I'm Amna Khalid, along with my colleague Jeff Snyder. Jeff and I were delighted to have the chance to catch up with PEN America's Jeremy Young at the recent American Historical Association conference in New York City. He's one of the most informed and astute analysts of government driven censorship in higher education today. We started by asking him to tell us a little about PEN America.

Jeremy: PEN America is a 102 year old organization that exists at the intersection of literature and human rights. It is one of 140 PEN centers around the world which are in a loose network of PEN Centers governed by PEN International. PEN America's mission is to celebrate literature and defend the freedoms that make it possible, of which two of the foremost are academic freedom and freedom of expression.

Amna: And what's your specific role?

Jeremy: I am the Director of State and Higher Education Policy at PEN America, which means that I oversee our Freedom to Learn program, which leads actions and responses to educational censorship legislation, largely from the state governments, but also from the federal government. Things like DEI bans, critical race theory restrictions, and various other types of restrictions on faculty governance and university autonomy.

Amna: We're eager to hear your predictions on what the higher ed sector should be bracing for with the second Trump administration. But first, Jeremy, could you please remind us of the nature of the attacks against higher education during Trump 1.0?

Jeremy: In the summer and fall of 2020, this really happened late in the first Trump administration, there was a national panic around critical race theory, and this was created by Chris Rufo and some others really as a response, a backlash, if you will, against the George Floyd protests, the Black Lives Matter movement, the popularity of the 1619 Project, and so on, this sort of moment of racial reckoning. And so Rufo and others (Rufo is a fellow at the Manhattan Institute) decided to use this term critical race theory, which of course is an academic term with a particular set of meanings but to, as he put it, decodify and recodify it, essentially weaponize it to mean things that weren't all that connected to the actual theory of critical race theory and were really just a sort of catchall for criticisms of DEI and other race-based pedagogies and ideas. And so Rufo was able to convince president Trump to issue an executive order 13950 called Race and Sex Stereotyping that laid out a list of nine divisive concepts which bore some passing resemblance to critical race theory, but really were vague, and general, and banned all sorts of practices related to race, gender, and identity, and ideas related to race, gender, and identity that were unclear and difficult to interpret. Originally, this was a restriction aimed solely at trainings in government agencies…the executive order never went into effect. It was stayed by a court and repealed on the first day of the Biden administration. But that language of the divisive concepts then began to appear in state legislatures aimed now squarely at education. At first, at K-12 institutions primarily, and over time, higher education became more and more of the target.

In 2023, we started to see a shift toward sort of broad spectrum attacks on higher education, moving away from some of the direct speech restrictions of the critical race theory bans, in part because of court cases that had gone adversely for those restrictions, and instead restricting broad swaths of university governance, including DEI offices, the ability of a university to manage diversity work on its own as a sort of shared governance function, tenure restrictions on faculty governance, restrictions on curriculum, which I think are going to be very prominent in 2025.

Amna: You mentioned backlash to the 2020 racial reckoning as a key factor driving the anti-CRT movement. Can you say something mor...