BOSTON – Speech crackdown efforts at American colleges targeted more than twice as many individuals in 2025 as they did in 2024, according to data from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a First Amendment legal advocacy group. Boston area colleges have not been spared.
The number of college students, faculty members and university-affiliated researchers “investigated, censored, or otherwise punished” for expressive activity jumped from 504 in 2024 to 1,155 in 2025, an increase of nearly 130%.
Compared with previous years, 2025 saw more speech-related controversies impacting large groups of people, FIRE data shows. For example, the data documents more than 300 authors and scholars who had their books removed from—though later returned to—the U.S. Naval Academy library following a federal directive aiming to eliminate diversity, equity and inclusion programs.
Graham Piro, a legal fellow at FIRE, said several events have recently “supercharged” speech and expression on campuses, including the assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, the Oct. 7, 2023 attacks on Israel by the militias of Hamas and several other Palestinian political organizations based in Gaza, and the Gaza war by Israel against those organizations and the entire population of Gaza.
“Those opinions, oftentimes, may be offensive and they may draw outrage,” he said. “When that happens, universities are going to come under significant pressure from a variety of sources to take action, and it’s important that they stand by their First Amendment obligations, or they stand by their stated policies to protect speech on campus.”
While a university may crack down on speech because it is legitimately offensive, it may also do so due to ideological disagreement, community backlash or pressure from donors or lawmakers, he said.
Piro clarified that only public universities are bound by the First Amendment, as they are government-funded. However, some private universities make promises of free expression that often align rhetorically with First Amendment protections, he said.
In these cases, FIRE argues that private universities should still uphold their promises, even if they are not legally bound by the First Amendment, Piro said.
Since 2023, FIRE has documented 2,395 students and scholars who were targeted by efforts to punish individuals for “expressive activity that is, or at a public institution would be, protected by the First Amendment or that violates academic freedom.” Of these individuals, 123 were affiliated with the 19 Boston-area schools included in the database.
Universities across Greater Boston saw a similar increase in the past year, with the number of targeted individuals rising by 71% from 2024 to 2025. However, unlike the overall data, which showed a sudden, dramatic spike that year, the data for the Greater Boston schools showed a far more gradual increase, starting in 2023.
Of the local universities, the majority of speech crackdown efforts since 2023 have been aimed at Harvard University, constituting nearly 63% (77) of the total number (123), FIRE data shows. This was followed by Boston University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, each accounting for less than 1% (9 each) of the total.
Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, Harvard has been the target of a pressure campaign by his administration over allegations of bias and being “deliberately indifferent” to antisemitism on campus.
Bence P. Ölveczky, professor of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology at Harvard, said he believes the Trump administration’s attacks have led the university to seek “institutional neutrality” on political issues.
In 2020, Ölveczky, his lab and his colleague, Mansi Srivastava, stuck large block letters to their windows, spelling out “BLACK LIVES MATTER,” to signal solidarity with the movement, which sparked after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis Police.
Five years later, after receiving virtually no pushback, he said the building manager sent him a letter claiming the display violated university signage rules and had to be removed.
Ölveczky, who was in Maine with his family at the time, said he asked the manager not to remove it until he had clarification because the rule being cited did not apply to private offices.
Despite this, he said, the letters were taken down.
“Harvard has as its motto, ‘The truth,’” he said. “But I do find this silencing. And it’s muzzling the students and teachers. I think we’re not doing the next generation a service by this.”
After this occurred, faculty petitioned to change the rules to permit the Faculty of Arts and Sciences to keep public-facing signs in their private workspaces—an effort that proved successful, allowing Ölveczky to put the sign back up, he said.
Harvard did not respond to a request for comment.
BU Earth and Environment Professor Nathan Phillips said the sign removal at Harvard is similar to a later policy enforcement effort at BU.
Over the past several years, BU administrators have repeatedly directed faculty and staff to remove pride flags from their office windows.
According to the university, these requests were attempts to enforce its Time, Place and Manner rules, outlined in both its Publications and Publicity Policy and Events and Demonstrations Policy, which prohibits “unattended placards, banners, or other signs,” unless attached to an approved location.
However, the requests were met with resistance, with some arguing it violated the university’s principles of free speech and expression.
Eventually, university officials clamped down and, over the most recent spring recess, removed the pride flags of those who refused to take them down themselves, sources told BINJ.news.
Phillips said he originally put his pride flag up in solidarity with his colleagues after learning they had faced pressure from the BU administration as early as August.
Around a week after he declined the university’s request to take it down, the university removed his flag, as well as others located at the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies offices at 704 Commonwealth Avenue and Professor Liz Bettini’s office in the Wheelock College of Education and Human Development.
University officials justified the decision in a “Frequently Asked Questions” article in BU Today—a publication run by the university’s Marketing and Communications Office—by claiming BU is making a greater effort to apply its longstanding, “content-neutral” signage policy more consistently across its three campuses.
However, Phillips argued that the university employed “selective enforcement,” as other flags remained hanging on campus, including an American flag and a flag for the Seattle Krakens, a professional ice hockey team.
In the weeks following the pride flag removals, community members retaliated and pressured the administration until BU President Melissa Gilliam announced in a university-wide email that she would temporarily pause enforcement of the policy.
Rachel Lapal Cavallario, BU’s vice president of public relations, wrote in an email to BINJ.news that the suggestion that the university was “singling out specific communities” is not true.
“Previous to the pause, university officials took the time and opportunity to ask people to relocate signs to permitted areas, such as interior office walls, before signage was taken down,” she wrote. “Due to this process and conversations, not all outward-facing signage came down at the exact same time.”
Cavallario wrote that the administration will continue to have conversations with the campus community to discuss the “complex issues” raised by the policy and its application.
Phillips said BU has grown more suppressive of speech in recent years.
In 2012, he hung a sign on his window promoting a divestment campaign from fossil fuels that was active in Greater Boston at the time. The sign was never taken down, he said.
In 2025, on the other hand, he said he put up several signs in support of pro-Palestinian student activists detained by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The BU administration kept removing them, he said.
BU’s way of achieving neutrality is by prohibiting all speech on office windows, Phillips said. But there are also ways to place some limits on protected speech while promoting diverse and opposing viewpoints on campus, he said.
“It’s like a muscle,” he said. “We have to exercise that freedom of speech, or else it will go away.”
The Boston College administration has also faced recent community backlash for its apparent restrictions on free speech and expression. Specifically, students have criticized the institution’s pre-approval policy for demonstrations.
Aiden Zhang-Mastrapa, a rising sophomore at BC, said he encountered challenges with the policy when trying to organize a protest against ICE.
The demonstration and protest request form asks for the organizers’ names and contact information, the proposed demonstration’s nature and purpose, anticipated security needs, plans for managing “disruptive behavior,” and anticipated final costs, as seen in a document obtained by BINJ.News.
Zhang-Mastrapa said he also had to report the exact language that would be used in chants and ran into issues with signage.
After he submitted the form, he corresponded extensively with BC administration, where they denied requests for certain locations for no given reason and repeatedly rescheduled a required meeting, he said.
By the time he met with administration, Zhang-Mastrapa said he had already decided to hold the protest off campus. The demonstration ultimately took place in February at Boyden Park, a parcel of public land near the Boston College MBTA stop and opposite the St. Ignatius Church, where an ICE vehicle showed up months prior.
Around 35 to 40 people turned up, which he said, for an individually thrown, off-campus protest at a school without a robust history of activism, he was “not angry at.” Still, he said, if it were on campus, it could have attracted a larger crowd and increased the visibility of the event.
“Throwing a protest at the school is not easy,” he said. “And I think the administration has very intentionally designed it to be that way.”
BC did not respond to a request for comment.
