The president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, Greg Lukianoff, recently offered a blunt assessment of last year’s attacks on academia: “2025 was the worst year for campus censorship in decades” and “the federal government and state governments, using the levers of state power, are now the leading forces behind attempts to punish campus speech.” FIRE counted 114 individual cases in 2025 involving demands by politicians for campus censorship—more than the previous 24 years combined.

So you might imagine that FIRE is reconsidering its past enthusiasm for political control over higher education. But Lukianoff refuses to let reality change his mind: “That brings us to the hard truth nobody wants to say out loud: Higher education really does need reform, and some of that reform will have to involve the federal government and state governments because the government helped build the incentive structure that produced this mess, and because public universities are state actors.” Rather than a hard truth, I’d call this a self-deluding lie told to deny FIRE’s small role in causing part of the current free speech disaster inflicted by the right.

FIRE bears some responsibility for creating and encouraging this monster of political intrusion. For years, FIRE has been denouncing academia as a cesspool of left-wing censorship and demanding that politicians step in to do something about it. And now that politicians have intervened against the left-wing enemy FIRE kept blaming and kept demanding that they do something to destroy, Lukianoff is disclaiming any responsibility for this monster he helped to build. The real problem, Dr. Frankenstein tells us, is that the leftist mob angered the monster with their DEI slogans.

We shouldn’t exaggerate FIRE’s role here. I agree with 99.9 percent of all the critiques FIRE made about repression by colleges, and they were right to criticize campus censorship, even if the backlash inspired worse censorship. FIRE was only one voice among many conservative groups urging government actions, and unlike the far-right organizations that have applauded this censorship, FIRE has spoken out forcefully against Republican repression and even sued Florida over it. But the false narrative that FIRE spread and Lukianoff continues to advocate—that only “the on-campus left” endangered free speech within higher education—became the justification for external repression.

Lukianoff’s naïve faith in politicians to solve campus censorship was an understandable mistake, motivated by the slow progress of FIRE criticizing (and suing) colleges individually, made in ignorance of how dangerous government power could be, and believing that FIRE could persuade legislators to change their worst ideas.

But when Lukianoff continues to make this mistake of trusting government intrusion, it’s appalling. Has he learned nothing from what happened this past year? How much more repression than the worst year for censorship in FIRE’s recorded history does it take for Lukianoff to question FIRE’s obvious error of calling for the government to control higher education?

I don’t know what Lukianoff means by claiming that government control over colleges is necessary because “the government helped build the incentive structure that produced this mess.” Government can and must fund higher education without demanding censorship, just as it needs to fund public libraries, science, welfare programs, medical care and everything else without making repression a condition of its money.

Lukianoff correctly recognizes the danger of government power: “Government can threaten funding, immigration status, research grants, and institutional survival itself.” But that’s a reason to oppose government control of colleges, not to demand more of it in the name of reform.

Even if politicians were the obedient followers of FIRE’s commands, it’s hard to see much value in any of FIRE’s feeble legislative accomplishments. Those bans on campus speech zones? Administrators obeying their political rulers simply turned the entire campus into a speech zone with repressive time, place and manner rules. There’s no evidence that any law supported by FIRE has had a long-term beneficial impact on campus free speech. And training politicians to exert control over colleges whenever they perceive a problem has opened a Pandora’s box that cannot be controlled.

FIRE has done enormous good to promote free expression on college campuses in the 21st century by shaming and suing universities that violate it. But the allure of a government cure for campus censorship proved too much even for a libertarian group.

It’s not enough for Lukianoff and FIRE to have benevolent motives and good goals in seeking to end campus censorship. They also have to use the right methods to achieve their aims. Government control can’t be the tool used to pursue better policies—especially when the goal is to defeat censorship.

Other groups have witnessed the evils of the Trump administration and changed their tune about political control. Heterodox Academy hired FIRE’s former legislative director, Joe Cohn, in 2024 to head up a new policy team with its own legislative agenda, and in the first days of the new Trump administration Heterodox Academy wrote a letter to Trump, praising how he “rightly championed free speech on college campuses.”

To its credit, Heterodox Academy last fall quickly made a sharp U-turn. It decided to eliminate its policy approach and pursue reforms the right way: by persuading colleges to adopt changes rather than asking politicians to force them on higher education.

Perhaps if FIRE gave up on the false dream of campus utopias imposed by our glorious political leaders, it could focus on real ways to improve free expression: tenure, shared governance, the right to organize and similar measures that limit administrative power. FIRE could ask colleges to adopt the core policies and procedures of the AAUP.

FIRE’s legislative team is still essential—to fight against all of the terrible laws that FIRE’s Republican friends have been proposing and passing, and to propose new laws that limit political interference in higher education and stop government censorship.

In rare circumstances legislative intervention can be useful, when it’s necessary to restore basic rights that the courts have overturned. The Student Press Law Center’s New Voices legislation protects student press rights that the Supreme Court eliminated.

But real reform is difficult. It requires years of work, long-term education to change hearts and minds, and policies and practices. Government-imposed “reform” is a menace that can’t be controlled, one that fails to create the true conditions for improving higher education and has the capacity for unprecedented destruction and repression that we have all witnessed.

No credible advocate of free expression can look at the torrent of government censorship in the past year and proudly declare that now we need more government action to liberate higher education. Perhaps Lukianoff will reconsider FIRE’s plans in light of its own ominous data and finally admit the hard truth about the monster of government control.