Today is Constitution Day, marking the Sept. 17, 1787, signing of the Constitution by the 39 delegates at the Constitutional Convention who had written its words. And 238 years later, we face the worst assault on the constitutional rights protecting academic freedom in all of American history. In less than nine months, Donald Trump’s administration has engaged in more unconstitutional actions attacking free expression in higher education than all of the 44 previous presidents combined.

A 2005 federal law (of dubious constitutionality, because it compels speech) requires all colleges receiving federal funds to hold an educational activity on this day, so it’s a useful moment to consider these threats to constitutional rights of academic freedom. So, with the Illinois conference of the American Association of University Professors, Project Censored and the Park Center for Independent Media at Ithaca College, I’ve organized a webinar I’m moderating on Sept. 17, 2025, at 4 p.m. Eastern on “Higher Education in Crisis: Academic Freedom and the Constitution” (zoom link to join).

The webinar will be introduced by Mickey Huff of Project Censored and the Park Center and will feature University of Chicago law professor Tom Ginsburg, faculty director of the Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, and Sarah McLaughlin, senior scholar of global expression at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression and the author of Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech.

The unconstitutional actions currently endangering academic freedom are so numerous and extensive that a full accounting of them would require dozens of columns. Inside Higher Ed maintains a database of lawsuits against the Trump administration. While some litigation (including by Harvard) has been successful, I certainly don’t trust a right-wing Supreme Court to correctly interpret the Constitution and prohibit Trump from violating fundamental rights. We need to speak out on Constitution Day about how the right to academic freedom is under attack.

Most of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional attacks on colleges have violated three provisions: the First Amendment right to free speech, the Fifth Amendment right to due process and protection from arbitrary government penalties, and the separation of powers provisions that give Congress, not the executive branch, authority to make laws and allocate federal funding.

Trump’s executive orders have been one powerful tool of repression, including Executive Order 14151 (ending all DEI and environmental justice programs and support across the federal government). Other executive branch orders have imposed similar repression, such as the Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter declaring DEI and similar programs a form of racial discrimination under Title VI that must be prohibited.

Money is a major part of the Trump regime’s methods to suppress free expression on campus. As a federal court noted when ruling in favor of Harvard, the Trump administration has used antisemitism as an excuse to target higher education institutions deemed to have disfavored views. The withholding of allocated federal funds is unconstitutional because it violates the due process required under Title VI before any funds are cut, because it is done to target universities based on the perception of them as places where critics of the government are harbored and because the Trump administration is demanding restrictions on protected free speech as a condition of restoring funding.

The removal of funding is also unconstitutional because it violates the separation of powers giving Congress the authority to establish the budget for the government, and it asserts that the executive branch has the power to overrule laws passed by Congress. The Trump administration recently rescinded $350 million in grants to minority-serving institutions, overruling what Congress had allocated because they claimed these long-standing grants violated the Constitution—even though the Supreme Court has never held this to be the case.

The Trump administration is also abusing its executive branch power in other areas, most notably immigration, also to target free expression on campus. America is now imitating the authoritarian regimes that McLaughlin warns about in her book, seeking to silence dissent and punish foreign scholars who hold ideas disliked by the Trump administration.

This is the global component of the Trump administration’s unconstitutional war on academic freedom. It’s a violation of the Constitution because the First Amendment is not a right of citizens, it is a restriction on government power, and therefore freedom of speech applies with equal force to noncitizens. When the Trump regime detains and deports legal residents from foreign lands because of their protected speech, it is a clear violation of the First Amendment.

Some unconstitutional attacks on colleges are made with the cooperation of Congress, such as the (newly expanded) endowment tax, which I argued was unconstitutional because it subjected Trump’s perceived political enemies to a special tax. The most powerful forms of repression come from the combination of executive orders, state legislation and obedience by colleges that adopt policies imposing these limits.

One example is the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s 2016 “Working Definition of Antisemitism,” which the Trump administration decreed as the definition of antisemitism. Many states have passed laws imposing this definition, but in 2024, a federal district court judge in Texas ruled that the state’s adoption of the IHRA definition was “likely unconstitutional” because it targets political views as inherently bigoted. Many organizations have challenged the IHRA definition because it unconstitutionally limits free expression.

Demands from politicians for repression—and the willingness of colleges to obey—are only growing. The assassination of Charlie Kirk has sparked a shockingly large number of suspensions and firings of Kirk’s critics in just one week, far exceeding even the awful violations of academic freedom that happened after the murder of George Floyd or the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11. Attorney General Pam Bondi declared this week that the government will “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

The terrible repression of colleges by the federal government under Trump has obscured another dangerous fact: In Republican-controlled states, we are witnessing some of the worst state legislation against academic freedom ever enacted. In state after state, massive repression is becoming the norm. An analysis by PEN America found 22 laws in 16 states enacted in the past year to restrict free expression on campus, with even more passed in the previous few years.

Many of these laws mirror the Trump administration efforts to ban DEI and punish alleged antisemitism, but some states were innovators in suppressing academic freedom, such as Florida with its Stop WOKE Act. While public colleges have always violated academic freedom at times, and state legislators sometimes influenced these repressive measures with the implicit threat of funding cuts, actual legislation imposing restrictions on free speech was fairly rare.

Nothing like the current wave of state laws targeting academic freedom has ever been witnessed in America before. Nothing like the current wave of executive orders and executive actions withholding funds to target higher education and demand censorship has ever happened in America.

These attacks on campus freedoms clearly violate the constitutional rights protecting due process and free speech, and what the Supreme Court has ruled is the right of academic freedom as “a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.”