This year’s Banned Books Week (Oct. 5–11) comes at a moment when the threat of censorship is reaching alarming heights. According to a new report issued last week by PEN America, “Banned in the USA, 2024–2025,” there were 22,810 instances of book banning in U.S. public schools from 2021 to 2025. As the coordinator of Chicago Banned Books Week, I can see a growing climate of fear where even some librarians are wary of promoting banned books.

Ever since Banned Books Week was created by the American Library Association in 1982, higher education has mostly regarded it with a distant indifference. Those unfortunate librarians and schoolteachers had to deal with routine demands for book censorship. At colleges, for all of the threats to academic freedom, books seemed sacrosanct, and the primary danger was that students arrived on campus without being exposed to a diversity of literature.

Not anymore. The culture of book banning is everywhere in Trump’s America.

Of course, there have always been a few repressive colleges that banned books. In 2019, Franciscan University of Steubenville banned Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom because it speculated about the Virgin Mary’s sex life. After initially defending academic freedom, the president reversed course and demoted the chair of the English Department for including the book in a seminar and then ordered the campus “to immediately review and revise our existing policy on academic freedom to prevent future use of scandalous materials.”

In the past, demands for book banning on campus were limited to a few sectarian colleges, but today the conservative movement wants every college to obey its dogmatic demands to ban the “wrong” ideas about diversity, gender and politics.

When Republican politicians in Florida took over the New College, banned the Gender and Diversity Center, and threw its library in the trash, conservatives celebrated the book banning. Gov. Ron DeSantis’s press secretary posted on X, “Putting gender studies books in the garbage? Great job, @NewCollegeofFL.”

So far, the worst government repression has occurred at military academies under the direct control of the Trump regime. At the U.S. Naval Academy earlier this year, 381 books were purged from the library, including I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou and How to Be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi. After a public outcry about the censorship, eventually 20 books were censored for wrongthink and the rest were put back on the shelves.

It should be shocking that dozens of books are being banned by military colleges; instead, it’s treated as a victory compared to the vastly worse censorship that the Trump administration wants to impose. The Trump executive orders used to justify repression at military colleges are not limited to those institutions, and the Trump regime wants to apply these principles of censorship to every college in America.

It’s not just books in campus libraries that are threatened by censorship. The curriculum is a top target of conservatives with “divisive concepts” bans and attacks on course assignments.

Graham Parsons, a professor of philosophy at the United States Military Academy at West Point, resigned his position to protest the Trump administration’s censorship, writing that “department leaders forced professors to remove from their courses works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and other women and men of color.”

In 2023, Amichai Chikli, Israel’s minister of diaspora affairs and combating antisemitism, wrote to Princeton’s top administrators demanding that they “act immediately” to ban the book The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability by Jasbir Puar from a class.

There has been a wave of new right-wing legislative proposals passed in several states that include a demand to publish syllabi for all courses. The American Jewish Congress has proposed a federal “Syllabus Transparency Act”  with the aim of eliminating “materials that serve to induce bias against Jews and indoctrinate students with hate.” The purpose of requiring public, searchable syllabi is to make it easier to identify controversial readings in classes so that they can be challenged or professors can be scared away from assigning them.

Even without syllabus laws, colleges can impose course audits aimed at banning books that advocate disapproved ideas. Texas A&M University illegally dismissed a professor for supposedly violating the authoritarian Trump administration decrees about what ideas about gender identity are permitted in classes. The university’s president, a retired four-star general who fired the professor and removed two administrators, was forced out for being too liberal. The Texas A&M Board of Regents announced that it “will not tolerate actions that damage the reputation of our institutions” and required the chancellor to “audit every course and ensure full compliance with all applicable laws.”

The Trump administration last week asked nine universities to sign a “Compact for Academic Excellence in Higher Education,” which includes among its many terrible ideas a requirement for “transforming or abolishing institutional units that purposefully … belittle … conservative ideas.” Those poor, oppressed conservatives, the true disadvantaged minority that controls all of the federal government and most states, will be protected from criticism of their political beliefs. And it seems likely that assigning books that are deemed to “belittle” conservatives would be the clearest basis for “abolishing” departments and other units deemed guilty of wrongthink.

Of course, no sane university president would ever sign this vile compact, which egregiously violates academic freedom and imposes a long list of requirements that can result in a complete cutoff of federal funds for a single alleged violation. But the compact is not a serious offer; it’s a threat designed to intimidate all colleges into suppressing academic freedom. Right now, the compact is a carrot offered to colleges that ban those books and people who “belittle” conservatives, but soon there will be a stick used to enforce these plans.

Yet there are reasons for hope. Book banning is an example of widespread public support for free speech absolutism. Polls have consistently shown that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose book banning, and advocates for free expression need to use the fight against book bans as a model for battling the Trump regime’s repression.

Today, higher education is increasingly recognizing the common cause shared with other educators (including librarians). Banned Books Week should be the impetus for a united front for expression. We need to build an alliance that crosses all boundaries and realize that unless we all stand together—secular and religious, private and public, military and civilian, leftists and conservatives, higher education and K–12, books and speakers, librarians and professors, students and teachers—to defend everyone against censorship, we will all be vulnerable to repression.