Oklahoma’s governor just signed an executive order barring most of the state’s public colleges from offering tenure to professors. School administrators can secretly record classes under a new University of North Carolina policy. Nervous about violating restrictions on speaking about racial issues, officials at Florida A&M, a historically Black college, were instructing students to remove the word “Black” from Black History Month flyers. (University higher-ups later said that putting that word on those flyers was legal.) Texas A&M officials told a professor that he couldn’t assign some writings from Plato for one of his classes.
This is American higher education in red states in 2026. What’s captured the most national attention has been the Trump administration’s authoritarian attempts to dominate elite private colleges, such as Harvard, and public universities in blue states like UCLA. The policies that the administration is trying to impose on blue-state colleges and private schools, such as strict limits on diversity and inclusion efforts, were already enacted years ago by Republican legislators and governors in red states.
Meanwhile, perhaps emboldened by what Trump is doing, the red states are going much further. They are attempting to destroy higher education as we know it. This assault on higher education is another indication of the radicalism of today’s Republican Party. What’s even more alarming is that most of these education moves in red states are happening without any involvement from Trump or his aides. The fascist Republicans aren’t just the ones in the White House.
Republicans have long been wary of universities and particularly professors. Ronald Reagan rose in California politics, more than five decades ago, in part by casting the University of California at Berkeley as a hotbed for radicalism. But conservatives had mostly left universities alone. The 2020 George Floyd protests were a turning point. Young people in the streets across the country declaring that America still has a racism problem resulted in a slew of red-state restrictions on the teaching of race and LGBT issues in both K-12 and college education.
Now it’s getting even worse. Governors and state legislators in red states have gradually stacked universities’ boards and administrations with their appointees, many of whom are ex-Republican politicos with little experience in higher education. These appointees are carrying out a similar playbook across the South, Great Plains, and Mountain West. African American studies and other racial and ethnic programs, women’s and gender studies, and sociology departments, in particular, are being cut or downsized. Faculty are being forced to post their syllabi online or otherwise make them public, to make it easier for conservative activists to blast universities for assigning books that Republicans disagree with. Schools are allowing and at times encouraging students to record lectures, so that faculty can be shamed and potentially fired if they say something perceived as too liberal. University administrators are increasingly reviewing what professors plan to teach in their courses and blocking some lessons.
Republican officials and their appointees have three motives. First, they don’t want students learning ideas that might undermine Republican Party principles. Sociology and Black studies classes help explain why the United States still has deep racial inequality, decades after official segregation ended. Those fields question the idea that America is a post-racial society. Gender and women’s studies courses analyze and critique traditional norms around sexuality and gender.
These are not Democratic Party ideas. In some cases, they are just facts. The persistence of racial discrimination and inequality in the U.S. is extremely well documented. In other cases, these are ideas or theories—the same kind of exploration that happens in economics, political science, history, and other disciplines too. But because gender fluidity and other such ideas are more aligned with the Democrats, GOP officials want to ban them from being taught at all.
Second, Republicans want professors to quit or be fired. In red states, most politicians are Republicans, and elites in business and other fields are often conservative themselves or don’t criticize GOP leaders for fear of losing funding or otherwise being punished.
That leaves professors as the most powerful, and at times only, critics of GOP lawmakers. Professors have expertise on policy issues. Their degrees and jobs confer status and authority. So news organizations quote them. Their social posts generate attention. And because Republican politicians these days so often choose policies that contradict the most sound data, science, research, and other evidence on a given issue, academics often end up disagreeing with red-state politicians.
There is a racial and gender dynamic here too. Women, African Americans, and particularly Black women struggle to win actual elective offices in red states. But academia provides them a perch to affect politics. Republicans could accept that it’s a free country, and one that generally respects academic freedom. Or, imagine … they could actually adjust their policies to acknowledge the wisdom of academics or other experts. Instead, Republicans have chosen a third course: intimidation. Creating a surveillance regime against professors is designed to make them either quit and move to blue states or conform and teach only ideas that Republicans agree with. This is despicable.
And professors have been fired in Oklahoma and Texas for allegedly violating vague rules about teachings on gender and sexuality. That will make other faculty members gun-shy, which is exactly what GOP lawmakers want.
“People are generally terrified because it’s so haphazard,” Florida International University sociologist Zachary Levenson said in a recent interview. “This isn’t about targeting the professors that you would expect them to target. It’s about the randomness; it’s the stochastic nature of this authoritarian project.”
Third, these Republicans want to remake college campuses. In many red states, college campuses are among the most liberal spaces around. That’s not because university presidents or professors are mandating that everyone read Barack Obama’s speeches every day. Rather, it’s because younger people tend to lean left, as do academics. University faculty and students are often people of color, who tend to vote for Democrats. And for many people, college is the first time they are exposed to political activism and encouraged to participate in it.
So a red-state college campus is a place where Republican politicians might get booed or at least draw fairly small crowds, while liberal causes such as opposing Israel’s actions in Gaza and Democratic politicians are celebrated. Conservative students and faculty don’t feel comfortable offering political opinions that are really bigotry—such as their opposition to greater rights and freedoms for LBGTQ people.
The idea that some spaces politically lean one way or the other is part of a free society. I don’t expect white evangelical churches or the Goldman Sachs boardroom to be filled with social democrats like me. But red-state Republicans can’t accept a space that they can’t dominate. So the officials they put in charge of campuses are limiting or outright banning publications and organizations that cater to minority students, while trying to increase the number of male students and Republican professors on campus. In Florida, Governor Ron DeSantis and his allies literally changed all of the policies and forced out the faculty at one school to make it more conservative.
You might think it’s not a crisis, or even that it’s a reasonable small-d democratic outcome that red states have more conservative colleges. You’re wrong. Many of the states with the largest Black populations are in red America. It is distressing that Black studies and even Black History Month celebrations are being eroded in those states, in particular. You shouldn’t have to leave your home state for a blue one to have a full education, including sociology and gender studies classes.
And if you care about democracy, you have to care about what’s happening at these public colleges in red states. A hallmark of antidemocratic authoritarian rule is restricting education and cracking down on universities. That’s what happened in the Jim Crow South generations ago. It’s what’s happening in countries abroad like Hungary right now.
Oklahoma Governor Kevin Stitt, Texas’s Greg Abbott, Desantis, and other GOP governors aren’t usually cast as the leading enemies of democracy and liberalism in the way that Trump and his top aides are. But while Trump is often constrained by courts and Congress, red-state governors and legislators have virtually unlimited authority. They have read the fascist playbook on higher education and are now enacting it. This is terrible news for the 40 percent of Americans, myself included, who live in red America.
