For years, the threat to free speech on American campuses was an inside job — a crisis defined by rows of administrators better suited to a daycare than a university, and crowds of activist students holding up placards, eager to police “wrongthink” and silence dissent.
But as 2025 became a record-breaking year for campus censorship in the USA, a new player has emerged: the state.
With the federal government beginning to fight fire with fire (using funding freezes and visa revocations to ensure ideological enforcement), many reformers have come to believe that the only way to save the “marketplace of ideas” is through top-down government intervention.
Americans should think again. This looks a lot like the “solution” we have attempted here in Britain that has spectacularly backfired, as state intervention often does. We have inadvertently handed our censors a more effective mask: the blank cheque of “safeguarding.”
This year, the UK officially began enforcing the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, a law aimed at establishing administrative accountability through mechanisms including a Free Speech Director at the Office for Students and a complaints system allowing students to sue universities for censorship. The law has already become a paper tiger since the Labour government paused the essential scheme that would allow students to hold these institutions accountable, creating a regulatory vacuum that administrators have been all too happy to fill.
Look no further than the University of Bristol, where this month the Student Union was referred to the Charity Commission — the UK’s national regulator for non-profits. In an unprecedented move, the Union’s Board of Trustees unilaterally overruled a democratic student vote to allow alumni and the wider community into societies and clubs. Their excuse? A “safeguarding” risk.
Apparently, 20-year-old adults are now so fragile that associating with a 25-year-old alumnus constitutes a “risk” that only a team of bureaucrats in bubble wrap can mitigate.
While some might see a referral to a watchdog as the system “working,” it is actually a clear sign of its failure: a student's right to associate should be protected by clear laws and simple democratic votes. Instead, because the government paused the complaints scheme, students are forced to navigate a bureaucratic maze and appeal to a federal-level regulator just to have their votes recognised.
It is the ultimate administrative Catch-22: the university insists it is safeguarding students whilst using every rule in the book to silence them. When the only way to be heard is to threaten an institution’s legal status, free speech on campus has no local enforcement left.
At Bristol, when students tried to bring a “Motion of Censure” against the Trustees for their overrule, it was blocked by a committee claiming that the move was against what they interpreted as the rules — arguing that a Censure could only be brought against an individual, not a group — effectively making the Board of Trustees an untouchable ruling class. The bureaucrats decided that criticising them was a step too far.
In Britain, clearly, safety isn’t the actual concern — it’s instead seen as a new legal loophole for censorship.
Americans, who are usually a mere 3-5 years behind UK regulatory trends, should take care not to dismiss this campus protectionism as a distant curiosity.
We see it in the proliferation of campus "Stasi-style" reporting that relies on subjective definitions of harm to clamp down on protected speech. We see it in the purging of professors for their social media posts. Just as in Bristol, these mechanisms don’t “safeguard” students’ rights — they merely ensure that only certain opinions are circulated.
But Americans are seeing this approach to safeguarding from the federal level too as the Trump administration threatens to revoke funding from schools that don’t align with the administration’s values, and to revoke visas from students who the government considers a threat.
Americans must be wary of this British “solution.” When you invite the state onto campus to protect free speech, you’re more likely to create a new set of shackles.
No claims to safety or national interests can justify the government overriding the individual rights of adults. These students are old enough to vote, serve in the military, and pay taxes — they are most certainly old enough to decide who joins their university chess club or political society without an administrative risk assessment.
We are not institutional liabilities to be managed. We are adults. It’s time to take off the bubble wrap and let the marketplace of ideas breathe once again.
Samiksha is the president of the University College London Libertarian Society and a Young Voices contributor. You can find her work on YouTube, Instagram and Substack at Samiksha’s State of the Debate, where she discusses culture, politics, and economics.
