Nearly 30% of researchers in red states self censor – Survey

Almost one-third of university researchers in the United States based in Republican-controlled states where governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis or Texas’ Gregg Abbott have enacted laws restricting the teaching of “divisive topics” such as “racial or gender ideology”, immigration or climate change have reported self-censoring their work.

When set in the context of the total number of researchers surveyed across the 50 states in the US, 20% answered that in the past five years they “have avoided pursuing certain topics in my research, scholarship, or creative activity due to changes in state law or policy”.

These are among the findings contained in The Impact of State and Federal Policies on Academic Researchers: Findings from a National Survey, produced by New York City-based research in education and consulting firm Ithaka S+R, part of the same company, Ithaka, which includes the academic database and library JSTOR.

Researcher Dylan Ruediger, one of the study’s two co-authors, told University World News: “The United States is obviously still a very important centre of research and scholarship. So trends in what kind of research is fundable and possible in the US have ramifications for researchers all over the globe.

“What’s happening in the United States aligns with trends that we’re seeing in other countries. Academic freedom is a norm of many nations’ university systems,” he said. However, as the report’s findings show, it is also something that can be “more fragile than it sometimes appears”.

The report’s other co-author, researcher Chelsea McCracken, underscored the finding that “a large percentage of US researchers have changed their research agenda, have considered leaving the academy, are moving to different states for purposes of academic freedom, or moving to different countries.

“There are different percentages for each of these, but overall [the report shows] many researchers are impacted by the events that are happening in the US, both at the state and the federal level”.

Ithaka S+R’s findings “dovetail with our own, showing the impact of faculty censorial legislation and policy PEN America has been tracking for years”, Amy Reid, director of PEN America’s Freedom to Learn programme, wrote in an email to University World News.

“Our latest report, America’s Censored Campuses 2025: Expanding Web of Control, details how years of state legislation and policy, amplified by unprecedented moves by the federal government are stifling knowledge production across the country,” she said, referring to the various executive orders and actions against universities and their researchers by the administration of President Donald J Trump over the past 16 months.

“The Ithaka report provides valuable statistical support for the analysis in our report and the personal stories documented in the Snapshots,” wrote Reid, referring to a new PEN blog series that features stories of faculty’s experience of censorship in their teaching and research.

University World News reported in January that PEN America found that 50% of America’s 16.1 million post-secondary students study in states in which there is at least one law, or school, or state policy that restricts what can be taught. In 2025, more than 80 educational gag order bills were introduced into state legislatures.

A particularly egregious example singled out by PEN America is Ohio’s Senate Bill 1, which “mandates” that every course demonstrates “intellectual diversity while also forbidding even voluntary diversity, equity and inclusion training”.

Ithaka S+R surveyed 4,003 university instructors of record drawn randomly from a list provided by a vendor. “The sample is very robust and diverse across different states, different institution types, disciplines, job titles, roles and institution size,” explained McCracken.

A ‘broader climate’ of restrictions

According to the study, the deleterious impact of targeting “divisive topics”, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) and critical race theory (CRT), or banning research into climate change as in the case of Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Tennessee and Texas, where the Republican party dominates state politics, is felt most keenly in publicly funded universities.

Last week, as reported by University World News, the Texas Tech University system banned the teaching and research of SOGI, a neologism for “sexual orientation and gender ideology”.

Accordingly, 66% of respondents in public universities in these states reported that over the past five years their research has been impacted by such laws or policies.

However, the report also shows that almost four in 10 professors in private universities in these states report that they too have self-censored their research.

“Particularly at the state level, public institutions are regulated much more than are private institutions by state law. What you are seeing when you look at the 39% of private institutions that are having their research impacted is a spillover effect,” said Ruediger.

“There’s a broader climate of restrictions that is wider than the technical legal exposure of certain institutions. Public institutions are on the frontline, and they’re the people who are most exposed to consequences. But it’s creating a culture in which academics who are not subject to those laws are also changing their behaviour.”

According to Joan Scott, a long-time member of the American Association of University Professors’ (AAUP) Committee A on Academic Freedom, the AAUP’s research shows that in “states with divisive concepts legislation, faculty (and students) are avoiding controversial topics for fear of punishment in the form of reprimands or firing.

“The State of North Carolina is even considering bounties (financial payment incentives) to those who report violations of the ‘divisive concepts’ laws,” Scott wrote in an email.

The spillover is not confined to private universities in red states, the shorthand used to refer to Republican-led states where the governors and legislators strongly support Trump’s attacks on academic freedom, university autonomy and his efforts to ban DEI, CRT and other forms of critical inquiry.

Almost 30% of researchers in public universities in states that do not have divisive concept laws reported that in the past five years they had also felt the effect of out-of-state restrictive policies. Seventeen per cent of researchers in private universities in states without restrictive laws also answered that they had also been impacted by the effect of what could be the red states’ restrictive zeitgeist.

“Even if their individual institutions are not affected,” explained McCracken, “they [researchers] see that their colleagues in their discipline at other institutions in other states feel threatened and this impacts the extra-institutional aspects of the research enterprise.”

Such effects include, she said, “what can be published in journals, what takes place at conferences [and] which graduate students end up where. The research enterprise operates across state boundaries, so these impacts would be felt across state boundaries”.

Federal funding cuts

In the months after Trump returned to power in January 2025, there was almost a daily barrage of announcements of cuts to various federal funding agencies. Agencies such as the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Institute of Museum and Library Sciences and others were shuttered.

Over the first year of his second term, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) cancelled or suspended almost 8,000 grants. The rate of approval of new grants over this same period is approximately 75% lower than the average of the previous 10 years.

Eight per cent of respondents indicated that their grants had been cancelled, with the axe falling the hardest on research into LGBTQ persons, DEI, vaccination policy and global warming, says the report.

But five times that per cent – that is, 40% – of respondents reported a decrease in federal funding. Just under one quarter, 24%, “indicated that a federal grant programme to which they had applied or were considering applying had been cancelled.

“In some fields – especially those funded by the NIH, NSF, and the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) – more than 50 per cent of respondents reported federal policy changes had reduced funding opportunities in their fields.”

The report includes a figure listing 18 fields and the per cent of respondents indicating that federal government changes have resulted in decreased funding.

Given that 54.8% of researchers in the natural sciences reported the cancellation of or reductions to their grants, the fact that only 33.3% of English literature professors and 33.7% of fine arts professors reported reductions in their grants seems a relatively good news story for these humanities subjects.

However, as Ruediger explained, the lower numbers of English and fine arts professors reporting funding cuts are a function of the fact that “not a whole lot of federal funding goes into these fields”.

In monetary terms, he explained, the big cuts came from the NIH, NSF and USDA. Accordingly, 57.5% of researchers in agriculture reported having had their grants cancelled or substantially reduced, as did 50.8% in allied health, 50.6% in medicine, 54.8% in natural sciences and 52.7% in engineering.

According to Reid, “the fact that researchers in agriculture and engineering report negative consequence for their research shows that this isn’t just about faculty in the humanities and interdisciplinary programmes like American, African-American, or gender and sexuality studies”, as Trump has framed these government cuts in the many executive orders he has issued since returning to office.

Censorship is ‘contagious’

Ithaka S+R found that 10% of faculty working in states that restricted academic freedom and research sought to move to a more liberal state, while 6% were thinking of leaving the academy.

“Faculty have good reasons to be unhappy; politicians in states across the country are jumping on the bandwagon to censor higher education, and that means unacceptable limits on what can be researched and discussed on campus. In 2025 alone, eight states passed legislation to censor higher education for the first time.

“Censorship is contagious and, as it spreads, we can expect that the impact of Ithaka S+R documents, with faculty seeking to leave positions, states and even the US, will grow,” wrote Reid.

For her part, Scott pointed to Florida, the governor of which, Ron DeSantis, declared, after winning a second mandate in November 2022, that “Florida is where woke goes to die”.

“Faculty are fleeing the state if they can find other jobs. And if they can’t, they are trying to accommodate the law or find ways around it.

“The disturbing thing is that the university administrators in these states have caved to pressure, enforcing, rather than challenging, these draconian laws.”

A survey conducted last year by the AAUP of 800 professors in Georgia painted a dire picture.

Matthew Boedy, who teaches English at the University of North Georgia (Gainesville, 65 miles north-east of Atlanta) and is the president of the Georgia AAUP, told University World News that an AAUP study of universities in the South found that 20% of respondents applied for an academic position in another state in the two years prior to the survey.

More than half, 55%, said that “they would not recommend Georgia as a desirable place to work for colleagues from another state”. Twenty-three per cent said they planned on applying for a job in another state in the coming year.

“What these numbers tell me,” Boedy said, “is that a large segment of the population in public higher education is both unhappy with their current job but also with the larger circumstances that affect that job.

“Georgia reflects the South but also reflects a lot of GOP (Grand Old Party, the Republican Party’s moniker)-led states that are certainly trying to erase academic freedom,” he said.

Boedy also pointed out that Georgia is a founding member (along with Florida, Texas, North Carolina, South Carolina and Tennessee) of the new Commission for Public Higher Education (CPHE), a body created to replace the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges (SACSCOC), an independent not-for-profit accreditor; federal law requires that colleges and universities be accredited by a third-party body to be eligible to receive federal funds, including funds attached to students through federal financial aid.

In announcing the launch of the CPHE, DeSantis denounced the “monopoly of woke accreditation cartels”.

According to a comparative report from the University of South Carolina, the CPHE will not, as SACSCOC does, prioritise faculty authority over curriculum.

An example of why this is important is the replacement of Florida’s universities’ general education programmes with a single programme written in the state capital of Tallahassee and imposed by legislative fiat.

“No reputable accreditation agency would accept this, prompting the creation of one aligned with this political agenda,” Adriana Novoa, a Latin American history associate professor at the University of South Florida, is reported to have told the radio station WMAL.

As drafted, the CPHE does not provide clear protections for academic freedom. By contrast, SACSCOC provides explicit protections for academic freedom.

Boedy sums up the CPHE as “a purely partisan attack upon the independence of accreditation boards. They [governments that have been restricting academic freedom and passing laws against DEI and CRT] know how to work behind the scenes” to change the ecosphere in which professors and researchers flourish.

Academic freedom fears

The Ithaka S+R report supplies statistical support for Scott’s critique of university administrators’ mettle.

When asked if their unit leader advocated for their academic freedom, on a five-point scale (with five=Agree and three=Neither agree nor disagree), professors in states without restrictive laws or policies gave their chairs or unit heads a 4.23 rating, while those in states with restrictive laws rated their line officers at 4.12.

Provosts of colleges or heads of university divisions were rated lower: 4.01 and 3.86, respectively. Professors had even less faith in their institutions’ presidents to defend academic freedom; they were rated at 3.63 and 3.19, respectively.

Professors and researchers were scathing in their ratings of boards of regents or trustees of their institutions. Professors in states without restrictive laws rated them 3.14, while in states with restrictive laws these governing bodies were rated 2.62, well into the “somewhat disagree” bracket.

According to Rudeiger: “It is not surprising to see that in states with divisive concept laws, boards are not overwhelmingly trusted to protect academic freedom.

“In a number of states, the boards of governors have become highly politicised bodies that are appointed by the same [state] administrations that are ideologically aligned with divisive concepts of legislation.”