Updated April 14, 2025 at 18:00 PM ET
Being openly conservative at a liberal university comes with certain hazards, according to Miguel Muniz and Martin Bertao.
They are the incoming and outgoing presidents of the University of California Berkeley College Republicans and say they face harassment whenever they set up a table on campus.
"We're called fascist. We're yelled at. We're spit at," Muniz says, adding that verbal attacks are a constant. "You're not always going to have someone pushing you."
Bertao says that since President Trump began his second term, members are more willing to speak their minds and more people show up for tabling — a boost for conservative views at Berkeley.
"A university is supposed to be a place where you go and diversify your thoughts and beliefs," says Bertao, "And I think having a good conservative voice on our college campuses, which has been missing for, I would say, decades here, is extremely important to our next generation."
When President Trump was preparing to run for office again, he said that institutions of higher education are "turning our students into communists, terrorists, and sympathizers of many, many different dimensions." On the campaign trail, he promised to "deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again."
His administration has reached deep into universities, threatening to withhold hundreds of millions of dollars in federal funding from elite schools like Cornell, Harvard, Northwestern, and Princeton. The Department of Education is investigating dozens of institutions for alleged antisemitism, and dozens more for partnering with a nonprofit that helps some underrepresented racial groups pursue doctoral degrees in business. And, the administration has detained and questioned the legal status of student activists who have protested Israel's actions in Gaza, like Mahmoud Khalil at Columbia, Rumeysa Öztürk at Tufts, and Momodou Taal at Cornell. All of this has left critics asking if freedom of speech at universities is fading.
"It didn't just magically flip a switch"
Some conservatives say Trump's election has provoked a backlash on campus. Kristan Hawkins, president of the anti-abortion rights group Students For Life, says college administrators have thrown up bureaucratic roadblocks that stymie her speaking engagements, like requiring event insurance or billing her group for security.
"They understand that we certainly should have a right to speak on campus, but they can make it as difficult or as easy as they wish," Hawkins says.
A member of Students For Life at Florida International University, Mia Akins, says since Trump won, going out and tabling on campus has been tense.
"Because of the election outcome, there was more animosity towards us," Akins says. "Just because Trump got in office and he signed an executive order, it didn't just magically flip a switch where all of a sudden pro-lifers have the upper hand."
Still, Hawkins notes that anti-abortion activists currently don't have to worry about the FACE Act, which prohibits threats, obstruction and property damage intended to interfere with reproductive health care services, because the Trump administration has limited enforcement of the law.
For the Berkeley College Republicans, the election is not a sea change. They say people still spit or curse at them while handing out fliers on campus.
"You don't get representation from the school. The school doesn't put out rhetoric defending you, your beliefs, or your own safety," Muniz says.
He adds: "The main thing that's allowed us to be free in our speech is the legal action that the university knows that we will take, if we're not treated fairly."
UC Berkeley spokesperson Dan Mogulof said the university defends the full diversity of student perspectives and that the College Republicans were "the only student organization that has been specially defended by the chancellor" this academic year.
Keeping quiet
It's not only conservatives who have thought they could be shunned for expressing certain beliefs at institutions of higher learning, even before the current Trump administration.
Nicholas, a professor in West Virginia, describes himself — and the campus where he works — as progressive.
NPR is identifying him by his first name because he is worried about blowback from his employer and colleagues for expressing opinions that he normally keeps to himself. Take for example, his views on transgender athletes.
"Although I'm fully supportive of transgender rights, I do think that there's a difference that needs to be considered more carefully when it comes to sports," he says.
And, though he is a gun owner, he has avoided speaking up in debates about the Second Amendment.
"I didn't think I would be fired. But did I think I would lose friends or be diminished in some way in the eyes of colleagues? Yes," he said. "I was concerned that there could be lost opportunities."
A national survey conducted in 2024, the year before Trump returned to the White House, by the nonprofit Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, or FIRE, found Nicholas in good company. FIRE described an atmosphere of self-censorship among some college faculty, with more than a quarter feeling "unable to speak freely for fear of how students, administrators, or other faculty would respond." Forty percent of faculty said they worry "about damaging their reputations because someone misunderstands something they have said or done."
Nicholas says in recent months he has felt freer to tell his friends and colleagues how he really feels, though he's not sure if the election played a role. He only just discovered that some of his friends share his opinions about transgender athletes.
However, he says the fear of being shunned is different from what he sees as more direct, political threats to free speech from the government, such as visa revocations, detentions and planned deportations of international students on college campuses.
"That's more of a very literal policing function," he says. "We are very much in frightening territory."
He's referring to people like Mahmoud Khalil, a pro-Palestinian student activist at Columbia University and green-card holder, who was detained last month after Secretary of State Marco Rubio alleged he had participated in "antisemitic protests and disruptive activities." A Louisiana immigration judge said last Friday that Khalil can be deported, though his lawyers have said they will appeal the ruling.
At the University of Texas-Austin, one of many campuses rocked by protests and arrests of demonstrators over the war in Gaza, two student activists say they are feeling a chilling effect.
Elijah Kahlenberg, a Jewish American activist and the founder and current president of Atidna International, which hosts spaces where students of different backgrounds can discuss the conflict, says Palestinian, Arab and Muslim students have recently hesitated to attend.
"They are afraid," Kahlenberg says. "They don't want to come to these spaces."
Ammer Qaddumi, who was arrested and suspended last year for his role in the protests at UT Austin, says he would no longer feel safe leading a demonstration on campus. Last year, he says, he felt that he could speak publicly.
"There was some sort of safety net. There was some sort of rule of law that was going to protect me and my peers," he says.
Academic freedom
In addition to shifting the window of acceptable speech on campus, the Trump administration has reached for universities' purse strings to fulfill its agenda.
Elite schools in particular face large funding pauses — more than $1 billion at Cornell, nearly $800 million at Northwestern — while the Department of Education investigates those universities and dozens more.
Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber called such cuts "the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s" in an essay for The Atlantic. In an interview with NPR's All Things Considered, he said that events at Columbia, where the government dangled funds for scientific research to force change at an unrelated department, represent a threat to academic freedom.
"It will compromise things that are fundamental to the excellence of American universities and that are really integral to the pursuit of knowledge and the strength of our society," Eisgruber said.
The scholar and historian Ibram X. Kendi says watching researchers lose support has felt devastatingly familiar.
Kendi, the author of How to Be an Antiracist, has held immense sway and fielded intense criticism in recent years in the debate over racism in America, and now sees other areas of study coming under attack too.
"What has actually shifted for me has been the unfortunate truth of witnessing other people who aren't necessarily studying racism having their opportunities, their resources, their platforms rolled back and eliminated," he says.
His field has been a particular focus of the administration's wrath. The president has singled out diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as tools that divide rather than unite Americans of different races. Opponents of DEI charge that these programs put diversity before merit, whereas Kendi sees the roots of their opposition in a white supremacist trope that diversity "was about harming white people, even seeking to carry out a genocide of white people."
Kendi believes the administration is trying to eliminate academic freedom.
"Academic freedom is the child of free speech," he says. "We need to freely study the problems of society, to be able to come up with evidence-based solutions that can be presented to elected officials that can actually help humanity. And instead, we'll have elected officials creating solutions that satiate constituents and tell them this solution is going to help them, when in fact it ultimately harms them."
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