The Quiet Crisis of Academic Deplatforming
Deplatforming, or censorship by internal or external sources of the accessibility to public events on campus, is alarmingly on the rise.
Deplatforming, or censorship by internal or external sources of the accessibility to public events on campus, is alarmingly on the rise.
In January 2025, a panel discussion at UC Berkeley, titled “Feminist and Queer Solidarities with Palestine”, organized by the gender and women’s studies department, came under fire from a faculty member for having an event description that challenged Israel’s claim of widespread sexual assault during the October 7th, 2023 attacks, although multiple news outlets, including Al Jazeera’s I-Unit have found insufficient evidence to support that claim.
First reported in Haaretz, emails leaked to the Israeli news outlet cited Berkeley law professor, Steven Davidoff Solomon, writing that the event represented a “disgustingly antisemitic new low, even at Berkeley,” to the university administrators. He further warned that this could imperil university funding and expose international students to visa revocations under the Trump administrations crackdown on Pro-Palestinian supporters. The University investigated and eventually concluded that they had “no legitimate ability to alter or cancel”, since it did not go against school policy, especially since the panel did not mandate any kind of student attendance. However, the administrators did remove the contentious event description from the event’s main page. After the decision, Solomon wrote an op-ed (not his first on apparent Antisemitism at Berkeley) titled “Mr. Trump, Investigate My Campus”.
In a dystopian political climate rife with attacks on the First Amendment and right to express political views freely, college campuses – which were always hotbeds of political activism – are being thrown into the spotlight even more than before. While protests may be front and center, a different, quieter type of censorship, like the example above, called “Deplatforming”, continues to grow on higher education campuses across the United States.
“Deplatforming is the successful censorship of, or the attempt to censor, campus events open to the public. Deplatforming can include disinviting speakers, canceling performances, taking down art exhibits, or preventing the showing of a film. It can include censorship or attempts at censorship that occurred either before or during an event, but not those that occurred after an event,” according to the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression. In early 2024, the nonpartisan advocacy organization released their "Campus Deplatforming Database”, chronicling attempted or successful deplatforming incidents on college campuses from 1998 to 2024. Although their website states that the data is self-reported, FIRE staffer Sean Stevens, who is also responsible for the maintenance of this database, said that most of these incidents are catalogued using media reports, student journalism and the letters that FIRE writes to higher education institutions when it believes that a violation of individual freedom or rights to expression have occurred. FIRE makes it clear that the data collected is still an undercount, with many censorship attempts likely flying under the radar despite their best efforts to catalogue them.
Campus deplatforming attempts have shot up post-pandemic, hitting a historic high of 172 incidents in 2024, with over half of those incidents resulting in successful censorship of artwork, commencement speeches, performances and others. For example, West Texas A&M University’s President banned a student group’s charity drag show in 2023 based on his own personal beliefs, calling them “derisive, divisive and demoralizing misogyny”. The ban remained in place all through 2024, preventing the show’s performance.
2025 has already seen 44 deplatforming attempts as of March 20th, which is when the database was last updated.
Roughly 95% of the deplatforming incidents came from sources that had a clear liberal or conservative political ideology and each party initiated a censorship attempt towards the other roughly the same number of times. Deplatforming attempts started by the left were successful half the time whereas the ones initiated by the right were successful one-third of the times.
To conclude that the “left censors more” from these raw numbers across more than 25 years would not carry the required nuance, before looking into how important yet contentious topics were handled by either side and what each considered offensive.
Here are the ten topics that faced the most deplatforming incidents from the left as well as the right. They are arranged from the most polarising topics (where the two sides differed significantly in their frequency of censorship) to the least polarising (where the two parties tried to censor the other with similar frequency).
The left tried to deplatform public events surrounding racial discourse nearly five times the amount that the right did. With race and most other topics, many of the deplatforming incidents were logged in FIRE’s database as compound topics – that is, as a combination of two or more topics. For example, race and immigration or race and sexuality often went together.
Analysis of all the incidents that had race as at least one topic revealed patterns of attempted censorship.
Left-initiated deplatforming attempts around race typically targeted speakers accused of racism or racially insensitive behavior. In many cases, students or faculty protested invitations extended to individuals who had made controversial statements about race, were involved in racially charged incidents, or were seen as representing policies or viewpoints that marginalized Black or Indigenous communities. For example, when Jared Taylor, media-dubbed white supremecist and self monikered “white advocate” and “racialist who believes in race-realism”, was invited to speak at Arizona State University in 2022, several student and outside groups called on university administrators to rescind his invite due to Taylor’s “white identity politics’. The university did not cave and Taylor spoke successfully.
On the other hand, right-initiated deplatforming around race centered on pushback against discussions of structural racism or white supremacy, often targeting speakers, faculty, or artists seen as promoting “divisive” or “anti-American” narratives, arguing that such content unfairly stigmatized white students or portrayed the U.S. in a negative light. For instance, in 2022, Daytona State College cancelled an art exhibition titled “Stranger Fruit” depicting Black mothers holding their children in lifeless poses to symbolize enduring maternal and familial grief in the face of racially motivated police brutality. The exhibition room’s HVAC system was cited as the reason for indefinite cancellation but three whistleblowers revealed that the school was worried about the politically charged nature of the exhibit, especially because of their small police training program.
When it comes to sexuality related deplatforming events, the right initiated them 2.5 times more than the left.
Right-wing deplatforming about sexuality revolved around drag performances, queer art, or sex education events and argued that such events are “inappropriate” or “immoral,” especially if they involve young audiences or are publicly funded. For example, the Purdue University Student Union Board planned to host an event called "Sex in the Dark", a sex education presentation that would allow students to ask anonymous questions to two "sex experts". However, administrators postponed the event after receiving complaints from another student group called Boiler Catholics that the event was "promoting premarital sex and hookup culture." The event does not appear to have been rescheduled.
Left-initiated deplatforming attempts involving sexuality often target events or speakers that are seen as promoting homophobia, transphobia, or exclusionary gender politics. In 2022, one such event led by students in Ohio State University called for the disinvitation of Patrick Geslinger, then CEO of intel, as commencement speaker, for his anti-LGBTQ views and support of campus organizations that forbid LGBTQ volunteers and staff.
As the Palestinian genocide continues, higher education has been rife with both Pro-Palestinian and Pro-Israel protests. This trend is also reflected in deplatforming events where each side had equally attempted to censor incidents related to Israel or Palestine.
Left-led deplatforming attempts related to Israel often emerge when the invited speakers are linked to pro-Israel military, political, or corporate institutions. In 2024, Yale Law School's chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine called on the university to cancel former IDF soldier, Ezra Grushko's speech because "the platforming of an IDF combatant recently returned from Israel's atrocities in Gaza makes many of us—especially Palestinian Arab, Muslim, Black, and brown students — feel physically and psychologically unsafe and unwelcome in our own school," and because he planned to share his "personal perspective" on fighting "terrorist organizations in Gaza" — statements that SJP considered Islamophobic and racist. Grushko spoke successfully.
Right-aligned protests against Israel/Palestine events usually object to pro-Palestinian or anti-Israel speakers, and believe those are threatening to Jewish students' safety. In recent events, conservative alumni and advocacy groups have pushed universities to cancel these events outright, and have criticized administrations for allowing platforms that challenge U.S. and Israeli foreign policy. At the University of North Texas this year, multiple state representatives wrote to the university demanding the cancellation of Associate Dean of Student Affairs, Nancy Stockdale's lecture titled "Palestinian Children and the Politics of Genocide," scheduled as part of a commemorative lecture series , because Stockdale used the term "genocide" in the lecture's title. Stockdale successfully presented her lecture on April 3rd.
On the map above, you can explore how each state deals with deplatforming events and whether the right or left is successful in its deplatforming attempts. The color of the state represents which ideology is receiving more censorship overall.
For instance, in California, 61% of deplatforming attempts initiated by the left are successful, which means that the majority of the time, the right-wing is being censored. To reiterate, the color of the state reflects which party is being censored more in that region.
The map reveals further nuance in the regional rate of success of deplatforming attempts. In states like Ohio and Utah, rate of successful censorship through deplatforming attempts is fairly similar whether it is initiated by the left or the right. However, in other states such as Louisiana, the divide is wide, with conservatives facing censorship more. Even though Louisiana is traditionally a red state, such patterns might indicate that campus poltical activism might not always reflect the state's political bend, further cementing higher education institutions as intersections of independent thought and activism, making it all the more important to protect the freedom of individual rights and expression exhibited there.
The data used for this project comes from the Campus Deplatforming Database published by the Freedom of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and contains censorship incidents at U.S. higher education institutions spanning from 1998 to 2025. A deplatforming incident is one where individuals or groups were denied platforms to express their views on college campuses.
I used web scraping techniques (Playwright and BeautifulSoup) to extract data from 69 pages of FIRE's embedded table, capturing both the summary information and detailed metadata from each incident's dedicated page. This technical approach allowed me to compile a comprehensive dataset in an analyzable form
The raw data required some cleaning and standardization. I added additional geographical information, corrected inconsistent topic classifications, and separated composite topics (like "Gender, Sexuality, Race") to enable accurate analysis. I also created a binary variable to distinguish between attempted and successful deplatforming efforts.
Approximately 5% of the database lacked clear political motivation classification and data interviews were conducted with FIRE staff to determine the basis for catch-all terms such as "Not applicable".
To identify patterns in campus censorship, I performed data analysis on topics targeted for deplatforming, political motivations behind censorship attempts, success rates, and institutional responses over time. I also manually read and annotated incidents that fell under Race, Sexuality and Israel-Palestine to accurately report on what each political side was trying to censor or was offended by. The visualizations were created using Datawrapper
It's worth noting that this dataset represents a conservative estimate of campus deplatforming incidents, as acknowledged in FIRE's methodology. The database primarily includes events documented through media reports, institutional correspondence, and student reporting, followed by FIRE's fact-checking procedures and at the time of this piece, had been updated on March 20th, 2025.