A new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) warns that U.S. higher education faces mounting threats to academic freedom as politically appointed governing boards play an increasingly interventionist role on public university campuses. The analysis argues that board overreach—combined with state-level legislation and federal actions under the Trump administration—risks reshaping colleges and universities around ideological demands rather than academic standards.
The report, How University Governing Boards Can Protect the Independence of Colleges and Universities, details how board decisions in several states have interfered with curriculum development, weakened tenure protections, and restricted faculty speech. CAP frames these efforts as part of a broader national trend that undermines principles long considered essential to U.S. research and teaching. As the authors write, “The United States is facing unprecedented threats to higher education teaching and research—including from the executive branch unilaterally canceling research grants and contracts for political purposes, state legislation banning the teaching of certain topics, and university governing boards increasingly acting in the interest of elected political figures.”
The report situates contemporary U.S. developments within the global context of authoritarian movements that have systematically curtailed university autonomy. It points to Turkey—where the government used a failed coup as justification to “force the resignation of more than 1,500 university deans”—and Hungary, where the ruling party “shut down master’s degree programs in gender studies and forced a private research university to relocate.” CAP argues these examples demonstrate how quickly academic independence collapses when political actors control university systems.
While the authors stress that the U.S. is not yet at this point, they warn that several states have moved in a similar direction. In Virginia, boards at George Mason University and Virginia Commonwealth University blocked new general education requirements on race and diversity after the governor requested to review course syllabi. In Indiana, lawmakers added “an ‘intellectual diversity’ requirement” to post-tenure review, a shift faculty groups criticized as political surveillance.
North Carolina offers one of the starkest cases. The University of North Carolina Board of Governors voted in 2015 to close a poverty research center whose director had been publicly critical of state policy. As law school dean Jack Boger said at the time, the move “contraven[ed] the core principles of academic free speech and inquiry.” The center’s director, Gene Nichol, called the action “state-sponsored censorship.”
Florida’s recent actions go further, enabling sweeping state control of curricula and campus programming. Senate Bill 266 bars institutions from using state or federal funds to “promote, support or maintain programs…that advocate for diversity, equity and inclusion,” while more recent decisions eliminated hundreds of general education courses. CAP notes that Florida faculty described the changes as an “authoritarian approach to education.”
To counter this trend, the report calls for merit-based board selection processes, stronger protections for shared governance, and stricter enforcement of accreditation standards tied to academic freedom. CAP concludes that safeguarding institutional autonomy is essential to preserving higher education’s democratic purpose and global competitiveness. Allowing political actors to dictate what can be taught or researched, it warns, “risks dismantling the infrastructure that underpins democratic resilience and global competitiveness.”
