SUSIH 2025: Previewing the “Censorship and Intellectual Unfreedom in Modern America” Plenary

“At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this? And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?”
— Ilya Kaminsky

As intellectual historians, we are keenly attuned to the environments that inspire, provoke, challenge, and constrict the imaginaries of individuals living in bygone eras. We are trained to notice the minute slowdowns, speed-ups, and reversals in the flows of historicity; the ideas and emotions we examine like pebbles smoothed and scarred by the tousle of time. We know that ideas emerge and take root because of contexts that allow them to do so. And because we know this, many of us are concerned about the fate of ideas in our present. We are living, it seems, in an age of intellectual unfreedom.

Earlier this month, the Trump administration sent letters to nine top universities outlining a ten-page “Compact.” If universities agree to Trump’s list of demands—including capping international student enrollment, implementing strict definitions of gender, and suppressing student activism—they will receive preferential access to federal funding. As of yesterday, the White House reportedly extended the compact’s offer to all American colleges and universities.

These moves are the latest in a string of relentless interventions into higher education since Trump took office for his second term. The freezing of research funding, the assault on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programming, the targeting of trans students, and the demonization of pro-Palestinian demonstrators have made American campuses a critical node in the exercise of authoritarian power—and with it, technologies of control including financial sanctions, surveillance, censorship, and forced firings.

Universities are not the only place where intellectual freedom is at risk, however. Armed federal agents patrol American cities, threats against media institutions endanger a free press, museums and cultural centers confront new restrictions on their programming and funding, and lawless deportations present a particularly violent form of silencing. What does it mean to think amidst a climate this repressive, a climate the historian Ellen Schrecker has deemed “worse than McCarthyism?”

At our upcoming conference in Detroit, we will historicize and think aloud about these issues with a Plenary titled “Censorship and Intellectual Unfreedom in Modern America: A Historical Perspective.” The panel brings together four distinguished scholars who have addressed the topic from a variety of angles through different periods in modern American history: Simon Balto from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Frank Guridy from Columbia University, Michael Kazin from Georgetown University, and Naoko Wake from Michigan State University.

By grounding the discussion in long legacies of intellectual unfreedom, including the prosecution of anti-war protestors during World War I and the government-facilitated assassinations of Black radicals in the 1960s and 70s, the panelists will examine how state power and ideological crusades have shaped who can speak, write, teach, and dissent throughout American history. By situating today’s threats to free inquiry within these historical contexts, the Plenary will highlight how intellectual repression has always been a critical tool of governance in modern America. Our discussion is not simply retrospective; it is a call to understand the past as a way to empower ourselves as we defend democracy in the present and the future. It offers, we hope, a timely reckoning with America’s long history of ideas under siege.