Your Rights Are Under Attack. Plymouth State Is Letting It Happen.
The Editorial Board of The Clock
5/1/25
Some of our readers have pushed back against an op-ed, published in the March edition of The Clock, that deplored the suppression of conservative speech on college campuses. In some instances they have even asked us why we published the piece in the first place. But insofar as the op-ed was a good faith plea for preserving speech rights, the Editorial Board of The Clock is all on board – and of course, it is our goal to publish a diversity of opinions, including those with which we disagree.
It is apparent that the United States has entered an era where free expression is losing favor – on college campuses and otherwise – to a culture of compliance and dogma. Instead of protecting speech for some and disregarding it for others, let us offer something to unite all of us: resistance to an authoritarian government that suppresses oppositional speech and political expression.
Authoritarian governments depend on strongmen: bullies that act on a national scale. Under an authoritarian government, only the strongman gets to have an opinion. Everyone else must say and do things in line with who is in charge. And from the press to the judiciary to immigration to higher education, we are seeing a strongman declare which speech is and is not allowed, and use the powers of government to silence the speech he doesn’t like.
Consider the Associated Press’s expulsion from the White House press pool for refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the “Gulf of America.” Meanwhile, the President’s congressional allies seek to sabotage NPR and PBS for their “anti-american” agenda. The strongman stuffs the White House briefing room with his loyalists and sues or investigates news outlets that publish content he doesn’t like. His message to the press is clear: oppose me and you will be punished.
The strongan’s rule also means that everywhere, universities are under attack — especially when they show signs of protesting. A graduate student at Tufts University, Rumeysa Ozturk, was kidnapped and detained just because she co-authored an opinion essay for her student paper. At Columbia University, graduate student Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and detained for negotiating with Columbia on behalf of fellow students protesting. The government paused millions of dollars’ worth of federal funds that support critical research at Brown University because of some students’ involvement in legal protests last year. The U.S. Department of Agriculture froze funds to the University of Maine System after Maine’s governor clashed with the strongman. And most recently, the federal government demanded Harvard University surrender control of their curriculums and hiring practices so that the strongman may flood the university with a “critical mass” of loyalists. Universities and their students everywhere are being punished for exercising free speech and political expression on campus. The strongman’s message to higher education is clear: oppose me and you will be punished.
It is worth asking why universities have drawn such particular attention from the strongman. Of course, higher education has long been a convenient target for certain political groups as alleged purveyors of elitism or woke ideology (or political correctness before that) – allegations that likely include some truth, though far from in the way the strongman intends. But the new attempts to both target individual students and seize control of the institutions themselves should be equally alarming.
On the individual level, where the strongman punishes student dissenters by revoking their visas and sending Gestapo-like I.C.E agents to detain them, authoritarianism creates a chilling effect. Students self-censor. They stop writing op-eds. They never protest in the first place. That chilling effect can be observed as students across America submit requests to withdraw their names or contributions altogether from their campus newspapers. The Columbia Political Review, for example, has had contributors ask for more than a dozen of their articles to be removed, its editor, Adam Kinder, told the Guardian. “For students who disagree with the Trump administration’s stance, they fear real retaliation,” Kinder said.
The strongman creates a chilling effect beyond college campuses, too. In every corner of American society, people are suppressing their own speech to avoid retaliation from the strongman. They are complying in advance.
The strongman’s attempts to control Universities as a whole are equally frightening. They erode the basic principles of academic freedom. Robust and autonomous universities are a fundamental safeguard against authoritarianism in that they ensure a society with strong morality and critical thinking skills. One particular area of the college curriculum where free speech and critical thinking is emphasized is in humanities programs. The humanities encourage students to think about ways they can make our society stronger and more compassionate.
So what does the strongman who now runs America think about the humanities at large – and why does it matter? He thinks the humanities produce “wokeness,” that they are enforcing “gender ideology,” and that they are “antisemitic.” The strongman also sees the humanities as indoctrinating students into thinking critically and fighting systemic racism. He uses “wokeness” without defining what it is, “gender ideology” without explaining what it means, and a form of “antisemitism” decried by Jewish Americans across the political spectrum. These are all slogans that reduce thought into meaningless soundbites that are then used as weapons against our citizenry.
This nationwide rise of authoritarianism is affecting our Plymouth State campus. This is apparent in the PSU administration’s choice to dissolve the humanities programs, and their developing a narrative that attacks The Clock for reporting on said cuts in the first place. In the same authoritarian rhetorical fashion, PSU President Donald Birx responded to criticism by gaslighting and abusing language; he cracked down on The Clock’s coverage of the humanities cuts by calling it exaggerated “misinformation.”
Humanities programs contradict authoritarianism just by existing. This is because they encourage free speech, a well-rounded approach to learning, and encourage independent and critical thinkers. These are qualities strongmen look to squash, so of course humanities are often the first programs to be attacked when universities are under financial threat – even though they are often the cheapest programs for a university to run.
Plymouth State is aligning itself with the strongman’s crackdown on free speech, and universities nationwide may soon do the same as they are punished by anti-education agendas. When PSU confronted budget cuts this spring, it decided not to dismantle its more expensive programs, like robotics, but instead to dissolve cheaper programs within the humanities.
When a country is led by a strongman, no one has free speech. To have free speech and true democracy, we must not be forced to follow the laws – or lawlessness – of one strongman. We all need each other to all be able to speak loudly — that is what makes America great.