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It was my daughter’s reluctance to wear a pair of sandals made of embroidered Chinese fabric that made me realise that something had shifted. When I asked why she wasn’t wearing them, she said: “I just feel like there’s a chance I’ll offend someone.” In that moment, I understood that my daughter was coming of age in a world radically different from the one I grew up in, a world where even the fabric on a pair of shoes could feel politically charged. Where self-censorship had become the safest form of self-expression.
That worry is what sent me back to university to make a documentary. Both of my children were about to enrol in higher education, and I wanted to understand the world they were entering. I’ve spent my career running towards difficult stories. Ebola outbreaks. Human trafficking. The black market in human organs. None of it prepared me for a university campus.
When footage of protests at Evergreen State College, a progressive college in the US state of Washington, started circulating on social media in 2017, I hopped on a plane from my hometown of Toronto. I found a campus in open conflict over race, identity and who had the right to speak.
Bret Weinstein, a biology professor, had sparked outrage by criticising the college’s plans for its annual “Day of Absence”, when, instead of students and staff of colour voluntarily leaving campus for a day (to demonstrate the vital contribution they made to university life), organisers had asked for white students and staff to stay off campus while people of colour remained. Weinstein argued that no one’s right to be on campus should depend on their skin colour and refused to comply.
Within a day of my arrival at Evergreen, a student informed me – not in anger, almost as a friendly heads-up – that I was a white supremacist. I am a Jewish woman whose mother survived Auschwitz, so “white supremacist” is not generally how I think about myself. But they explained, patiently, that it wasn’t about intent; it was about the system I benefited from by virtue of being white. My views didn’t matter. My identity did.
I saw the university’s president, George Bridges, get accused of a “microaggression” for using hand gestures while trying to calm down a room of angry students. He wasn’t being aggressive. He was just talking with his hands, the way people do. They mocked him, shouted over him and demanded he keep his hands still. Eventually, he did.
What followed was a near 10-year journey across campuses in North America and the United Kingdom. Again and again, I saw complex issues giving way to ideological certainty. A generation was being taught that disagreement was harmful.
Words I thought I understood had acquired new meanings. “White supremacy culture” no longer referred to neo-Nazis but, in some academic circles, now included traits such as perfectionism, individualism and a belief in objectivity, because, so the theory went, these were “white” values. A “safe space” no longer referred to somewhere that protected you from physical danger. Now it could refer to a place where you were protected from ideas that challenged your world view.
As part of my BBC documentary series, Speechless, I spoke with Erec Smith, a black professor of rhetoric at York College of Pennsylvania. Defending his belief that students should be taught standard English, he had found himself in conflict with some of his colleagues, who had accused him of upholding the language of white supremacy and suffering from Stockholm syndrome, the psychological state in which a hostage or abuse victim internalises the beliefs of his oppressor.
“It’s a strange feeling to be called a white supremacist by a white person,” he told me. “I went through what many theorists would call a degradation ceremony. The point is not to listen to people but to ridicule them and show other people: ‘This is what happens when you speak up.’ I was called a fascist, but who isn’t these days?”
Tabia Lee had felt the same pressure at De Anza College, in California. Hired as the “faculty director for equity and social justice”, she told me that in her first departmental meeting, when she had suggested that people keep notes and set an agenda, a colleague told her to stop “white-speaking” and “white-splaining”. In workshops, traits such as objectivity and punctuality were ridiculed as being part of “white supremacy culture”.
She dared to fight back. “What are they expecting of me as a black woman?” she asked. “Are they expecting me to be lazy, to not be on time, to not take notes?”
When she tried to introduce alternative ways of thinking, she said, “the clampdown on me really happened”. Soon afterwards, she was fired. The college’s board said she had taken positions that were “adversarial and hostile” to its stance on social justice, anti-racism and equity.
I also talked to Zack De Piero, a former professor of English writing at Pennsylvania State University, who is white and is pursuing legal action accusing the university of racial discrimination. He was asked to watch a professional development video titled “White teachers are a problem” and was warned that “white supremacy manifests itself in language and writing pedagogy”.
At a session commemorating George Floyd – the black man who pleaded “I can’t breathe” as a police officer knelt on his neck, sparking the 2020 racial-justice protests – staff members were led in a moment of silence, with a small twist. “The challenge for all of us today, especially for white and non-black people of colour, is to hold our breaths just a little bit longer,” a facilitator told the group. “To not give in to our privilege… hold it in for as long as you can, to feel the pain.” De Piero describes multiple workshops and training sessions that he felt explicitly targeted his whiteness as a problem.
Carole Hooven, a Harvard evolutionary biologist, stated on television in 2021 that biological sex was binary, a mainstream scientific position. She also acknowledged that gender existed on a spectrum and that she was talking about biology, not identity. But, within hours, the director of her department’s Diversity and Inclusion Task Force had accused her of transphobia. Graduate students refused to work with her, making it impossible for her to teach her course. She eventually retired and later told me she thought about suicide.
The same pattern played out in England. Kathleen Stock left her job as a professor of philosophy at the University of Sussex in 2021 after her gender-critical views sparked a student campaign accusing her of transphobia and calling for her to be sacked. Among her crimes was the belief that trans women should not have unrestricted access to women-only spaces. I’ll leave that argument to others, but what struck me was the response to it: not a counter-argument, but a campaign to end her career.
These are not Right-wing provocateurs; they are educators who questioned an increasingly narrow consensus and paid for it with their careers, their reputations and, in some cases, their mental health.
Then came October 7 2023, and its aftermath, a catastrophe with a devastating human cost that I don’t want to litigate here. But it turned everything I’d spent years documenting on its head. Activists who previously had been willing to restrict what could be said, in the name of protecting vulnerable groups, seemed to suspend these principles when it came to anyone who supported even the existence of the state of Israel.
I interviewed Momodou Taal, a British doctoral student at Cornell, in New York state, who was one of the leading voices in the university’s pro-Palestinian protest movement. He told me plainly: “I think Zionism is white supremacy. I think Zionism is a form of racism.” When I asked whether that was too simple a lens for a complicated conflict, he replied: “I don’t understand why there’s a call for nuance when we believe it is racism.” He also said: “We hope through our campaigns that other students become more radicalised.”
I also interviewed Gwen, a trans student. “I’d say that, as a trans person, I’ve been very lucky,” she told me. “Cornell is a very accepting place. I’ve had much more difficulty being Jewish than I have being trans.”
On other campuses, protesters were filmed telling Jews to go back to Poland. Imagine that same line aimed at any other group – go back to Africa, go back to China, go back to India – and ask yourself how the university would react.
Diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) initiatives began with genuinely good intentions, opening doors long closed to women, people of colour and other marginalised groups. And that work still matters. But in some institutions, DEI shifted from expanding opportunity to enforcing ideological conformity.
Eventually, though, there was a backlash. The conservative activist Christopher Rufo launched an investigation into diversity training programmes in public institutions in the US, including universities, and eventually caught the attention of Donald Trump.
When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, the response was delivered with full force. Federal DEI programmes were cancelled, university research funds were frozen and visas for student activists were revoked.
In my view, the president went too far. Extremism and anti-Semitism on campus is real, but Trump used it to justify a much broader assault on universities, including research that had nothing to do with campus politics.
One thing I learnt making my film is that once you start silencing people, you don’t get to decide who uses those tools next. Universities are now living with the consequences.
In England, the Government has introduced a free-speech complaints system for universities, with heavy fines for institutions that fail to protect it. It’s a start. But laws can’t fix a culture. You can fine a university for bad policy; you can’t fine a colleague for freezing someone out, or legislate away the instinct to humiliate and cancel.
Universities should be the one place where difficult ideas can be examined without people worrying about damaging their careers. When we teach students that disagreement is violence, that discomfort is harm, that the proper response to an idea you find threatening is to make sure nobody else hears it, we weaken them.
I think about my daughter and her sandals often. She’s not alone. I hear versions of her hesitation from friends, colleagues and students, people who just decide to hold back, to say less and risk less.
During the filming of Speechless, some students told me theirs is a generation simply trying not to cause harm. But I sense fear. And fear is no foundation for a democracy. Because once we decide that some ideas are too dangerous to hear, we have already conceded the argument to the people who would silence us.
Ric Bienstock is a Canadian documentary filmmaker who has won several Emmys and been nominated for a Bafta. She is the director of Speechless, the two-part documentary series now streaming on BBC iPlayer.
