Glinda: “I’m a public figure now, people expect me to…”
Elphaba: “Lie?”
Glinda: “Be encouraging.”
– “Wicked: For Good”
The November 2025 box office release of “Wicked: For Good,” sequel to the first film installment and adaptation of the musical “Wicked” by Stephen Schwartz, has everyone singing the famous “Defying Gravity” riff and tossing their hair. Yet, more than a bubbly feel-good movie musical about friendship and magic, “Wicked: For Good” contains a stark reminder of the dangers of propaganda and censorship that afflict the American higher education system right now.
“Wicked,” released in 2024, is the story of the Wicked Witch Elphaba Thropp and Glinda the Good as the two become close friends, only to be pulled apart by the politics of Oz and the pair’s obedience or disobedience to the nefarious Wizard. The crux of Elphaba’s and Glinda’s friendship is formed while the two are students at Shiz University. Shiz’s animal professors, once well-known and celebrated for their intelligence, have become the Wizard’s scapegoats, blamed for the Great Drought that destroyed the Emerald City years before.
Throughout the duology, a conspiracy unfolds to remove the animals’ ability to speak, the animals themselves sometimes disappearing altogether. For example, Doctor Dillamond, a goat, at one point receives a threatening message on the chalkboard in his classroom: “Animals should be seen and not heard.” Dillamond later sings, “I’ve heard of an ox, a professor from Quox / No longer permitted to teach / Who has lost all powers of speech / And an owl in Munchkin Rock / A vicar with a thriving flock / Forbidden to preach.”
That outspoken animals disappear or have their speech taken away in the films can be compared to the Trump administration’s tactics against international students on college campuses. Last September, an immigration judge in Louisiana ordered the deportation of Columbia graduate student and activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-American who was arrested by ICE agents in March. That month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the United States had revoked 6,000 foreign student visas and that “visa holders must prove themselves worthy of being allowed to remain in the US every single day.” In November, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza from Babson College was arrested by federal immigration officers and deported to Honduras, a country she had not seen since she was seven years old.
The lines from Dillamond’s song, “Under the surface / Behind the scenes / Something bad is happening in Oz” parallel what has recently become overt in the American higher education system.
“There are other restrictions designed to chill faculty speech—restrictions on tenure or curricular control bills, and let’s also remember the bills that were introduced or passed to limit student protests on campus,” Senior Manager of Freedom to Learn at PEN America Amy Reid said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, pertaining to faculty censorship. Reid was previously a professor of French and the director of Gender Studies at New College of Florida. The Gender Studies Program was shut down in 2023 by a majority vote of the school’s newly conservative board of trustees.
“All of those things are designed to make people afraid to speak up and to question things on campus,” Reid continued. “That’s not healthy for our education system, and it’s not healthy for our democracy.”
Across the country, students and professors feel the brunt of the current presidential administration’s attempt to control and censor higher education. The Trump Higher Education Compact, whose conditions include “abolishing institutional units” which “punish, belittle, and even spark violence against” conservative ideas and screening international applicants for support of “American and Western values,” offers preferential funding for universities. Most of the nine universities asked to sign it in early October declined within the month, but New College of Florida President Richard Corcoran vowed to sign the document. In November, a faculty resolution strongly opposing his readiness to engage the compact received near-unanimous support.
Much like how Glinda chooses her own ambitions and stays by the side of the Wizard who vilifies Elphaba, some institutions have allowed the Trump administration to shape their curricula and censor their publications. In December, the University of Alabama suspended two student publications—Alice, a women’s lifestyle magazine, and Nineteen Fifty-Six, a magazine about Black culture and student life. Visitors to the Nineteen Fifty-Six website will see this Ida B. Wells quote on the homepage: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” University officials cited new federal DEI regulations for driving the suspension.
As German journalist Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”: “In politics, obedience and support are the same.” In “Wicked: For Good,” the Wizard, who is from the human world, responds to Elphaba’s pleas for him to tell everyone the truth by stating, “Where I’m from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren’t true…we call it history.”
Jon M. Chu, director of the duology, discussed the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” movie in a 2024 interview. Released at the end of the Great Depression, closely following the hardships of the 1930s Dust Bowl, the rise of German fascism and the beginning of World War II, the story of the Wizard and Dorothy has always had political implications.
“When I saw [“The Wizard of Oz”] in 2002, I was in college, so I was still growing up,” Chu told IndieWire. “I was seeing the world for the first time a year after 9/11, we’re going into war, America’s in transition and everything is scary all around. And when in scary situations, people go towards strongmen who just take the reins.”
As the Wizard tells Elphaba with regard to why he is persecuting the animals, “The best way to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy.” The Trump administration has curated a narrative of higher education as “schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilization itself.”
The silenced animal professors at Shiz and the propaganda of the “Wicked Witch,” meant to discredit Elphaba for knowing the truth about the Wizard’s agenda, eerily echo Arendt’s writing about how governments “put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding and dealing with reality and factuality.”
The “Wicked” film series contains a warning of a world where intellectuals and media are silenced and censored. It is also a reminder that leaders who spread misinformation for their own political gain would be unsuccessful without the support of the people. Glinda the Good becomes the wicked one when she is complicit in the Wizard’s censorship campaign, a reflection of our own complacency in the midst of America’s increased control of higher education.
“For facts are stubborn,” Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” her 1963 analysis of the American and French revolutions. “They do not disappear when historians or sociologists refuse to learn from them, though they may when everybody has forgotten them.”
A Wicked tactic for tackling higher education
The November 2025 box office release of “Wicked: For Good,” sequel to the first film installment and adaptation of the musical “Wicked” by Stephen Schwartz, has everyone singing the famous “Defying Gravity” riff and tossing their hair. Yet, more than a bubbly feel-good movie musical about friendship and magic, “Wicked: For Good” contains a stark reminder of the dangers of propaganda and censorship that afflict the American higher education system right now.
“Wicked,” released in 2024, is the story of the Wicked Witch Elphaba Thropp and Glinda the Good as the two become close friends, only to be pulled apart by the politics of Oz and the pair’s obedience or disobedience to the nefarious Wizard. The crux of Elphaba’s and Glinda’s friendship is formed while the two are students at Shiz University. Shiz’s animal professors, once well-known and celebrated for their intelligence, have become the Wizard’s scapegoats, blamed for the Great Drought that destroyed the Emerald City years before.
Throughout the duology, a conspiracy unfolds to remove the animals’ ability to speak, the animals themselves sometimes disappearing altogether. For example, Doctor Dillamond, a goat, at one point receives a threatening message on the chalkboard in his classroom: “Animals should be seen and not heard.” Dillamond later sings, “I’ve heard of an ox, a professor from Quox / No longer permitted to teach / Who has lost all powers of speech / And an owl in Munchkin Rock / A vicar with a thriving flock / Forbidden to preach.”
That outspoken animals disappear or have their speech taken away in the films can be compared to the Trump administration’s tactics against international students on college campuses. Last September, an immigration judge in Louisiana ordered the deportation of Columbia graduate student and activist Mahmoud Khalil, a Palestinian-American who was arrested by ICE agents in March. That month, Secretary of State Marco Rubio stated that the United States had revoked 6,000 foreign student visas and that “visa holders must prove themselves worthy of being allowed to remain in the US every single day.” In November, Any Lucia Lopez Belloza from Babson College was arrested by federal immigration officers and deported to Honduras, a country she had not seen since she was seven years old.
The lines from Dillamond’s song, “Under the surface / Behind the scenes / Something bad is happening in Oz” parallel what has recently become overt in the American higher education system.
“There are other restrictions designed to chill faculty speech—restrictions on tenure or curricular control bills, and let’s also remember the bills that were introduced or passed to limit student protests on campus,” Senior Manager of Freedom to Learn at PEN America Amy Reid said in an interview with Inside Higher Ed, pertaining to faculty censorship. Reid was previously a professor of French and the director of Gender Studies at New College of Florida. The Gender Studies Program was shut down in 2023 by a majority vote of the school’s newly conservative board of trustees.
“All of those things are designed to make people afraid to speak up and to question things on campus,” Reid continued. “That’s not healthy for our education system, and it’s not healthy for our democracy.”
Across the country, students and professors feel the brunt of the current presidential administration’s attempt to control and censor higher education. The Trump Higher Education Compact, whose conditions include “abolishing institutional units” which “punish, belittle, and even spark violence against” conservative ideas and screening international applicants for support of “American and Western values,” offers preferential funding for universities. Most of the nine universities asked to sign it in early October declined within the month, but New College of Florida President Richard Corcoran vowed to sign the document. In November, a faculty resolution strongly opposing his readiness to engage the compact received near-unanimous support.
Much like how Glinda chooses her own ambitions and stays by the side of the Wizard who vilifies Elphaba, some institutions have allowed the Trump administration to shape their curricula and censor their publications. In December, the University of Alabama suspended two student publications—Alice, a women’s lifestyle magazine, and Nineteen Fifty-Six, a magazine about Black culture and student life. Visitors to the Nineteen Fifty-Six website will see this Ida B. Wells quote on the homepage: “The people must know before they can act, and there is no educator to compare with the press.” University officials cited new federal DEI regulations for driving the suspension.
As German journalist Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1963 book, “Eichmann in Jerusalem”: “In politics, obedience and support are the same.” In “Wicked: For Good,” the Wizard, who is from the human world, responds to Elphaba’s pleas for him to tell everyone the truth by stating, “Where I’m from, we believe in all sorts of things that aren’t true…we call it history.”
Jon M. Chu, director of the duology, discussed the 1939 “Wizard of Oz” movie in a 2024 interview. Released at the end of the Great Depression, closely following the hardships of the 1930s Dust Bowl, the rise of German fascism and the beginning of World War II, the story of the Wizard and Dorothy has always had political implications.
“When I saw [“The Wizard of Oz”] in 2002, I was in college, so I was still growing up,” Chu told IndieWire. “I was seeing the world for the first time a year after 9/11, we’re going into war, America’s in transition and everything is scary all around. And when in scary situations, people go towards strongmen who just take the reins.”
As the Wizard tells Elphaba with regard to why he is persecuting the animals, “The best way to bring people together is to give them a real good enemy.” The Trump administration has curated a narrative of higher education as “schools that aid the Marxist assault on our American heritage and on Western civilization itself.”
The silenced animal professors at Shiz and the propaganda of the “Wicked Witch,” meant to discredit Elphaba for knowing the truth about the Wizard’s agenda, eerily echo Arendt’s writing about how governments “put to sleep our common sense, which is nothing else but our mental organ for perceiving, understanding and dealing with reality and factuality.”
The “Wicked” film series contains a warning of a world where intellectuals and media are silenced and censored. It is also a reminder that leaders who spread misinformation for their own political gain would be unsuccessful without the support of the people. Glinda the Good becomes the wicked one when she is complicit in the Wizard’s censorship campaign, a reflection of our own complacency in the midst of America’s increased control of higher education.
“For facts are stubborn,” Arendt wrote in “On Revolution,” her 1963 analysis of the American and French revolutions. “They do not disappear when historians or sociologists refuse to learn from them, though they may when everybody has forgotten them.”
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