American colleges and universities routinely claim neutrality in matters of religion and culture. Yet each December, that neutrality collapses. Rather than simply allowing students and faculty to observe Christmas, many institutions recast, sanitize, or suppress it in the name of “inclusion,” making public celebration of it uncomfortable or unwelcome.

This season, the University of California, San Diego decked the halls with drag shows. On December 5th and 6th, attendees of “Ginger Minj’s Holiday Spectacular” were promised “campy classics, hilarious holiday tales, and costumes that shine brighter than the star on the tree,” featuring a lineup of drag performers.

Napa Valley College followed suit with a “Drag the Halls” event, advertised as “family-friendly,” where drag queens in Christmas attire danced provocatively while collecting cash tips from students and other attendees.

Other campuses opted for a more explicit rejection of Christmas’s meaning. 

Ithaca College’s LGBTQ Center hosted a “warm, affirming,” “Queer for the Holidays Dinner,” while Northeastern University’s Sexual Health Advocacy, Resources, Education (SHARE) club celebrated the season by decorating “erotic” sugar cookies shaped like genitalia—so much for O Holy Night.

But if some universities replace Christmas with spectacle, others prefer erasure—scrubbing campuses of Christmas language and imagery altogether.

The University of Maryland–Baltimore, for example, instructs students and staff in its “Inclusive Language Guide” to avoid Christmas-related words, symbols, and decorations. Snowflakes and mittens were acceptable; Christmas trees, wreaths, bells, holly, reindeer, and even gifts were not. Color schemes, too, were policed: red and green were discouraged in favor of institutionally neutral palettes.

Metropolitan State University of Denver echoes the same logic, advising the campus community to use “winter-themed holiday décor” that avoids representing any “particular holiday preference,” all to ensure that no one feels “left out.”

Arizona State University, meanwhile, partnered with PBS to encourage parents to use the holiday season as a teaching moment in inclusivity. Parents are advised to avoid Christmas-specific language, diversify their children’s holiday music playlists, and remain “mindful” of cultural differences. Evidently, exposure to Christmas alone is a developmental risk.

Taken together, these examples show that higher education does not treat Christmas as one tradition among many that students are free to observe, but as something to be diluted or ideologically repurposed so its public presence does not offend institutional sensibilities. Given higher education’s discomfort with Christianity, this posture is hardly surprising. Today, if one is looking for campuses that refuse the habit of “including” Christmas only by hollowing it out, one must look to institutions that are explicitly Christian.

The University of Valley Forge, for example, continued its annual Christmas at Valley Forge concert, featuring classical and contemporary works, including Handel’s Messiah. As music department chair Dr. DeSanto explained, the university’s mission is “to honor Christ and bring Him glory during the Christmas season.”

Liberty University likewise embraced the holiday with its annual Christmas in Lights celebration, complete with a towering Christmas tree, a live nativity, and performances of Christmas classics by students and faculty. Other events—from ’Twas the Night Before Bingo to Christmas Coffeehouse—gave students space to celebrate the season together. According to the university, such traditions matter because they allow the community to worship and give thanks for “the best gift of all, His Son, Jesus Christ.”

That these institutions celebrate Christmas openly and without incident is not simply a function of their private status, nor a quirk of governance. It reflects a deeper difference in institutional culture. The contrast only sharpens the central question raised by universities that do not: why does Christmas, of all traditions, so often provoke administrative anxiety?

The answer to that question is cultural. Christmas provokes administrative anxiety because many colleges and universities now operate within an ideological culture uneasy with Christianity itself.