As First Amendment lawyers, we get asked that quite a bit, sometimes about our clients. The answer is not too hard to figure out. People want to be heard, and social media platforms give them a megaphone.

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Charlie Kirk understood that better than almost anyone. He created a provocative style built for social media and amassed an empire with millions of followers in his tragically short life. So, when he was assassinated on Sept. 10, 2025, his admirers and his critics raced online to say something about it.

What followed was an unprecedented wave of public-employee firings based on social media posts.

One year on, at least 46 of those disputes have been in court, from Florida to Washington State. Tennessee has six. Florida has ten, two of them against the same wildlife agency. Iowa has five. The plaintiffs include teachers, professors, a landscaper, a paramedic who was named medic of the year in 2025, and a public defender who argued before the Iowa Supreme Court days before losing her job.

One concerning trend from these cases deserves special attention: Government employers are vastly overstating the impact of social media posts on their operations. Under the First Amendment, the government may punish an employee for off-the-job speech on a matter of public concern only if it can show that its actual operations were disrupted or if it could reasonably predict that disruption. If the government can’t do either, it’s simply punishing someone for sharing a disfavored opinion. And that appears to be the case of late.

Brittney Brown’s case is a perfect illustration. Brown, a biologist, spent seven years monitoring shorebirds for the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. FWC fired her five days after Kirk died over a repost on her private Instagram. When she asked the court to reinstate her, Brown’s supervisor, Melissa Tucker, swore that FWC’s channels received “hundreds of citizen contacts” in two days. The court refused to put Brown back to work while her case proceeded.

Then the lawsuit proceeded to discovery, where the parties exchange information relevant to the claims. Turns out there weren’t “hundreds” of outraged citizens demanding Brown be fired. In fact, Tucker didn’t actually know how many people contacted FWC. FWC’s inspector general documented about 50 emailed complaints, but none from employees, partners, or volunteers. What’s more, a sizable minority were from out of state, and one of those actually complained about FWC’s decision to fire Brown.

By comparison, FWC’s bear hunt the year before drew over 4,000 complaints, some of them threatening. The hunt went on. In other words, Florida used an inflated complaint count to justify terminating an individual for sharing her opinion but had no problem continuing the bear hunt in the face of thousands of real complaints.

In May, Judge Mark Walker struck FWC’s misrepresentations from the record and ordered it to pay attorneys’ fees. Walker found no knowing lie, but sanctioned the government’s refusal to correct the record, which he referred to as “doggedly defend[ing] the indefensible.” And while he acknowledged the false statements were material to his earlier ruling, he concluded that striking them would not have changed the outcome. Ultimately, Florida paid Brown a $485,000 settlement.

“Hundreds of complaints” might sound like disruption, but as Brown’s case demonstrates, the details matter. Are the complaints real? If so, who are they from? Is a “like” on a social media post calling for a public worker to be fired a complaint? Perhaps, but it’s certainly not disruption.

While the volume of terminations is new, the pattern is not. The same kind of outrage has been used to target employees who shared more conservative views. In 2020, social media users expressed outrage over public employees’ views on Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. That outrage often turned into demands to fire the employees.

In Beathard v. Lyons, for example, an Illinois State football coach alleged he was fired after replacing a Black Lives Matter poster on his office door with a sign reading, “All Lives Matter to Our Lord & Savior Jesus Christ.” Sound familiar?

Both then and today, social media has amplified the heckler’s veto, in which the government uses popular opinion or audience reaction to justify censorship. If the government is allowed to cite online mobs when it fires an employee for controversial — but off-the-job — speech, the prevailing mood on social media trumps an individual’s right to speak their mind. In a country that values free speech, that’s the opposite of what we should strive for. The First Amendment protects the most controversial speakers in society, even (and especially) in the face of vehement disagreement. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t mean much.

As with the 2020 cases, some of which are still being litigated, we’re seeing some patterns emerge. Preliminary relief — asking the court for your job back while the case proceeds — has broken almost perfectly along a line that has nothing to do with speech.

Two plaintiffs have won early relief — and they were the only two still on the payroll when they filed their lawsuits. A federal court reinstated Phillip Hook, an art professor, after the South Dakota speaker of the house publicized his post and then called the university himself. While the state board of regents issued a notice of intent to terminate his contract and placed him on administrative leave, the termination had not become final when he sued. Melisa Crook, an Iowa teacher, received a partial injunction barring her school district from terminating her employment over a Facebook post.

Unlike Hook and Crook, every plaintiff who was already fired lost their bid for early reinstatement. But that doesn’t mean that the cases have been losers — quite the opposite. Defendants have mostly failed to get these cases dismissed. At least six plaintiffs survived motions to dismiss, with courts rejecting qualified immunity at least five times. One court dismissed a plaintiff’s lawsuit based on qualified immunity, but she is appealing.

The important question is how little it took to end these careers: a handful of phone calls, a few dozen emails that no one bothered to count, and a couple of days of online anger.

Of the 46 federal cases we’ve found, 29 are still active, 16 have settled, and only one is completely closed. In the ongoing cases, discovery has been the plaintiffs’ best asset because it allows them to see the evidence of disruption (or lack thereof) on which their government employer relied.

The publicly reported settlements demonstrate the cost of censorship. So far, they come to over $4 million. And that’s just the floor because there are very likely other settlements that will never be public.

Surely, some of you reading have little sympathy for the plaintiffs in these cases. You saw their posts, and you asked yourselves the question we opened with: Why would someone post that?

It’s a fair question. It’s not, however, the important one. The important question is how little it took to end these careers: a handful of phone calls, a few dozen emails that no one bothered to count, and a couple of days of online anger.

A year later, early court results show that public employers should stop equating controversial social media posts with workplace disruption. When they do, they erode our deeply ingrained free-speech values, and they upend the lives of hard-working public employees in the process.

You can dislike what someone posts, and you can do so loudly. That’s your First Amendment right. But when the government leverages complaints to fire employees for exercising the same right, that’s not accountability — it’s intolerance, and it’s the state punishing an opinion.

And we are not better off for it.

Jim Watt had become a familiar face at Florida wildlife meetings. A retired turtle farmer, he was often there to raise concerns about the use of pesticides. These public meetings gave citizens a place to do exactly that. By his account, Watt never once raised his voice.

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But in July, The Orlando Sentinel reported that Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation officers have for years used driver’s license records to monitor environmental activists who spoke up at public meetings. The agency says it began using the database to investigate critics after staff received threats. It pulled information for more than 20 people, accessing Watt’s personal information 34 times, even though the agency later said he was never under criminal investigation.

When Watt learned that the agency had been quietly pulling his records, he became afraid to return to the meetings. “When I drive down the road and I see a game warden truck pull up near me,” he says, “I’ve never been afraid of law enforcement in my life, but I am now. I’m afraid.”

The database FWC officials accessed — Florida’s Driver and Vehicle Information Database, or DAVID — is no ordinary system. It’s a restricted government database containing addresses, driver’s license numbers, dates of birth, Social Security numbers, vehicle information, and other sensitive details. In many cases, the reason given for the searches was reportedly “Criminal Investigation.”

The FWC denies misusing or weaponizing its law-enforcement authority, saying the searches were a public-safety measure prompted by threats against commissioners and employees, including over Florida’s black bear hunt. The agency cited a protest outside a commissioner’s business as well as alleged doxxing, and released a collection of hostile social media posts, including one in which the poster said whoever proposed the hunt “should be shot.”

Government officials can investigate credible threats of violence — true threats are not protected by the First Amendment. But angry rhetoric, violent imagery, and ugly political hyperbole do not automatically cross that line. Whether any of the examples the FWC released crossed that line is far from clear. Context matters.

But even if they did, records show that many of the people whose records the agency pulled had not written any of the posts it cited to justify those searches. Instead, many searches took place after someone simply criticized the FWC online or spoke up at a public forum, and the agency had offered no evidence that it ever suspected some of these people were a threat.

Public meetings exist so citizens can question, challenge, and sometimes anger the officials who exercise power over them. That process breaks down when people have to wonder whether criticism will invite government scrutiny.

This is not the FWC’s only recent free-speech controversy either. FIRE recently criticized a broad FWC social media policy that restricted employees’ speech on their personal accounts. The FWC also paid $485,000 to settle a lawsuit filed by a former biologist who was fired for reposting a meme on her personal account that claimed Charlie Kirk wouldn’t care about children being shot. These episodes involve different facts, but they sharpen the concern raised here: whether FWC treats criticism as something to tolerate — or something to investigate.

The FWC says Floridians should be able to speak at its meetings and disagree with its commissioners without paying a personal price. Yet Watt learned that, after repeatedly doing just that, agency officials had accessed his personal information 34 times. The FWC has not shown that he threatened anyone or was suspected of a crime. When a law-enforcement agency searches the records of its critics without a clear public-safety justification, it blurs the line between a dissenter and a suspect — and makes speaking up feel risky.

The damage does not stop with the people whose names were searched. Public meetings exist so citizens can question, challenge, and sometimes anger the officials who exercise power over them. That process breaks down when people have to wonder whether criticism will invite government scrutiny. Watt says he is now afraid to return to meetings he once regularly attended and that fear itself is a price. Floridians should not have to choose between criticizing their government and wondering whether their government is quietly looking into them.

Last week, Polk State College proudly announced that its Board of Trustees had adopted a statement committing the school to institutional neutrality. On Sept. 3, the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors will consider taking the first formal step toward requiring all 12 universities in the system to adopt institutional-neutrality policies of their own.

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On the whole, that’s good news. Institutional neutrality can help colleges remain focused on their educational mission while leaving political and social debates to students and faculty.

But both the Polk State policy and the proposal before the Board of Governors contain a significant loophole. Rather than hew to the clear and rare exceptions used by many schools that have adopted institutional neutrality, these policies provide a new exception that threatens to render the neutrality commitment meaningless. Unless Florida fixes this defect, FIRE cannot treat these policies as the kind of institutional neutrality commitments we recommend to colleges and universities.

Polk State framed the move as part of new President Anastasios Kamoutsas’s “vision for his first 90 days as president” and as part of a broader tapestry of Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s statewide education initiatives. The college even included a quote from Governor DeSantis, celebrating the adoption and touting Florida’s commitment to “free speech and open inquiry” in higher education and framing this as a strike against “echo chambers.”

That instinct is sound.

Institutional neutrality is the idea that universities should not, as institutions, take formal positions on social and political issues, instead leaving those discussions to members of the campus community. The concept was formalized at the University of Chicago in 1967 when a committee chaired by legal scholar Harry Kalven Jr. released its “Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action,” now known simply as the “Kalven Report.”

The Kalven Report has become an important template for schools seeking to make their own commitment to institutional neutrality. FIRE urges colleges and universities to adopt institutional neutrality, and 50 of them have formally done just that.

When FIRE analyzes universities’ approaches to institutional neutrality, to decide whether to include them on our list of formal adoptions, we are determining if the school has formally adopted an “official position of institutional neutrality substantially similar to the principles set forth in the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report.”

Not every policy carrying the label passes the test. Some lack an important component of Kalven. Others add language that risks swallowing the principles. Polk State’s policy and the similar approach being considered by the State University System of Florida’s Board of Governors fall into the latter category.

Polk State and the Board’s proposal get much of this right. The new policy says the college and its operating units generally will not take official positions on matters unrelated to the institution’s mission and operations.

Then comes the problem.

The Kalven Report is clear that only in rare circumstances is it acceptable for the university to overcome “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day.” According to Kalven, that exception comes into play for threats to the “very mission of the university and its values of free inquiry. In such a crisis, it becomes the obligation of the university as an institution to oppose such measures and actively to defend its interests and its values.”

Polk State says the college may nevertheless “speak out when an issue is in violation of the law, affects its educational purpose, how it operates, or the safety of students, faculty, and staff.”

The Board of Governors’ proposal contains a similar exception. It would require each university’s policy to provide that institutional neutrality does not prevent university representatives from “publicly addressing, condemning, or prohibiting expressions or actions that violate the law.” The same proposal separately allows institutional statements when an issue bears materially and directly on the university’s core mission.

That second exception is enough. The first is a fatal defect.

Of course a university may enforce the law. Institutional neutrality does not require administrators to ignore vandalism, violence, unlawful harassment, true threats, or other illegal conduct. Nor does neutrality prevent a university from telling its community what rules apply, explaining an arrest on campus, closing a building for safety reasons, or otherwise carrying out its ordinary responsibilities.

But enforcing the law is different from institutionally condemning conduct. The former is an operational responsibility. The latter is an institutional judgment. And once “this violates the law” becomes an independent justification for institutional speech, the boundaries of neutrality become remarkably unclear.

We can only speculate how administrators at Polk State, as well as schools across the Florida State System, will determine “when an issue is in violation of the law.” Is it enough that a state legislature is considering adopting a law? Or that someone is accused of violating a law? Or that the Supreme Court is considering a matter? Or that a country is accused by some of violating international law?

If the answer to any of those questions is yes, this carve-out could allow Polk State — a small public college in Winter Haven, Florida — to offer comments on everything from trans high school athletes in Idaho and the ongoing Lindsay Clancy trial in Massachusetts to President Trump’s White House ballroom and, of course, where the college stands on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

For the sake of Polk State’s reputation — and the sanity of its communications department — hopefully the college has no intention of offering comments on any of the above matters and will instead follow the Kalven Report’s vision of institutional neutrality. But policies should be written to constrain the next administration too, including one far more eager to speak.

The Kalven Report got the basic principle right nearly 60 years ago. Universities exist to foster disagreement, not resolve political disputes in the institution’s name. They must sometimes speak to protect their ability to perform that mission. But they do not need a free-floating power to condemn whatever administrators have determined to be illegal.

Florida has the right destination in mind. But before it can actually call this policy neutral, it needs to close the loophole.

In the summer of 1798, Congress gave the president the power to expel any foreigner he personally judged dangerous. Though the president never used the Alien Friends Act, and it expired two years later, it had its intended result. French printers, teachers, and booksellers sold their belongings and took ship out of Philadelphia, rather than wait to find out if the president had them in mind. Thomas Jefferson later argued that to put such power in the hands of one person is the very definition of despotism.

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Last Friday, a federal court in California reminded us of this in Stanford Daily v. Rubio, in which Judge Noël Wise held the government cannot deport people for their opinions. The court held that the two provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio invokes in trying to do so violate the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment when used to target protected speech. The first provision FIRE challenged lets the secretary of state cancel anyone’s visa, at any time, for any reason. The second lets him deport anyone over protected speech so long as he “personally determines” the speech “compromises a compelling United States foreign policy interest.”

After the Trump administration began targeting people for pro-Palestinian speech, The Stanford Daily saw multiple staff reporters and editors refuse to cover the war in Gaza out of fear of being deported. Some even quit the paper rather than take the risk of doing journalism in such a climate. Their fear was not without reason. The government had already arrested and detained for deportation multiple people for daring to voice their opinions on one of the most widely discussed issues in recent history.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a doctoral student studying the positive uses of social media by adolescents, became deeply troubled by what she read about the war in Gaza, so she decided to co-author an op-ed in her student paper calling on Tufts University to divest from companies tied to Israel. Mahmoud Khalil, who had studied international relations as a Columbia grad student, took part in pro-Palestinian protests and characterized Palestinian actions as “armed resistance, which is legitimate under international law.” Mohsen Mahdawi, who had been recently accepted into the same program as Khalil, blamed Israel for the Oct. 7 attacks and said he does not justify such violence, but empathizes with Hamas.

These views may offend many who hear them, just as they may gain instant agreement from others. This is how the marketplace of ideas is supposed to work. President Jefferson understood this. He took the oath in 1801, after an election so vicious that Federalists had warned a Jefferson presidency would burn the churches and end the republic itself. His own allies were jailed under the Sedition Act for the crime of criticizing the government. Yet in his wisdom, delivering his inaugural address, he turned to the very people who thought him the enemy of constitutional order and asked that they be left to stand undisturbed, as “monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”

The three students identified above were all pursuing academic study in America and expressing opinions on a widely debated topic. Their right to do this without punishment for stating their views is not only a testament to American freedom, but to the distinctly American tradition of intellectual resilience that does not merely tolerate differences of opinion, but recognizes in them an opportunity, and holds fast to the belief that we can be made better by hearing them, even if we think they’re wrong. Yet for their thoughtcrimes, all three were arrested and nearly removed from the country.

As a result, Stanford Daily reporters on student visas began turning down assignments about the Middle East. Not just opinion pieces, mind you, but reporting work. Now multiply that by every campus paper, every graduate seminar, every noncitizen who has an informed view about a place they actually come from, or simply a different opinion about whatever might be in the news that week. What you end up with is public conversation in America with a conspicuous hole in the middle.

Nor was the Daily alone in the lawsuit. A second plaintiff, participating under a Jane Doe pseudonym, with no connection to the paper or the school, also felt the chill and simply stopped going to protests. She stopped wearing a keffiyeh. She decided it was wiser to surrender the expression of her own beliefs than to risk the wrath of a censorial government. Her story should remind us that censorship is most effective when it need not be enforced, but rather operates on the mind of the victim before an offending idea is ever given voice. And more is lost than just her opinion. When voices fold into silence, we not only lose their unspoken perspective, we lose touch with what it means to be American, and lose our grip on the very promise of our republic.

We are a country made great in no small measure by more than two centuries of welcoming brilliant minds from abroad. Add to this that there was once something deeply American about taking pride in saying the unpopular thing, and saying it loud. Now we find ourselves telling visitors that they had better watch what they say, or simply keep their thoughts to themselves, lest they bruise our fragile sensibilities and lose their right to remain in the country.

Thankfully, last week’s ruling places the First Amendment back at the forefront. Meanwhile, Khalil’s and Mahdawi’s cases are still working their way through the system. But we are at least now turning in the right direction. A noble principle, once commonly held, is coming back into view. As Judge Wise said in her ruling, “You can simultaneously hate the content of a person’s speech and love the country that cherishes the freedom to allow it.”

A Nebraska school district censored a student newspaper over a political cartoon criticizing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. After FIRE objected, the district adopted a new policy — one that gives administrators formal power to restrict student journalism before publication.

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The cartoon, by Aidan McClaren, was the first and only editorial cartoon for Gretna East High School’s student newspaper last school year. That cartoon now sits in a storage bin alongside his academic decathlon trophies and journalism awards, after it was scrubbed from the school paper’s website.

McClaren was not originally a cartoonist. But when The Wingspan’s editor-in-chief noted that the paper hadn’t published any cartoons that year, McClaren, then a junior, started thinking. Later, when he got home from his after-school job, the day’s news was top of mind: ICE’s presence in Minneapolis and the killings of Renée Good and Alex Pretti, both by ICE agents in January 2026.

That night, he drew. “I knew I wanted to reference how it was similar to things that I had learned about in my history class that I took my sophomore year,” McClaren said in a video interview. His idea quickly took shape. The finished cartoon showed a young man looking at a factory labeled “History” with gears marked “Bureaucracy” and “Loopholes,” churning out historical moments such as the Palmer Raids and Japanese internment, alongside ICE.

“It took me a full week to muster up courage and show it to my class,” he said. After student leaders signed and approved, the cartoon found its home on The Wingspan’s website on Feb. 10. But it didn’t stay there for long.

Cutting off ICE criticism

McClaren was at home on his couch watching a reality TV show with his mom when his phone buzzed around 9 p.m. on Feb. 12. It was his student newspaper adviser. Two days after The Wingspan published McClaren’s cartoon, school administrators had taken it off the website.

“I was immediately kind of angry,” McClaren said. But McClaren didn’t just let it fester or stun him into inaction. He wrote another piece for The Wingspan — this time, an op-ed about his experience being censored.

“When our publication displayed a cartoon comparing ICE operations to past American military operations, the district administration had it removed,” he wrote. “The justification offered was that the topic was too controversial at the moment, and that people in our community were dealing with it firsthand. By that standard, no editorial cartoon worth publishing would ever see print. That is not a reason to suppress a cartoon. That is a reason to publish one. The district disagrees.”

The school blocked the piece’s publication, too.

Administrators gave McClaren and The Wingspan a choice: they could republish McClaren’s cartoon in the paper if the paper also published a pro-ICE cartoon or if they explained the cartoon for their audience. Otherwise, the pieces would stay offline.

McClaren wasn’t alone in feeling the school’s actions were wrong. Fellow Wingspan journalist Nick Mitchell launched a petition. Editor-in-chief Madeline Petrick asked the school to provide the reasons for the censorship in writing. The students attended a school board meeting on March 30 to ask the Gretna Public Schools Board of Education to adopt a student press freedom policy, reinstate the cartoon, and stop conducting prior reviews.

Skirting around speech standards

FIRE wrote to the school shortly after, echoing McClaren and his fellow student journalists’ calls and explaining the constitutional defects of the district’s actions and subsequent responses to the students.

Administrators pointed to the Supreme Court cases Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier and Tinker v. Des Moines, reasoning they permitted the takedown and subsequent demands for prior review. While it’s true that school officials have greater authority to regulate student speech than the government ordinarily has with respect to the public, that authority comes with important safeguards. Public school students “do not shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate,” as the Court said in Tinker.

Tinker permits school officials to regulate student expression when they reasonably forecast that it will substantially disrupt school activities or invade the rights of others. Officials must support that conclusion with actual evidence, not just unsubstantiated fear. Gretna Public Schools offered no more than McClaren’s cartoon itself, which they posited could lead to a substantial disruption. Under Tinker, which doesn’t allow schools to merely rely upon “undifferentiated fear or apprehension of disturbance,” that reasoning fell flat.

The school also pointed to Hazelwood, but that standard did not seem to apply to The Wingspan. Hazelwood grants a more deferential standard to public school officials when dealing with “school-sponsored speech,” allowing them to regulate speech when their actions are reasonably related to legitimate pedagogical interests.

But based on the publication’s history of editorial independence, that standard would not apply. Hazelwood undeniably gives administrators more discretion over school-sponsored student speech — including student newspapers that are produced as part of a class or otherwise not set aside “by policy or practice” as forums for independent expression. But as McClaren and his peers noted, The Wingspan had long operated as such a forum. The school only took issue when his anti-ICE cartoon crossed their desktops.

But strong policies cement such protections and make it harder for administrators to deny them. That’s why McClaren, his peers, and FIRE called on the district to promulgate an official student media policy that protected student press rights.

Instead, they passed one that gutted them.

Making prior review permanent

On June 22, the Gretna Public Schools Board adopted an official policy regarding student media. Prior to its passage, McClaren and his peers didn’t have a chance to see what the new rules would be. “They never gave us a copy of the policy to read,” he said. It wasn’t until the policy had passed that McClaren and his peers could review it.

The policy marks a stark change. Student media is now considered “school-sponsored or part of the curriculum” that shall be “under the supervision and control” of not only the adviser but also the “building principal or designee.”

And while McClaren and his peers had largely operated without prior review in the past, the new policy allows for pre-publication review. “Prior to publication or distribution, school-sponsored student media may be reviewed by the classroom instructor, sponsor, principal, or designee to determine whether material is appropriate for publication or dissemination in a school-sponsored forum.” Among material that administrators may withhold is content that “gives the appearance of endorsing a political candidate or pending ballot issue.”

How the district treated McClaren’s cartoon offers little reason to believe it will limit the authority it granted itself to legitimate pedagogical concerns. McClaren connected the cartoon and the school’s reaction to it with the updated language. “You pretty much take a side in an opinion,” he noted. “And so, if [that opinion] were something political, then that would be pretty much in violation of that ninth bullet on there.”

McClaren said he sent emails to the superintendent and school board but didn’t hear back. But he wasn’t fazed. Instead, McClaren decided to look for other options to make change.

He began advocating for New Voices legislation. “I switched my focus so that the law would say they have to change.” He attended the New Voices Student Leaders Institute led by the Student Press Law Center, learning alongside other high school student journalists how to advocate for state-level protection for the student press.

These bills are designed to reverse the effects of Hazelwood, and often include language to stop Hazelwood from being improperly applied on college campuses. These statutory protections generally ensure student media remains free from administrative control or prior review.

“That’s my workaround to make them change it,” McClaren said of the school board and its new student media policy.

But for now, the district-level policy is in place, allowing prior review and placing restrictions on political content. Welcome back to school, Gretna East High student journalists. You have less press freedom now than when you left.

From 2000 through 2024, FIRE recorded 102 cases of politicians trying to silence faculty. That’s four cases a year on average. Then, in 2025 alone, we recorded 114. That extraordinary spike comes as federal efforts to reform higher education have too often crossed constitutional lines.

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At the same time, the old threat of censorship by school administrators never faded. This year, South Florida State College fired professor Vinita Prabhakar after its president called a celebrated short story she assigned about an alcoholic teacher “political.” Now Prabhakar, represented by FIRE and FIRE Legal Network member Gary Edinger, is suing the school. In 2019, the University of North Texas decided not to renew professor Nathaniel Hiers after he called flyers about microaggressions “garbage.” He sued, and the university settled for $165,000. Nearly a decade prior, UCLA refused to reappoint professor James Enstrom after his research questioned state environmental standards. After he sued, UCLA settled for $140,000.

These and cases like them span the ideological spectrum. They involve different subjects, contexts, and sources of pressure. But they share a pattern: Professors do their job, schools buckle under pressure and violate their rights, and taxpayers literally pay the consequences.

It’s time for a change.

To help state leaders enact that change, FIRE has drafted a new model bill — the Guaranteeing University Academic Rights and Discourse Act, or GUARD Act.

The GUARD Act draws on decades of First Amendment case law to ensure faculty at public colleges and universities can exercise their academic freedom and private speech rights without fear of state discipline. The bill takes constitutional protections that can be costly and time-consuming to vindicate in court and puts them directly into state law, with clear standards for universities and meaningful remedies for faculty.

Protecting teachers and their work

The GUARD Act protects professors by codifying an exception to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Garcetti v. Ceballos, which said public employees generally have no First Amendment protection for speech they make as part of their jobs.

Recognizing that their decision could threaten academic freedom, the Court chose not to decide whether it would apply to teaching or scholarship. Since then, however, every federal appeals court to squarely consider the issue has held that the First Amendment does protect faculty teaching and scholarship. The Supreme Court has yet to settle the question nationwide, but the GUARD Act provides an answer:

No public institution of higher education shall take adverse personnel action, or maintain a policy that allows it to take adverse personnel action, against a faculty member for expression related to their teaching or academic work, or for the dissemination of their academic work…

This recognizes that professors have the academic freedom to teach pedagogically relevant material and follow their research where it leads. And the exceptions to this broad protection are exactly the same commonsense rules faculty themselves have recognized for decades — institutions can discipline faculty for classroom expression that’s unrelated to the course but constitutes a substantial part of classroom time, for example, or for violations of basic, constitutionally permissible professional standards laid out in school policies.

Importantly, the GUARD Act makes clear those standards cannot be used as a backdoor to punish a professor because administrators dislike a viewpoint in their scholarship or because their work deviates from a majority view. And institutions remain free to address unlawful conduct, discriminatory harassment, unlawful discrimination, and expression that falls into one of the Supreme Court’s categories of unprotected speech.

Making universities find the balance

The GUARD Act also sets clear rules and procedures for deciding when the First Amendment protects public employees’ speech, based on Supreme Court doctrine.

That doctrine comes from Pickering v. Board of Education, which said public employees do not surrender their First Amendment rights just because they work for the government. When a public employee speaks as a citizen on a matter of public concern, the government cannot fire that person unless their speech seriously interferes with the government’s ability to do its job. This prevents public employers from treating controversy as grounds for termination. But universities often do exactly that.

That can be an expensive mistake. In just the past several months, public institutions have agreed to some hefty settlements after punishing employees for off-duty political speech, including a $1.9 million settlement by the University of Tennessee system and a $225,000 settlement by Ball State University.

To help ensure universities perform the Pickering balancing test, the GUARD Act prohibits schools from disciplining faculty for speaking as private citizens on matters of public concern unless a neutral decision-making body with at least one faculty member reviews the case. The school has to explain, in writing, how the speech interfered with the professor’s duties or the university’s operations. Specifically, the school has to answer how the speech:

(a) Severely impairs discipline by superiors or close working relationships between co-workers for which personal loyalty and confidence are necessary;

(b) Directly and substantially impairs the faculty member’s ability to perform essential job responsibilities; or

(c) Severely disrupts the institution’s regular operations.

The institution also has to account for the unique nature of the academic environment, including by giving significant weight to the chilling effect that disciplining faculty speech can have on other professors.

Most importantly, officials cannot use mere disagreement by politicians, administrators, employees, students, or members of the public to justify punishing a professor.

Giving the protections teeth

Of course, rights mean very little if nobody can enforce them.

The GUARD Act authorizes the person whose rights under the law have been violated to sue the institution or its agents to stop the violation. (The state attorney general can also file if needed.) And plaintiffs can seek compensatory damages.

That changes the incentive structure. Instead of asking professors to gamble their careers on whether administrators will remember, or respect, decades of First Amendment doctrine when controversy erupts, the GUARD Act tells universities the rules in advance and gives faculty a practical way to enforce them. The First Amendment already supplies the principle. The GUARD Act simply ensures public universities live by it.

FIRE stands ready to work with legislators interested in sponsoring the GUARD Act. Our team can tailor the model to each state’s needs and provide support throughout the legislative process. Interested legislators can contact us by emailing campus.legislative@fire.org or calling 215-717-FIRE (3473).

Free Speech Dispatch covers censorship trends and challenges around the world. If you want to know where free expression is under attack and why it matters, subscribe now to get each edition delivered to your inbox.

With each edition of the Free Speech Dispatch, I usually look outward from the United States to discuss how free speech is faring abroad, and whether those developments overseas mirror any in the United States, or could even limit whether and how Americans can speak. And I’ll cover plenty of those reports today. But in the leadoff story, I’ll ask a different question: How does a policy in the United States ultimately influence what is said and read outside of American borders? It’s an increasingly pressing issue as U.S. policies around visas, the border, and speech rapidly evolve — and this one may ultimately influence what news people abroad and even in the United States see online.

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United States to vet foreign journalists’ social media posts

The list of visa applicants who will be required to make their social media accounts public and provide their handles to U.S. officials is set to grow yet again. International students and a number of other classifications of visa applicants have, for months, faced new requirements for social media vetting, and now foreign media representatives — and their dependents — are joining them. A memo on the change reportedly states the U.S. “remains vigilant throughout the visa issuance process to confirm that applicants do not intend to cause harm to Americans or threaten U.S. interests.”

While the U.S. government possesses broad powers to control who is granted entry to the country, it’s no mystery how applicants will likely read this latest change: as a directive to watch what they say on social media if they want a chance to visit or work here. After all, just this month, the Department of State boasted that it revoked a massive number of visas, including some for speech that is protected under the First Amendment. Multiple people who said things that were not particularly nice — but nevertheless legal — about Charlie Kirk’s assassination were among those whose visas were revoked.

Ultimately, this means that foreign journalists hoping to obtain entry to the U.S. may now understandably think it prudent to avoid sharing potentially negative information or reporting about the United States online lest officials deny them entry for harming “U.S. interests.” And that could chill not just what journalists report on and share on social media or elsewhere, but also what their followers in the U.S. and abroad can read about and learn.

France’s under-15 ban stalls

President Emmanuel Macron was proud to push forward with the first teen social media ban in the European Union, but France’s landmark legislation has hit a judicial wall. In a decision last week, France’s Constitutional Council ruled that the bill was overbroad and threatened free expression. “The Council holds that the ​contested provisions, on the one hand, disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication and, on the other, fail to provide the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life,” the court said. Macron must go back to the drawing board now, but is undeterred and plans to have his government rewrite the legislation and for those revisions to effect before next spring.

The latest in hate speech law

Chris Minns, the New South Wales premier, announced this month that his government will not act on recommendations from a report it commissioned pushing for expanded hate speech laws. The report advocated broadening the Crimes Amendment (Inciting Racial Hatred) Bill 2025, which passed last year, to include characteristics like sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, and religion in the law against inciting hatred based on race. Attorney-General Michael Daley explained that the “government’s view is that expanding the racial hatred offence to cover other attributes raises complex questions about freedom of expression, freedom of religion, and the consistent application of the criminal law across the community.”

And in Germany, an appeals court acquitted a woman who was initially convicted and fined under the country’s laws against “unconstitutional symbols.” She had posted an Instagram story highlighting what she believed were similarities between actions taken by the Israeli government and the Nazi government, along with a flag that showed half the Israeli flag, half the Nazi swastika. She also shared an image of a Star of David with a swastika inside it and the hashtags #FREEPALESTINE and #GAZAUNDERATTACK.

The court found that her use of those symbols did not violate the law because she did so to “express sharp criticism of the methods of the State of Israel while being accompanied by a clear distancing from, or condemnation of, Nazi wrongdoing.”

UK regulators and media clash

The United Kingdom’s media regulator Ofcom is at odds with two media outlets over comments aired on their shows. Regulators are investigating after thousands of complaints came in over a July segment on GB News, during which conservative activist and guest Caroline Farrow criticized Pride. Farrow said there are “some very bizarre and unhealthy kinks and quirks, you know, like furries and bestiality and even minor-attracted, they call themselves minor-attracted people, you know, paedophiles.” Ofcom is investigating whether the material violated its broadcasting standards on offensive material.

Ofcom also censured the BBC for a satirical radio show, Strong Message Here, that took place last October. In it, comedian Stewart Lee criticized former head of the Oxford Union James Price for comments he made about potentially withdrawn donations to the Union after its president-elect made comments celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death. Price complained to Ofcom, arguing that “the failure to offer any right of reply cannot be justified on the grounds that this was a comedy programme.” Artistic freedom advocate Rosie Kay criticized the decision, saying that “If broadcasters have to worry that anyone they ridicule might demand a response, comedy will inevitably become more cautious.”

There’s even more UK media news: Figures across the political spectrum have criticized the use of surveillance and investigators to spy on a journalist reporting on political funding. Businessman Arron Banks reportedly hired a firm to investigate The Sunday Times editor Gabriel Pogrund after his team looked into convicted fraudster George Cottrell’s contributions to Reform’s Nigel Farage. Pogrund faced a similar incident in 2023 when he investigated the funding of a think tank associated with the Labour Party.

Brazilian influencer sentenced for ‘social racism’

Bianca Barreto, a social media influencer in Brazil, was fined $3,900 and sentenced to two years of court supervision after using male pronouns to discuss Duda Salabert, a trans lawmaker in Brazil. “A man is a man, a woman is a woman,” Barreto said in a video she’d posted discussing Salabert’s dispute with another politician.

In 2019, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court ruled that homophobia and transphobia would fall under the country’s anti-racism law. Judge Eduarda de Lima Vidal, when convicting Barreto, said that her comments about Salabert could not be considered protected free expression. Barreto’s lawyers plan to appeal.

Political censorship across Asia and beyond

• Authorities in Singapore banned the members of British band Massive Attack from re-entering the country after they unfurled a Palestinian flag and shouted “Free Palestine” on stage. “The police take a serious view of acts which could potentially harm the racial and religious harmony in Singapore and urge the public, including foreigners, to refrain from importing foreign politics as this can undermine our social cohesion and the rule of law,” authorities said in a statement. Singapore bans the display of foreign flags and exercises strict control over public speech and assembly.

• Advocacy group Human Rights in China was sanctioned by the Chinese government this month, part of a series of retaliatory measures over U.S. measures against forced labor. “While we were surprised to find HRIC included alongside organizations we were previously unfamiliar with, we regard this designation as a badge of honor,” HRIC said in a statement. “It demonstrates that our work has had an impact and that the Chinese government recognizes the importance of independent human rights advocacy.” Check out FIRE’s 2024 video with HRIC’s Executive Director Zhou Fengsuo, whose involvement in student protests at Tiananmen Square put him on China’s most wanted list.

• The Nepalese government forced the cancellation of an International Association for Tibetan Studies conference. Organizers suspect diplomatic pressure from the Chinese government, which maintains close ties with Nepal — and which has been ramping up its censorship of pro-Tibetan advocacy.

• Indonesian police are investigating blasphemy law violations after a viral video showed a person at an alcohol brand’s booth encouraging another musical festival attendee to recite part of the Quran from memory for a free drink.

• Journalists, activists, and social media users in India are objecting to large-scale take-downs on Instagram, many of which center on posts about Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the burgeoning Cockroach Janta Party.

• X says it is complying with, but will challenge, a court order that it block Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu’s presidential campaign account in Turkey on national security grounds. Imamoglu, who was arrested last year, is the primary political rival of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

• Iran’s parliament rubber-stamped a bill this week that would, among other things, criminalize interviews with media deemed hostile to Iran. Working with “hostile” outlets could be punished with up to two years in prison. The bill now goes to the Guardian Council for its approval.

• Sudanese authorities are using cybercrime legislation to target at least 15 media professionals and two outlets over their investigation of corruption in the government’s interior ministry. As I explained last week, the threat of cybercrime laws is growing fast.

Pope Francis’ memoir censored in Russia

Russia’s “gay propaganda law,” and further restrictions on speech deemed pro-LGBT, have apparently struck again. The Russian publisher of the late Pope Francis’ memoir, Hope: The Autobiography, reportedly blacked out portions of the book that dealt with LGBT members of the Catholic Church. Censored passages include those arguing that homosexuality is not a crime and that LGBT people are welcome in the Church and can be baptized.

Max Friedman studies at the University of Memphis Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, where he is the editor-in-chief of the University of Memphis Law Review.

This is the third entry in a series on antisemitism and speech-restrictive policies. See also parts one and two.

Students continue to shout down controversial speakers on college campuses across the country. And as Americans’ views on Israel have soured amid ongoing conflict in the region, this unfortunate aspect of campus culture has ensnared numerous pro-Israel speakers. FIRE takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But FIRE has a long track record of fighting back when hecklers interrupt events and silence invited speakers — no matter the speaker’s viewpoint.

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One notorious accusation of “mob censorship” involving debate over Israel came from the City University of New York (CUNY) in the fall of 2023. Hunter College’s president invited Rabbi Andy Bachman to offer a pro-Israel perspective during a panel discussion following a screening of the film Israelism, alongside the filmmakers. The film follows two American Jews as they question their commitment to Israel, and it had itself been previously subject to cancellation. Bachman claimed that students repeatedly interrupted the panel, preventing him from asking his prepared questions. A lawsuit filed by Professor Leah Garrett against CUNY even alleged that a student “grabbed the microphone from the rabbi’s hand.” (Other professors attending the event attributed some of the blame to Bachman’s adversarial questioning of the filmmakers and purported refusal to ask questions students had submitted.)

Similar instances have occurred on other campuses across the country. Earlier this year, pro-Palestinian students at Sarah Lawrence College disrupted an event featuring New York Times journalist Ezra Klein. At Princeton University in 2025, students shouted down former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett (and allegedly pulled a fire alarm to end the event prematurely). At UC Berkeley in 2024, demonstrators shut down a lecture by an Israeli attorney invited to discuss international law as it pertains to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

These incidents are deeply concerning for free expression on campus. There is no First Amendment privilege to prevent someone else from speaking in reserved spaces. Blocking others from expressing viewpoints that may be uncommon or unpopular on campus frustrates the marketplace of ideas: It interferes with others’ right to listen and leaves the campus community with an incomplete understanding of the debate. This principle applies equally to all speakers, including those expressing pro-Israel viewpoints.

Universities have the tools they need to respond to these incidents. For example, they can prohibit students from intentionally, materially, and substantially disrupting others’ expressive activities in reserved spaces, and they can discipline students who violate that prohibition. They can also set expectations by educating incoming students on these and similar policies. Unfortunately, many institutions have failed to take these basic steps.

What these institutions — and the state — should not do is respond to illiberal actions by proposing illiberal remedies, such as incorporating the vague and viewpoint-discriminatory IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism into campus harassment policies. It defines antisemitism as “a certain perception of Jews,” a formulation so indeterminate that speakers and institutions cannot reasonably know what expression is permitted and what is prohibited. It also singles out particular political viewpoints — for example, “applying double standards” to Israel — as indicative of antisemitism, thereby burdening one side of the discourse. And even its carveout language, exempting criticism of Israel “similar to” criticism of other democratic nations, manages to discriminate by controlling the tone of this contentious public debate.

Make no mistake: Using the IHRA definition in campus harassment policies creates confusion and unnecessarily politicizes the worthy goal of protecting Jewish students’ civil rights on campus. Indeed, arguments extolling the IHRA definition’s ability to prevent mob censorship are seriously flawed.

Some have justified this use of IHRA or similarly viewpoint-discriminatory frameworks in part by arguing that pro-Israel students are so marginalized and denigrated that they are unable to engage in effective counterspeech. And certainly, self-censorship on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a real problem. (53% of students in our 2026 College Free Speech Rankings survey called it a difficult topic to “have an open and honest conversation about on campus”).

But this argument not only prescribes an illiberal disease as a cure, it underestimates the agency that pro-Israel speakers already possess. In the Princeton example discussed above, former Prime Minister Bennett and members of the audience demonstrated the power of collectively responding to the disruption: The crowd spontaneously sang Hebrew songs and the Israeli national anthem. Powerful collective responses like this may empower speakers and listeners who would otherwise have been left isolated or suppressed. Colleges and universities can further embolden pro-Israel speakers by being proactive and decisive in addressing shout downs and by normalizing disagreement through speech-protective policies and orientation programs.

Debates over Israel and antisemitism must not be controlled through censorship by administrators, governments, or mobs. Even if certain perspectives are uncomfortable or offensive to some, the First Amendment prescribes more speech as a remedy, not less. This approach allows all of us to gain a more robust understanding of contentious issues, even if we don’t ultimately change our minds. As Justice Louis Brandeis famously wrote in Whitney v. California, “Those who won our independence by revolution were not cowards. They did not fear political change. They did not exalt order at the cost of liberty.”

And neither should we.

Consider again Naftali Bennett and his audience’s response to the Princeton incident. Even if one vehemently opposes their perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, it is hard to deny how powerfully their counterspeech communicated the value of standing up for what you believe. Rather than responding to illiberalism with more illiberalism, universities and state actors should adopt policies that empower and protect the right to boldly speak back.

President Mark Brown recently welcomed incoming classes to Tuskegee University by announcing a new campus dress code.

The new code says students must arrive on campus with “a business suit and proper shoes for a business meeting” and bans revealing clothing, baseball caps, bedroom slippers, bonnets, sunglasses, durags, and clothing displaying profanity, sex, or drugs in classrooms, the cafeteria, and official school settings. T-shirt dresses and sagging pants are also off limits. Brown said faculty are “empowered to respond” if students disobey.

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The new policy is a nod to Tuskegee’s past. Tuskegee first adopted student uniforms in 1886, just five years after it opened, requiring male students to wear “a dark blue suit.” The suits would be supplied by the school’s Girls’ Industrial Room at a cost of about $13 for coat and trousers.

This fit with founder and first president Booker T. Washington’s model of academic study combined with professional discipline. Washington repeatedly tied personal appearance to the respect black Americans could command from others. In his autobiography, he described the difficulty of wearing one suit to work and school, and keeping it clean, and wrote how learning to care for his appearance inspired self-respect.

In keeping with Washington’s philosophy of respectability, Tuskegee continues to emphasize dress and professionalism today. But the university also makes broad commitments to student expression and intellectual independence. Although the school is a private institution not bound by the First Amendment, its laudable commitment to students’ free expression is inconsistent with a broad dress code.

Put simply, a university that promises its students freedom of expression shouldn’t undermine that promise by policing what students wear to lunch. Few would say that sagging pants, bedroom slippers, or bonnets are professional attire. And Tuskegee has a legitimate interest in helping students navigate professional expectations. But teaching students how to dress for a job interview doesn’t require turning the cafeteria into one.

Durags and bonnets can communicate identity, culture, or simply personal taste. Clothing is expressive precisely because people use it to communicate something about themselves. Solange Knowles wore a durag as part of her 2018 Met Gala look. Rihanna appeared on the cover of British Vogue wearing one in 2020, with the word “Rebel!” across her chest. There’s even a Durag Festival in Charlotte to celebrate black creativity in the city.

Or consider Tuskegee’s ban on clothing displaying profanity, sexual content, violence, illegal drugs, alcohol, or tobacco. If the school’s commitment to free expression means anything, it should only ban clothing that’s reasonably likely to disrupt class. Telling adults they cannot wear, for example, T-shirts depicting dogs playing poker and smoking cigars, advertising a local pub, or saying “Save Ukraine, Bomb Russia” is entirely inappropriate at a university that claims to believe in freedom of expression.

“We are never asking Tuskegee to lower its standards,” Rayne Caldwell, sophomore class president, said in a recent Facebook post. “We are asking Tuskegee to prioritize the standards that matter most.”

Given the policy’s broad restrictions on ordinary campus life, FIRE wrote to Tuskegee University urging administrators to reconsider the policy and bring its dress code into closer alignment with the university’s stated commitments to freedom of expression.

While it is true that Washington valued dress as a means of empowering black people, he also wrote in his autobiography about an even greater tool for black empowerment: speech. Describing his own speaking career, he explained how he accepted invitations to speak on the understanding that he was “to be free to talk about my life-work and the needs of my people.”

Universities can prepare students to know when a business suit is appropriate in professional life. But they don’t need to make every classroom or every trip to lunch a dress rehearsal for the boardroom. Tuskegee can honor Washington’s legacy by protecting the free expression rights he so prized.

Elizabeth Maguire is a rising senior at the University of Florida.

Update: A previous version of this article said NYU administrators told student leaders they could not raise money under their club names. NYU disputes this, which we have now noted.

Less than 100 days before its 2026 commencement, New York University canceled 13 identity- and faith-based graduation celebrations. Administrators reportedly cited the “current political climate.” They also restricted students’ attempts to organize replacement ceremonies and required many student commencement speakers to record their remarks rather than deliver them live.

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The result is a graduation season designed less to celebrate students than to minimize the risk that they might say something controversial.

NYU wasn’t the first university to retreat from affinity ceremonies. In 2025, Harvard University, the University of Kentucky, Virginia Tech, and the University of Utah withdrew funding or support from similar events amid the Trump administration’s campaign against DEI programs. Some state universities also changed their ceremonies in response to state anti-DEI laws.

But NYU’s actions in 2026 stand apart. While other students were able to hold separate celebrations, the university acted after the federal government’s central anti-DEI education directive had been vacated and rendered unenforceable. And NYU didn’t just pull its own sponsorship either. It reportedly tried to control what students could do on their own.

Student leaders told Washington Square News that administrators said they could no longer fundraise under their club names. NYU disputes that account and says it never communicated such a restriction. Chris Woods, NYU’s associate vice president for community development and connection, also reportedly told affinity groups independent events could not include “anything akin to a graduation.” Students could not walk across a stage, host alumni speakers, or call their events graduations.

NYU may reasonably reserve the word “graduation” for official university ceremonies if that is necessary to prevent confusion. But barring students from walking across a stage or inviting speakers reaches far beyond protecting NYU’s trademarks or distinguishing official events from private ones. It dictates the form and content of students’ expressive gatherings. The phrase “anything akin to a graduation” is also too vague to give students meaningful guidance. What counts: caps and gowns? A procession? A valedictory speech? “Pomp and Circumstance”? Vague rules invite arbitrary enforcement because students cannot know where the line is until administrators decide they have crossed it.

Several impacted clubs, such as the black and first-generation affinity groups, began seeking donations for alternative events. For students at a university as large as NYU, these smaller celebrations can carry special importance. Ticket limits at major commencement ceremonies may prevent extended families from attending, while affinity events offer a more intimate setting for graduates to celebrate with the communities that supported them.

Consider the history of lavender graduations. Ronni Sanlo, then a University of Michigan administrator, organized the first such event in 1995 after her former spouse barred her from attending their children’s graduation because she was a lesbian. The tradition spread nationwide, giving LGBT students a ceremony centered on shared experiences and community.

Affinity ceremonies may be open to criticism, but voluntary association is not the same as mandatory segregation. Students choosing to gather around a shared identity, religion, experience, or interest are exercising associational freedom — provided the events do not exclude participants in violation of the law.

The federal directive was already dead

In February 2025, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights issued a “Dear Colleague” letter asserting that schools receiving federal funds must end discriminatory DEI policies, racial preferences, and stereotypes not only in admissions but also in scholarships, hiring, discipline, housing, graduation ceremonies, and other programs.

The department invoked Students for Fair Admissions v. President and Fellows of Harvard College, the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision rejecting the consideration of race in Harvard University’s and the University of North Carolina’s admissions programs.

But Students for Fair Admissions addressed admissions. It did not announce that every voluntary, identity-based student gathering is unlawful. Nor did it hold that universities must suppress discussion of race, withdraw recognition from affinity organizations, or forbid celebrations organized around shared experiences.

It seems that the DOE’s misrepresentation of Students for Fair Admissions is part of the federal government’s greater push to end DEI practices and programs.

NYU therefore cannot persuasively point to that directive as a legal command requiring the cancellation of its affinity ceremonies. At most, the administration’s larger anti-DEI campaign helps explain the “political climate” NYU feared. But political pressure is not the same thing as a binding legal obligation.

NYU’s censorship problem

NYU is a private university and generally is not bound by the First Amendment. That means its cancellation of an event or screening of a graduation speech is not automatically unconstitutional, since the First Amendment restricts government actors. But that doesn’t make NYU’s choices wise or consistent with the values of free expression that a university should protect.

The decision to replace live student remarks with prerecorded speeches raises a related problem. In 2026, student speakers at individual NYU school ceremonies were reportedly required to record their remarks in advance, while the university-wide commencement retained a live speaker. NYU said invited speakers speak for the entire graduating community and that it wanted to ensure a respectful experience. NYU may set reasonable conditions for speakers chosen to represent a graduating class. Students do not necessarily have an unlimited right to turn an official commencement address into a personal political platform.

Still, eliminating live remarks from an entire category of ceremonies because one student departed from an approved speech is a sweeping response.

To be fair, NYU’s concern did not arise in a vacuum. During a May 14, 2025, ceremony for the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, student speaker Logan Rozos departed from his submitted remarks and condemned what he called “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine” and U.S. “complicity in this genocide.” NYU accused Rozos of lying about the speech he planned to deliver and withheld his diploma while it pursued disciplinary action.

Again, NYU can enforce neutral rules requiring selected speakers to submit and substantially follow their remarks. But the university’s stated objection that Rozos used the podium to express “personal and one-sided political views” is troubling because political views are usually personal and one-sided. A university committed to free expression should discipline fraud or disruption, but not punish a speaker merely because administrators disagree with his opinion or consider the occasion an inappropriate moment.

Association is not segregation

Critics characterize affinity graduations as “soft segregation.” Craig Trainor, then the Education Department’s acting assistant secretary for civil rights, wrote, “In a shameful echo of a darker period in this country’s history, many American schools and universities even encourage segregation by race at graduation ceremonies.”

That criticism should be taken seriously when an event excludes students based on race. Universities must not recreate racially closed programs under a more appealing label. But the segregation analogy fails when participation is voluntary and open to anyone. Jim Crow laws used government power to compel separation and deny equal access. An open student celebration organized around shared identity or experience does neither.

This distinction matters under the First Amendment. In Rosenberger v. Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia, the Supreme Court held that a public university could not deny student-activity funding to a publication because of its religious viewpoint. And in Matal v. Tam, the Court reaffirmed the government’s obligation not to suppress speech just because it’s offensive.

Those cases do not compel NYU, a private institution, to sponsor affinity ceremonies. They do, however, illustrate the danger of government policies that single out student organizations or expression because officials disfavor their messages. Public universities that make facilities or funding generally available must administer those resources under neutral rules.

After NYU students pushed back, Raea Lovett, a junior at NYU’s Silver School of Social Work, proposed a resolution to the Student Government Assembly calling for the restoration of affinity graduations. NYU later invited graduating students to yearend celebrations for 16 communities, which would function almost identically to the traditional affinity graduations that were canceled.

That compromise reduced the immediate harm, but did not answer why NYU canceled the ceremonies in the first place, tried to restrict independent alternatives, or replaced live student speeches with recordings. Nor does the label “end-of-year celebration” meaningfully change the expressive character of an event that functions much like an affinity ceremony it replaced.

Universities can enforce anti-discrimination law without treating every gathering built around identity as unlawful. They can set neutral rules for commencement speakers without turning every speech into a pre-approved video. And they can protect graduation ceremonies without banning students from staging celebrations that look too much like graduation.

But NYU went a step further. The First Amendment did not require NYU to cancel these events. The Education Department’s invalidated directive did not require it either. NYU chose administrative control over trust, and then cited the “current political climate.”

Max Friedman is a rising third-year law student at the University of Memphis. This is the second entry in a series on antisemitism and speech-restrictive policies. See also the first entry about a play about Jewish lesbians.

Universities don’t have to choose between protecting Jewish students and championing freedom of speech. In fact, federal law requires them to do both. Yet when my alma mater, Brown University, resolved a federal civil rights investigation during the Biden administration in July 2024, the line between protected speech and unprotected conduct was unnecessarily blurred.

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The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights had been investigating Brown’s handling of alleged antisemitism on campus after the October 7 attacks on Israel in 2023. Brown maintained it had complied with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Had OCR found Brown in violation, it could have pulled federal funding from the university. The voluntary resolution agreement let Brown end the investigation while claiming to uphold its commitments to academic freedom.

Yet OCR’s outcome letter provided “illustrative examples” of reported discrimination that include both serious allegations of peer harassment against Jewish students and speech protected by the First Amendment. Some students, for example, reported receiving threats and being blocked from accessing rallies on campus. Such conduct is clearly unprotected by the First Amendment, and could create a hostile environment for Jewish students on campus. But other allegations — students chanting “from the river to the sea,” inviting controversial anti-Israel speakers to campus, and displaying posters with anti-Israel messages — would raise serious First Amendment issues if used to subject the university to civil rights liability.

FIRE takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, nor does it endorse or condemn any of the constitutionally protected expression listed above. Universities may well have failed in some cases to properly address actionable misconduct. But institutions have too often responded to federal scrutiny by conceding more than civil rights law requires.

Columbia University and Reed College, for example, resolved similar investigations in 2025 and 2026 by incorporating the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism into university policy and agreeing to consider the definition and its examples as evidence of discriminatory intent. This usage of the IHRA definition creates confusion about what speech is and is not allowed regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and risks stifling expression on an important matter of public concern.

Of course, it is not unusual for civil rights settlements to include provisions that reform institutional policies. What is unusual is the extent to which these settlements bypass First Amendment limitations on Title VI. Federal courts have grown increasingly clear on two key principles.

First, the standard articulated by the Supreme Court in Davis v. Monroe County Board of Education is the appropriate means of assessing whether a university failed to adequately respond to reports of discriminatory peer harassment on campus. FIRE has long supported the Davis standard, which defines actionable discriminatory peer harassment as conduct that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive, and that so undermines and detracts from the victims’ educational experience, that the victim-students are effectively denied equal access to an institution’s resources and opportunities.”

This standard effectively balances the government’s interest in protecting students from discriminatory conduct against the risks of suppressing protected student speech and subjecting universities to endless liability. And although the Davis standard was first articulated in the Title IX sexual harassment context, courts have readily extended it to Title VI hostile environment claims based on race, color, or national origin — including claims of antisemitism.

Second, the First Amendment limits harassment law’s reach. In the landmark case Saxe v. State College Area School District, then-Judge Samuel Alito wrote for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, “There is no categorical harassment exception to the First Amendment’s free speech clause.” The Supreme Court and lower courts have since warned against transforming harassment law into a “general civility code.”

Numerous federal courts have agreed when considering Title VI hostile environment claims against universities for their handling of pro-Palestinian protests. For example, a federal district judge in Gartenberg v. Cooper Union Center for the Advancement of Science and Art concluded that Title VI does not allow for liability based on protected speech on a matter of public concern. The First Circuit in a similar case, StandWithUS Center for Legal Justice v. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, found that the complaint largely rested on allegations that the university declined to censor core political speech.

Colleges are sophisticated actors. They are well-equipped to enforce their conduct rules, litigate cases, negotiate settlement terms, and craft nuanced responses to complaints. They should act like it.

Notably, the complaint in Gartenberg survived a motion to dismiss because it alleged significant discriminatory conduct; for example, demonstrators allegedly surrounded and banged on the windows of a library while identifiably Jewish students were inside studying. But in both cases — and others at the University of California at Berkeley, Haverford College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago — courts recognized that Davis and the First Amendment do not permit Title VI liability premised solely on students’ subjectively offensive political speech.

Accordingly, Title VI does not obligate universities to respond to protected speech or settle investigations by adopting speech-restrictive policies. Instead, universities must respond to allegations of discriminatory hostile environment harassment by enforcing their conduct policies and applying the Davis standard. This approach gives universities the tools they need to respond to actionable discriminatory harassment — for example, when students directly target their peers with true threats, block others from parts of campus, or damage property — without chilling free speech.

Unfortunately, as we’ve seen, too many universities have taken a different path. Some have failed to enforce their conduct policies and, when faced with subsequent scrutiny, agreed to settlements that fail to distinguish between protected speech and unprotected discriminatory conduct. But with this approach, institutions commit a double wrong. They fail the students who were victims of actionable discriminatory harassment, and they betray their commitments to the students whose speech is suppressed by flawed policies.

Colleges are sophisticated actors. They are well-equipped to enforce their conduct rules, litigate cases, negotiate settlement terms, and craft nuanced responses to complaints. They should act like it, rather than making unnecessary concessions that will chill the very free expression that they claim to support.

In 1990, black blues musician Daryl Davis arranged to interview Roger Kelly, the Ku Klux Klan’s imperial wizard in Maryland, without telling him he was black. Kelly arrived at Davis’s hotel room with an armed bodyguard. The meeting was dangerous, but it sparked an unlikely friendship. Kelly eventually left the Klan, gave Davis his robe and hood, and even asked Davis to be his daughter’s godfather.

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Davis now travels the country with a collection of Klan hoods and Nazi flags given to him by people who say their conversations with David helped them reject racism. On June 21, he shared that work with a rapt audience at FIRE’s third annual Free Speech Forum in Washington, D.C.

The Forum is a weeklong summer program where high school students learn about the First Amendment and how to defend — and advocate for — their free speech rights. Nearly 200 students traveled from across the country to American University’s campus, where they practiced debate, collaborated on free speech projects, and heard from First Amendment leaders.

During Davis’ keynote address, students eagerly asked about the expressive power of music and how they could emulate his courage and commitment to dialogue. The conversations continued after the lecture, through the opening night’s ice cream social, and throughout the week. Students repeatedly returned to the five principles Davis discussed: Everyone wants to be loved, respected, heard, treated fairly and truthfully, and everyone wants the same things for their family that you want for yours.

The next day, students heard from Lee Rowland, executive director of the National Coalition Against Censorship and former policy director at the New York Civil Liberties Union. Her quick-witted answers about free speech litigation energized students about the breadth of First Amendment law — and the many paths into civil liberties advocacy. Rowland urged students to be wary when the government reduces minors’ rights in the name of protecting children, pointing to age-verification laws being proposed and enacted in the United States and abroad.

Afterward, students unwound at Creative Expression Night. As they beaded keychains and colored banners, one student announced a new life goal: working at the NYCLU.

Students also worked together on projects to strengthen free speech culture at their own schools. They produced instructional zines and pamphlets, skits, games, videos, comic books, and plans for community action days.

Later in the week, they heard from Nadine Strossen, former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, who has spent her career defending even the most controversial speech. Strossen discussed how technology has transformed free expression and recalled leading the ACLU during Reno v. ACLU, the Supreme Court’s first major case addressing freedom of expression on the internet. The Court struck down provisions of the Communications Decency Act that broadly restricted online speech deemed “indecent” or “patently offensive” in an effort to shield minors.

As artificial intelligence rapidly develops, Strossen encouraged students to embrace new technology without abandoning books. Her own passion for free speech, she said, began when she read and reread every book available to her in the library as a child.

FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff then traced the history of free speech from Socrates to the present day. Against a backdrop of colorful slides, he described free speech as a nonpartisan democratic principle — and an “eternally radical idea.”

The Eternally Radical Idea with Greg Lukianoff

A blog about freedom of speech and both the Coddling & Canceling of the American Mind.

His talk resonated with students. One said Lukianoff’s “unique perspective” encouraged them to see free speech not merely as a tool for individual speakers, but as a principle worthy of protection in its own right.

The students also left campus for a trip to Capitol Hill, visiting the Folger Shakespeare Library, the Library of Congress, the Lincoln Memorial, and the U.S. Capitol. Back at American University, they performed in a talent show, sang karaoke, competed in trivia, and ended one evening with bowling and arcade games.

But the Forum’s most important moments did not always happen onstage. They happened when students confronted a person who sincerely believed something they considered deeply wrong — and chose to ask another question instead of walking away.

They practiced how to debate effectively, disagree respectfully, and search for truth amid conflict. Most of all they learned that sometimes the first step toward defeating an idea is having the courage to speak with the person who holds it.

This article originally appeared in The Los Angeles Times on Aug. 1, 2026. According to Times editorial policy, the newspaper substituted “a racial epithet” for “nigger” and “a slur against women” for “cunt.”

Members of the Los Angeles City Council would like a word or two — to ban.

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Last July, the council adopted a motion to prohibit two terms — a racial epithet and a slur against women — during the legally required public comment periods of their meetings. As the rules document states, anyone who says “any variation of either of these words” during public comment will be warned. If they say a banned word again at that meeting or any subsequent one, they’ll be removed. Ejected speakers automatically are prohibited from attending future meetings for up to six business days.

This policy, championed by Council President Marqueece Harris-Dawson, is meant to push back against words he argues are “designed to attack someone’s personhood and their protected status.”

Now, you may loathe the words in question and never use them yourself. You may share the council’s desire to make public comment more civil and appropriate. You may believe Harris-Dawson and the other council members’ hearts are in the right place.

But make no mistake: The council is effectively claiming the authority to ban any words it decides are inappropriate or offensive in the future. That’s a very dangerous power to grant any government official. Even if you agree today, you might not always be so fortunate.

Imagine a different council justifying bans on words like “trans woman” or “cisgender” because they’re “designed to attack someone’s personhood.” Imagine council members banning the phrases “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada” because they believe these slogans are so offensive, they’re inherently disruptive. That’s the power the council is seizing.

And before you raise the slippery slope fallacy, listen to the council president’s own words. Asked whether this was just the beginning of a more concerted effort to police “offensive” language during public meetings, Harris-Dawson replied, “Absolutely. This is as much a step as we can take at this moment, we believe. But we think it will open us up to take additional steps in the future.”

We should take him at his word.

It’s certainly true that things can get ugly during public comment. During a March 2025 council meeting, for example, a regular attendee spent his time at the podium leveling a series of expletive-laden complaints, hurling insults and slurs at council members, Jews, the pope, and black people.

Council meetings are frequented by many characters of this type, and it can be an understandably difficult and frustrating experience for those on the receiving end of these tirades. But the First Amendment reflects a judgment that, in a free society, it’s safer to require officials to tolerate even vile language than to empower officials to decide what criticism is off-limits. The council can prohibit actual disruption of its proceedings, like speaking when not recognized, but it can’t conflate harsh words with disruptive conduct.

Unfortunately, this is precisely the kind of conflation the council’s ban allows it to make, and the ban isn’t even limited to the use of slurs as insults. The rules make clear that speakers are prohibited from using the specified epithets during public comment “even though the speakers would use the words to express a non-offensive, non-vulgar viewpoint.” Put another way, the words are banned regardless of context, including when criticizing the ban itself — which is what resident Stacey Segarra-Bohlinger was doing during a council meeting last Halloween.

Speaking during public comment, Segarra-Bohlinger protested the ban on the slur against women, saying the council was “afraid of the word.” In accordance with all other council rules, she remained on topic, did not exceed her allotted time and did not otherwise interfere with the council’s ability to conduct business. In other words, she didn’t disrupt the meeting.

Councilmember Heather Hutt felt otherwise. She objected on the basis that the word offended her and insisted that the council president intervene. Segarra-Bohlinger was then warned and threatened with removal. When she protested again in a similar fashion the following December, she was removed and banned from future meetings in response.

This unconstitutional overreach is why the First Amendment Coalition and my organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, sent a demand letter to the council: Repeal these rules now or face a lawsuit.

We’re doing this because defending our ability to speak, even when we offend others, is critical to preserving our fundamental freedoms. If we allow the government to decide what we can and cannot say, then our First Amendment right to speak our minds becomes a mere privilege granted at the discretion of the powers that be.

It’s never fun to feel like you’re being verbally abused or insulted. But the point of public comment is to allow the public to comment, and that commentary sometimes will be offensive and upsetting to some of us. That is the price of public discourse in a democracy, especially if you are an elected official.

It’s also how we ensure that our own right to speak freely isn’t infringed upon simply because some find it unacceptable.

The city commission of Emporia, Kansas, has endured countless hours of public criticism. What it could not endure was a few seconds of clapping.

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At its July 22 meeting, citizens contested a proposed data center, briefly applauding between public comments as one speaker left the microphone and another approached. Commissioners sometimes ignored the applause and other times warned the audience to stop. But their warnings soon expanded to cover even more muted reactions like finger-snapping and a woman in the back of the room silently waving her hands.

When high school physics teacher Lux Claridge clapped five times for a speaker, a commissioner told officers to remove the next person who clapped. But instead of waiting for another round of applause, officers immediately ordered Claridge to leave. After refusing, Claridge was physically removed, arrested, and booked on charges of disorderly conduct and interference with law enforcement.

In other words, a citizen was thrown to the ground, arrested, and removed from a public meeting for endorsing criticism of local government in a non-disruptive manner.

Emporia’s written public-comment rules don’t ban applause. They authorize removal when someone “fails to comply with public comment procedure, speaks out of turn, or is otherwise disruptive,” and continues after a warning. To be sure, government bodies can adopt clear, viewpoint-neutral rules against conduct that actually disrupts a meeting — preventing speakers from being heard, hijacking the floor when not recognized to speak, or otherwise preventing the government from conducting its business.

But that’s not what happened in the Emporia Municipal Courtroom. None of the clapping, including Claridge’s, materially disrupted the meeting. Each burst of applause lasted only a few seconds during the interval between public comments. No speaker was interrupted or delayed. The meeting continued moving forward. The only disruption came from the arrest of Claridge and the meeting recess that followed.

The incident illustrates a recurring problem with vague decorum policies for public meetings. They give officials room to recast expression they dislike as “disruption,” and tend to be enforced most aggressively when criticism stings. It’s hard to believe the commission would have reacted the same way to brief applause for comments praising city officials. But even if so, the fact remains that none of the clapping was “otherwise disruptive.” And Claridge’s refusal to leave cannot retroactively supply the missing disruption to justify removal in the first place.

Emporia’s own policy says public comment is intended to “provide citizens with an opportunity to provide input to the governing body on matters of city business.” Brief, nondisruptive audience reactions do exactly that. A few seconds of applause signal support for a speaker and the intensity of public sentiment. Applause can also give residents who don’t make a formal comment themselves a way to convey their opinions.

Local government meetings are where people confront decisions about their neighborhoods, schools, taxes, utilities, and homes. Officials can require order — the First Amendment does not force them to let meetings become ungovernable — but they can’t demand monastic silence and perfect stillness from everyone in the room, then treat any audible or visible reaction as disorder.

If no speaker is drowned out, no one loses their speaking time, and the meeting keeps moving, where is the disruption? When brief applause becomes grounds for removal and arrest, it’s worth asking whether officials are preserving order, or simply punishing dissent.

Caroline Cunningham is a rising junior at the University of Alabama, where she is majoring in legal history on the pre-law track.

A formidable enemy of free speech on college campuses is self-censorship. Much has been said about how to make students more willing to voice their opinions, but proposed solutions often overlook the people best positioned to change the culture where self-censorship frequently occurs: professors.

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Professors shape many of the environments where students decide whether speaking candidly is worth the risk. In a FIRE student survey conducted in 2025, 72% of students said they self-censor at least occasionally either when speaking in class or with a professor. Yet despite their direct influence over students’ willingness to speak, professors — and the classroom techniques they employ — remain underused in efforts to address the problem.

Self-censorship at the classroom level is especially troubling. More than half of respondents said they would feel uncomfortable expressing their views on a controversial topic during an in-class discussion. Students also feared that revealing their opinions could hurt their grades. About one-third said they had hidden their political beliefs from professors at least occasionally in hopes of getting a better grade.

Whether those fears are well-founded in every case, they are powerful incentives to remain silent. Students may worry that a professor will penalize an unpopular viewpoint, or that classmates will judge them for expressing it. Either concern can be enough to make silence seem safer than candor.

Professors, however, can meaningfully reduce those fears by creating classrooms in which disagreement is expected and handled fairly.

What does such a classroom look like? The basic practices are pretty straightforward: present competing positions accurately, assign serious readings from multiple perspectives, ask students to articulate arguments they may not share, and emphasize that disagreement is an essential part of intellectual inquiry.

Professor neutrality can help, but a viewpoint-open classroom does not require professors to conceal their own beliefs. It requires them to remain conscious of the authority their views carry and of the chilling effect that authority can have on students who disagree. A professor who claims to welcome discussion while treating one position as obviously enlightened and its alternatives as morally or intellectually suspect is not truly inviting debate.

The best college class I have taken demonstrated what this can look like in practice. The class addressed abortion, gun control, and numerous other contentious issues. After our discussion of abortion, I left the room amazed. Students had exchanged opposing views respectfully and productively. There was no echo chamber, no reluctance to challenge another person’s reasoning, and no palpable tension. That atmosphere was not accidental. It was the result of how the professor conducted the class.

Before coming into class that day, our reading assignments had included compelling sources from both sides of the debate. When we entered class, we explained each source’s argument—not belittling either, but seeking to understand them. Then, we interrogated each argument. At one point, my professor assigned a “side” to each half of the room and had representatives respectfully debate. During general discussion, my professor aided the less represented side, which tended to shift depending on which element of the issue we were discussing. Throughout the class, he never revealed his personal opinion on the issue and commented only on the academic merits of each argument.

In that class, there certainly seemed to be little discomfort with voicing a controversial opinion, as many students expressed them. In fact, controversial opinions were encouraged and welcomed because they gave us the chance to consider another side of the issue. When we wrote our essays, there was no doubt in my mind that they would be graded entirely on their academic merit, not influenced by any personal feelings my professor might harbor.

In my experience, that classroom was exceptional.

I have seen many classrooms quickly become echo chambers, with discussion mostly reiterating the prevailing view the professor had endorsed. I have been in classes where I, like many students, hesitated to raise my hand because the professor was less than encouraging of opinions contrary to their own. I have softened or even completely shied away from expressing my true point of view in written assignments out of fear that my professor might find some arbitrary excuse to dock me points because they didn’t agree with me.

Whether or not those fears would have been realized, professors hold an often underestimated amount of power over the culture of self-censorship at the classroom level. The professors I self-censored around likely would not have let their own opinions cloud their objective evaluation of my assignments, and perhaps they would have been more tolerant of contrary opinions during classroom discussions than I had supposed. But I had self-censored because the classroom environment did not come across as viewpoint-open enough to outweigh my fears in a cost-benefit analysis of whether I should speak up. This is likely the case for countless other students who self-censor in the classroom.

Peer culture is an important reason students self-censor, and classroom environments have the potential to influence this too. Conversations are carried over from the classroom to the broader campus. If students are meeting each other’s ideas in classrooms where they feel unafraid to raise their hand and express a controversial opinion, this will likely spill over into their interactions with their peers outside of the structured classroom setting. This could produce greater tolerance among students of opposing viewpoints, and could lead to a higher number of productive discussions as well as a decrease in self-censorship, as students will have learned from the example set in their classes.

It is especially important for professors to create viewpoint-open classroom environments today, when academia’s faculty is largely left-leaning. This likely makes students in the political minority less confident that their views will be received fairly. Indeed, the 2025 FIRE survey revealed that frequent self-censorship in the classroom and in conversations with professors is highest among conservative or Republican students. Self-censorship of students in the ideological minority only heightens the threat of universities becoming increasingly ideologically homogeneous and makes it imperative that professors work to ensure such students do not feel the need to self-censor.

The classroom is the heart of a university. The work students do there is their primary reason for attending college. If in their classes students feel that they should hide their opinions to get a better grade, or feel uncomfortable engaging in a controversial classroom discussion, the culture of the school becomes one of fear.

Professors can instead foster a culture of openness by recognizing their role in combating student self-censorship and employing teaching methods that create viewpoint-open classrooms and, ultimately, a more viewpoint-open university.

Last summer, a former student journalist asked the University of Michigan’s student paper The Michigan Daily to take down or anonymize an article they had written more than 10 years ago. The article mentioned their involvement in a movement calling for the school to divest from companies associated with the Israeli government. In the email, they explained that their partner was a green card holder, and they were about to travel abroad with their young child. They worried they would not be allowed back.

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As managing editor of the paper at the time, I was dismayed and, frankly, enraged by the fact that any of our journalists felt pressured enough by the political climate to want to self-censor. The former student’s article was about the emotional challenges of transitioning to college. It was a deeply personal and moving piece, and one that other students might greatly benefit from reading — even those who might strongly disagree with their politics. Taking down the author’s name would remove that intimacy and destroy the soul of the piece.

But this was not an isolated case. Far from it. During my time at the paper, the editor-in-chief and I received an unprecedented number of emails from current and former student journalists requesting that they be made anonymous or that their articles be entirely removed from The Daily’s website. Some had graduated years ago but still worried that their pro-Palestinian or anti-Trump essays could draw attention from the administration. Many of them were international students or graduates now on a work visa, living in fear of being sent home because they had voiced a forbidden opinion.

This wasn’t just Michigan either. There’s a disturbing nationwide trend of student journalists making similar requests to avoid deportation or other repercussions for their protected speech. Hofstra University’s The Hofstra Chronicle approved their first anonymity request in four years because the writer, a legal resident of the United States, feared retribution for expressing liberal views. At the University of Florida’s The Independent Florida Alligator, editors described how they repeatedly saw international students who didn’t want to write about politics. Not because they didn’t have anything to say, but out of fear.

This comes in the shadow of the federal government targeting international students — including student journalists — for their speech. Let’s not forget that last year, ICE agents arrested Tufts University student Rümeysa Öztürk, claiming without evidence that she had ties to terrorist activity. But court documents show the real reason was an opinion piece she co-wrote in which she criticized her university’s response to the war in Gaza.

Or the fact that FIRE is currently representing The Stanford Daily in a lawsuit challenging provisions of the Immigration and Nationality Act that Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the Trump administration have used to target foreign nationals for pro-Palestinian speech. In the complaint, we explain that several Stanford Daily contributors decided not to publish or asked the newspaper to remove previously published articles about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict due to the threat of visa revocation.

The situation is so bad now that a collection of student media groups — including Associated Collegiate Press, the College Media Association, and the Student Press Law Center — even issued an alert advising student publications to ease longstanding takedown and anonymity policies in light of these new risks. This is striking, as journalists have historically exercised caution when granting anonymity to maintain credibility and provide an ethical account of history.

This is, of course, not a critique of anonymous speech. On the contrary, anonymity has served as a tool throughout the history of our nation to protect speakers from the potential consequences of unpopular or dissident speech. In the 1995 Supreme Court case McIntyre v. Ohio Elections Commission, the Court wrote:

Anonymity is a shield from the tyranny of the majority . . . It thus exemplifies the purpose behind the Bill of Rights, and of the First Amendment in particular: to protect unpopular individuals from retaliation — and their ideas from suppression — at the hand of an intolerant society.

In their essay “Anonymous speech is as American as apple pie,” FIRE’s Carrie Robison and Daniel Ortner remind us that Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay wrote the Federalist Papers under the pen name “Publius,” while Thomas Paine wrote Common Sense, addressing “the inhabitants of America,” without signing his name.

What is concerning, therefore, is not that student journalists are making use of their constitutional right to anonymity. Rather, it’s the driving force behind the rising frequency of these requests. The government only needs to make examples out of a handful of people — Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, and Mohsen Mahdawi — to create a chilling effect that will cause others to silence or mask their voices rather than let them ring.

I wholeheartedly support the right of student journalists to remain anonymous. But no former student journalist who graduated years ago should have to dig through every article they’ve ever published and reflect on what’s safe to say.

When former University of Pittsburgh student and freelance journalist Henry Bard tried to get records from his campus police department last year, the university swiftly said no.

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Most public universities nationwide fall under their states’ open-records laws, but not Pennsylvania’s — Pitt, Pennsylvania State University, Temple University, and Lincoln University are not legally classified as “state agencies,” but “state-related” institutions. The difference may seem semantic, but the distinction means these four schools, and their campus police departments, are not subject to the state’s Right-to-Know-Law.

That keeps the press and public in the dark. But a new legal challenge to the University of Pittsburgh Police Department’s refusal to provide records could change that.

Into the light

In April 2025, Bard requested records about Pitt PD’s purchase and use of less-lethal munitions during demonstrations at the school’s 2024 pro-Palestinian encampment.

Pitt denied the request the same day Bard sent it. The university’s assistant legal counsel specifically cited the state’s RTKL, which “exempts state-related universities such as Pitt from the definition of Commonwealth agencies.”

Bard appealed the denial to the Pennsylvania Office of Open Records, which upheld Pitt’s decision. With representation from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, Bard again appealed to a state court, arguing that since Pitt PD operates under governmental control, serves a governmental function, and is under government oversight for financial decisions, it qualifies as a local agency. Pitt PD is the “third-largest law enforcement agency in Allegheny County,” and its officers must maintain state certification, according to Bard’s court filing.

The court held a hearing on June 24, and if it takes up the case, it could bring the university’s police department into the light after decades outside the purview of the state’s transparency law.

Cardinal rule

Public universities should not operate as a black box. Student journalists often serve as watchdogs at their institutions, and public records are vital to their reporting. They rely on public records to help get scoops, vet sources, and confirm facts. Professional reporters and the public also use transparency laws to keep a close eye on state-funded institutions.

In most states, public university police departments are also subject to open-records laws. Even some private university police departments may be subject to such laws depending on the jurisdiction.

Like Bard, Vincent Porco, Editor-in-chief of The Louisville Cardinal, had his own public records fight. Porco ran into a string of redactions and denials to requests made of the University of Louisville in the spring. But after coaching from FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative hotline, he advocated for those records’ release. The university complied, allowing the Cardinal to identify a man who had been banned from campus.

Those kinds of requests improve the quality of journalism and allow for more accountability on public college campuses. But that transparency is lacking at Pitt, Penn State, Temple, and Lincoln.

Shining a light on campus crime

Unlike Porco’s fairly straightforward open records fight, Bard’s has wound its way through the state’s open records office and now to the courtroom. And as we wait for updates on the case, those seeking transparency for Pennsylvania’s state-related universities and their police departments are not without options.

Whether you are seeking campus crime information from one of these state-related institutions or a private university or college, you can take advantage of the Clery Act. The Clery Act requires nearly all colleges and universities — public and private — to maintain a publicly accessible daily crime log that must be updated every 48 hours.

While not as detailed as other public records from other campus police departments, it includes the nature, date, and location of the crime, when it was reported, and the disposition of the complaint. (And student journalists who can’t get this information should contact SPFI.)

Student journalists rely on open records laws to be the watchful eyes on behalf of the public on their campuses, including their campus’s police departments. Transparency is vital to ensure accountability for all public institutions, regardless of what they’re called. The more light shed on these institutions, the brighter the future is for transparency.

A few years ago, the Supreme Court reaffirmed a basic free speech principle: “the First Amendment protects an individual’s right to speak his mind regardless of whether the government considers his speech sensible and well intentioned or deeply misguided and likely to cause anguish or incalculable grief.”

Yet that principle appears to have been cast aside in the prosecution and conviction of a woman who hurled racial slurs in a public park.

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In April of last year, Shiloh Hendrix was at a playground in a public park in Rochester, Minnesota, with her toddler when an eight-year-old black boy allegedly took an applesauce pouch from her diaper bag. Hendrix allegedly chased after the child, repeatedly calling him “nigger,” before retrieving the pouch.

The incident drew the attention of a bystander, Sharmake Omar, who began recording Hendrix on his phone. In the video, Omar confronts Hendrix about her language. She responds that it’s “none of your fucking business” and begins walking away. Omar, who is also black, then challenges her to repeat the slur. Hendrix turns around and says, “Fuck you, nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger.” After the two exchange some more words, the encounter ends with Omar saying, “OK, we’ll see about that, what the internet has to say about you.”

Indeed, the video went viral. But Hendrix faced more than public condemnation (and support). Rochester prosecutors charged her with three counts of disorderly conduct, two of which proceeded to trial. Yesterday, the jury acquitted Hendrix on the count involving the child but convicted her on the count arising from her interaction with Omar. The judge immediately sentenced her to probation, community service, and a $1,000 fine.

Unless the trial record contains some critical fact absent from public reporting, that conviction cannot stand under the First Amendment.

The video merely shows a heated verbal exchange between Hendrix and Omar. No threats. No violence. Nothing beyond words. However much offense they caused, that simply does not justify the government imprisoning, fining, or otherwise punishing the speaker. A public argument does not become a crime because a speaker used a particular word.

The jury reportedly was instructed on the quaint “fighting words” doctrine. Although still technically an exception to the First Amendment, the Supreme Court recently threw cold water on “fighting words,” observing it “has not upheld a conviction under the fighting-words doctrine in 80 years.” That case was 1942’s Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, involving a man who had choice words for a police officer. It’s a good thing the fighting-words exception has been sharply limited and arguably erased by the Court’s subsequent speech-protective decisions. Violent individuals shouldn’t have a veto over what others can say.

Even if the “fighting words” doctrine still has a pulse, it’s very hard to see how it applies to Hendrix’s comments. The doctrine is, at most, confined to a tiny category of face-to-face insults that, under the circumstances, are likely to provoke an immediate violent reaction. But courts have made clear that even the most taboo racial slurs are not fighting words per se. And, as the video shows, Omar solicited Hendrix — who was walking away while carrying her child — to repeat the slur so he could capture it on video and shame her. She did so and then continued walking away. Nothing about the interaction suggests Hendrix’s words were likely to provoke an immediate violent response.

However one feels about what Hendrix said, the proper response to objectionable speech is counterspeech — of which there was plenty after the video went viral — or to simply ignore it or walk away. But allowing imposition of criminal punishment erodes the important limits on the government’s power to police speech. If officials could punish people for speech based on how others might react, there would be no principled stopping point. A pro-Palestinian activist chanting, “From the river to the sea.” An Israel supporter calling that activist a “terrorist sympathizer.” Someone calling a preacher a “bigot” or referring to a transgender woman as a man. All could suddenly face prison time if someone else feels offended or might throw a punch in response.

Chaplinsky itself illustrates the point. The defendant was convicted of an offense in the vein of disorderly conduct for calling a police officer a “God damned racketeer” and a “damned fascist” — speech that today is unquestionably protected. The case is a reminder that determinations about what speech is too emotionally charged or offensive to allow change from person to person and generation to generation. It would be a grave mistake to give those subjective judgments the force of law.

Yes, that means we must sometimes tolerate speech we find repugnant. But that’s the only way to ensure the speech we value remains free.

Elyse Everest is a rising junior at Boston College from Honolulu, Hawaii, studies international studies and transformative education.

From 1896 until 1986, and over 5,000 miles from where the U.S. Constitution was written, the Hawaiian Islands were subject to one of the most harmful and forgotten large-scale violations of free speech in our nation’s history.

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Although Hawaii did not become a state until 1959, the Hawaiian language ban of 1896, or Act 57, made English mandatory in all public and private schools. In practice, this meant corporal punishment and public humiliation for children caught speaking the Hawaiian language (ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi) on school grounds, a policy that survived annexation, the territorial period, and statehood itself, remaining on the books until the state legislature quietly discovered and repealed it in 1986.

Speakers recall being forced to pull a weed for every Hawaiian word spoken in class, or being taken home by a teacher who would tell their parents to stop using Hawaiian at home. These systematic efforts to suppress the use of the Hawaiian language nearly drove it to extinction. By 1985, it was estimated that only 32 children could speak Hawaiian fluently across all eight islands.

There seemed to be no hope for revitalization, but in the 1970s, a group of activists worked hard to bring the language back. The most foundational effort along those lines was a radio show produced by one such activist, Larry Kimura, who had his elders speak Hawaiian together, leaving listeners unsure and curious about what they were saying. This inspired great interest and commotion in the community, and led to further efforts to bring Hawaiian back to the classroom — and establish Hawaiian immersion schools.

In the 1923 case Meyer v. Nebraska, the Supreme Court struck down a Nebraska law requiring instruction in English and barring the teaching of modern foreign languages in any public or private school to students who had not yet passed the eighth grade. The law was the result of anti-German sentiment during and after World War I. Under the Wilson administration, German Americans faced enormous pressure to demonstrate patriotism. Many bought Liberty Bonds, enlisted in the military, abandoned German-language newspapers, anglicized their names, and stopped speaking German in public — which could invite suspicion or harassment.

But the Court held that Nebraska’s law violated the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because it unconstitutionally interfered with parents’ rights to direct their children’s education. It held that a state cannot ban the teaching of foreign languages to young children, even in private schools, simply because lawmakers want everyone to speak English. Today, Meyer is best known as an early case protecting parental rights in directing their children’s education. And although Meyer was not a First Amendment case, its broad understanding of individual liberty helped lay the groundwork for later decisions that applied many constitutional rights — including free speech protections — to the states through the Fourteenth Amendment.

Furthermore, in the 1920s, the Territory of Hawaii attempted to place private Japanese-language schools (along with Chinese and Korean schools) under strict government control — regulating teachers, textbooks, and hours. In the 1927 case Farrington v. Tokushige, the Court unanimously struck down the regulations, extending Meyer to hold that parents have a Fifth Amendment due process liberty interest in directing their children’s education, including foreign-language instruction.

When targeting a nation and its people, restricting speech is the first and most detrimental step. Hawaiian was fortunate to experience a renaissance. As Kimura put it, “language is the first aspect of a people to vanish.”

This is because censors understand a simple but eternal truth: Being able to say what you want, how you want, and in whatever language you want, is one of the most powerful tools that people can wield against their government.

It may be tempting to treat the history of the Hawaiian language as peripheral to mainstream First Amendment doctrine due to the islands’ geographic and, at times, political distance from Washington. But in fact, that history exposes one of the doctrine’s central tensions: the difference between constitutional principle and constitutional reality. A population annexed into the United States, governed for decades without meaningful representation in the national political process, and largely unable to rely on ordinary democratic mechanisms, was especially dependent on constitutional guarantees to protect fundamental liberties. Yet those guarantees arrived unevenly.

The gap between Meyer’s 1923 recognition that language choice is protected by the Fourteenth Amendment and Hawaii’s 1986 repeal of its English-only law is not a footnote. It illustrates how constitutional protections have often been uneven in practice. Hawaii’s experience therefore belongs not in the margins of First Amendment history but near its center, reminding us that constitutional doctrine is not measured by the rights courts declare, but by how long it takes those rights to become realities for the people they are meant to protect.

That unevenness has consequences that outlast the original harm. Hawaii has consistently had some of the lowest voter turnout in the nation. No single historical event explains that on its own, but it is difficult to expect deep trust in constitutional government from people whose own experience taught them that constitutional rights could arrive decades too late. If the Constitution did not protect your language when it mattered most, why should you instinctively believe it will protect your rights now?

Hawaii has never lacked civic talent. The islands produced Senator Daniel Inouye, one of the longest-serving senators in American history, and President Barack Obama. The problem was never the people. It was that the constitutional protections articulated in cases like Meyer took far too long to reach them. Even Tinker v. Des Moines, the Supreme Court’s landmark 1969 ruling recognizing that the First Amendment prohibits punishment of public school students for non-disruptive speech, was decided 17 years before the repeal of Act 57.

No federal statute designates any official national language, religion, or culture. In public schools, English-only instruction is not a constitutional imperative — it’s a policy choice with real costs. But Hawaii’s campaign went much further. By imposing that mandate on private schools and punishing children for speaking Hawaiian, the government intruded on parents’ authority over their children’s education, violated students’ First Amendment rights, and helped sever a people from their language and identity. You don’t have to ban books or arrest speakers to suppress a language. You just have to make sure the next generation never learns it in the first place.

So why does this little island chain matter to the rest of the country? Because the suppression of the Hawaiian language proves the point that rights delayed are often rights denied, and the damage doesn’t end when the law finally catches up. It lingers in culture, civic trust, and the relationship between a people and the government that was supposed to protect their identity and their voice.

Athena Rem is a rising junior at the University of California, Los Angeles.

When Bud Selig famously wrote that “baseball is a social institution,” clearly he did not have the First Amendment in mind.

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Currently, 29 out of 30 Major League Baseball teams host an annual “Pride Night” celebration in June, featuring rainbow versions of the typical logo on caps and jerseys. The leagues issue similar themed uniforms for other holidays like Mother’s Day. Per the collective bargaining agreement struck between owners and players, players always have the option to revert back to the standard uniform instead, but they may not alter their uniforms themselves in any aspect.

Despite this ban, three San Francisco Giants players used Pride Night 2026 as an opportunity to protest. Starting pitcher Landen Roupp, among others, adorned his Pride cap with Bible verses from Genesis that portray the rainbow as a symbol of God’s covenant with humanity. In response, MLB formally warned the implicated players that they may not “write, attach, affix, embroider or otherwise display nicknames or messages on apparel or playing equipment.”

At first blush, MLB’s move might appear to be at odds with the freedoms of speech and free exercise guaranteed by the First Amendment. But the First Amendment bars the government from restricting our rights to speak and worship freely — not private corporations. Private employers have expansive discretion to limit an employee’s on-the-clock expression, like the players’ alteration of their caps.

Nevertheless, legal responses to MLB are pending. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri wrote a strongly worded letter to MLB accusing them of discrimination for the warning issued to the Giants players. Along similar lines, the Department of Justice launched a civil rights investigation into whether MLB’s restriction violates religious liberty. Indeed, MLB could be legally responsible for its actions here if the league were discriminating against players on the basis of their faith. Under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, Roupp and his fellow players would have to prove they suffered an adverse employment action solely on the basis of their Christianity rather than their violation of a neutral workplace policy.

Arguing that the league’s stance is anti-Christian discrimination runs up against the extent to which MLB has made clear that any sort of alteration to a uniform is a punishable offense. For example, the league enforces the same rule for messages like “Dad” that have no religious or political subtext. Further, the players would have to demonstrate that writing the Bible verses on their hat comprised a meaningful form of worship to claim MLB is impeding their right to exercise their religion. And as a private corporation, preventing alterations to their uniform is within the MLB’s purview.

Legal and constitutional concerns aside, culture war skirmishes like the MLB controversy shape free speech’s place in our society.

The government leaning on private corporations as a vehicle for censorship is especially problematic. Allowing unsubstantiated culture wars to seep into private corporations’ functions, especially as the DOJ threatens to get involved, holds dangerous consequences for the future. Restricting MLB’s ability to ban Bible inscriptions on caps or uniforms would essentially prove that any entity, even a private one, is a potential battleground for government advancement of its own rhetoric at the expense of individual liberties.

When players sign their contracts, they must adhere to MLB’s lawful choices regarding political, religious, or other identity-based topics. Players need not endorse these beliefs outside of their work, but they also do not enjoy the freedom to alter MLB uniforms to match their own views.

Even America’s pastime is under threat from partisan encroachment. If the government can abridge MLB’s rights, there is nothing stopping them from eventually infringing on the average individual’s speech as well.