Dozens of young people stood in a San Francisco park lined with palm trees and town homes, holding a long white banner that read in bold black font: “STUDENTS FIGHT BACK!” Below, highlighted against a red background: “AGAINST ZIONISM — AGAINST TRUMP’S BILLIONAIRE AGENDA — AGAINST MASS DEPORTATIONS.”

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In February, that image appeared on the front page of The Redwood Bark, the student newspaper for Redwood High School in Marin County, California. Front-page photos are meant to grab attention and raise questions, but this one prompted an investigation into the paper itself. This was after administrators ordered the removal of The Bark’s Instagram post this same semester for noting that Marin County was mentioned in the Epstein files.

These acts of censorship are bad, but administrators’ continued characterization of them as benign or, worse, necessary forces us to weigh in. But even after FIRE’s advocacy interventions, these administrators still haven’t budged an inch. So we’ll spell it out.

Eye-catching cover sparks eyebrow-raising probe

The paper’s troubles started with coverage of the local student protest at Dolores Park in San Francisco, including a photo of the banner described above. That image captured a tense moment in local news, and sparked debate and backlash among community members, which is generally a reliable mark of good journalism.

But, feeling the pressure, the student editors-in-chief decided to publish a letter “acknowledging that this image caused pain and concern for some readers, particularly some members of our Jewish community.” They added, however, that the paper’s “responsibility is to present reality as it occurred.”

Days later, an individual wrote to school leaders, “I am worried that Redwood’s student paper decided to publish an image of a protest slogan about Zionism that has increasingly been used as an antisemitic slur.”

Ultimately, the complaints culminated in the district’s senior director of student services sending an email to the newspaper adviser with the subject line, “Notice of Investigation.” The email said an independent investigator had been assigned “to conduct a thorough and neutral review of the complaints filed” about the image. Courtney Goode, the superintendent for the Tamalpais Union High School District, characterized the investigation as concerning “harassment and discrimination.”

Epstein reporting taken down

As noted above, The Bark had also recently posted on Instagram a rundown of all the Marin County towns that were mentioned in the Epstein files.

Like other news outlets, they sought to make a national story local. But this reporting would land them at the center of another controversy. The Bark mentioned French national Gisele Attias Bonnouvrier as “providing models to Epstein.” Not long after, the principal of Redwood High received an email from someone claiming to be Bonnouvrier herself. The person sending the email demanded the removal of her name from the post, threatening a lawsuit if the school did not comply.

“I have a directive from the cabinet and superintendent,” the principal wrote to The Bark staff, “to redact the one name immediately from the post.”

And just like that, based on a single email from an unverified source, school administrators censored their own student journalists.

High school admins aren’t the arbiters of the law

The administrators’ actions caught the attention of local news in late April. FIRE’s Student Press Freedom Initiative wrote the school district on May 6, urging them to end the investigation into The Bark’s front page image and to promise not to interfere with its content again — such as by demanding the takedown of social media posts — both of which violate constitutional obligations and California state law.

As FIRE explained, The Bark is a “limited public forum” — a phrase found on its own website — which, under the Supreme Court’s Hazelwood v. Kuhlmeier decision, receives greater student press protections than those afforded to curricular or school-sponsored publications. In cases like this, school officials are held to the more deferential standard articulated in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District. Under the Tinker test, administrators can only regulate student speech if it is unlawful or likely to create a substantial disruption to the school day. In addition, California’s Student Free Expression Law specifically protects the editorial decisions of student journalists.

The photo and The Bark’s decision to run it were protected expression. The school’s characterization of the photo as potential “harassment and discrimination” was deeply misguided and shouldn’t have led to this investigation. FIRE’s letter spelled out how the paper’s front page couldn’t be investigated for discriminatory harassment, which the Supreme Court has narrowly defined as conduct that is “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive” that it “detracts from the victims’ education experience.” A single photo on the front of a newspaper falls well short of that standard.

And that’s where the core of the free speech concerns lie for The Bark. The question isn’t just whether a school ultimately punishes a speaker after an investigation. As the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held, the question is whether the institution’s actions would “chill or silence a person of ordinary firmness from future First Amendment activities.” That decision is binding on the school district, and an investigation into protected student journalism would do just that.

Then there’s the demand to take down the Instagram post about the Epstein files. While Tinker and California state law recognize exceptions for defamatory student speech, The Bark’s post still warrants protection. That’s because, even assuming the underlying allegation about Bonnouvrier amounts to libel, the post falls within the “fair report” privilege, which protects fair and accurate reporting on official government proceedings, including federal investigations. In other words, The Bark had the right to name the French national in the context of reporting on the content of the Epstein files. Even more concerning is reporting that Goode admitted “no legal analysis was done before issuing the directive to remove the woman’s name.”

Goode responded to FIRE’s initial letter, saying the district “has a long-standing commitment to student journalism” and “remains fully committed to upholding student free expression rights consistent with California law.” The district characterized both matters as “resolved.”

As for the investigation? As Goode put it herself, “There is no investigation.” But, she added, “when concerns are raised through the formal complaint process, the district is required to review them.” But none of this, she promised, will “limit student editorial decision-making or student press rights.”

Thankfully, no single administrator’s belief, however well-intended, is the legal standard. FIRE responded, pointing out that the school had emailed The Bark adviser with a “notification of investigation,” suggesting that the school was, you know, notifying the paper of an investigation. We made clear that nothing in our position required the district to ignore complaints or decline to provide resources to those offended by the image. But when the school receives a complaint about speech, the correct approach is to conduct a preliminary, internal review rather than sending an ominous email announcing an investigation. That would allow the district to handle complaints and offer support without chilling speech.

The district disagreed, saying it “remains fully committed to student free expression rights consistent with California law” and that “student editors make the decisions about what they publish.” The student journalists at The Bark deserve better. Its advisor has taken an unpaid leave of absence through June 2027, reportedly in protest. Regardless of whether the district wants to admit it, its actions aren’t aligned with its obligations to the student press.

What we have now are promises that the district better keep. FIRE will be watching.

After studying engineering at Rutgers, Rami Elghandour began chasing a problem that has haunted medicine for decades — how to teach the body to kill cancer cells without destroying itself in the process. This spring, his biotechnology company, Arcellx, unveiled a treatment that moves the science closer to that goal than ever before. In conference halls and investor calls, the reaction bordered on astonishment. Last month, Gilead Sciences bought Arcellx in a deal valued at $7.8 billion.

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Elghandour credits much of his success to his mother. In 1989, she left a comfortable life in Egypt, and the fashion boutique that was her lifelong dream, for the uncertain promise of opportunity in America. Watching her rebuild her career shaped his own approach to leadership. Each year, for example, he hosts about 60 students from Rutgers’ Road to Silicon V/Alley program. The meetings often go long, but Elghandour is happy to take the extra time, he says, “because it is refreshing to talk openly about the things that matter to students.”

So it was no surprise when Rutgers invited Elghandour to give the engineering school’s graduation speech this year. But the speech was promptly canceled after students (about five of them, Elghandour estimates) complained about remarks he’d made on social media. The school specifically cited one post in which he opined that Israel was committing genocide and “running dungeons where they train dogs to sexually assault prisoners.” In other words, a former student returning as a billionaire innovator at the forefront of cancer research was prevented from addressing 800 students because a handful of them disliked his politics. Regardless of one’s feelings about Elghandour’s opinions, there’s no denying that this is a standard that could be used to torpedo virtually any speaker, with opinions on this or any other topic. Elghandour later said this sends a dangerous message to students. Namely, “Don’t you dare speak up and say anything that you believe.”

A pattern emerges

As though to prove that point in the most obvious way possible, earlier this month, Dr. Morton Schapiro withdrew as the commencement speaker for Georgetown University Law Center after students protested his selection due to his support for Israel. Maybe it’s just the Israeli/Palestinian issue? No such luck. Around the same time, Congressman Rich McCormick said he still plans to speak at Morehouse School of Medicine – his alma mater – despite student backlash over the fact that he supports restricting immigration and has introduced legislation to prohibit using federal funds to perform transgender surgery on minors. Meanwhile, Drexel University’s College of Computing and Informatics’ original commencement speaker, David Kaganovsky, “mutually agreed” to step back from speaking after his “problematic social media posts came to students’ attention.”

Unfortunately, year after year, school after school has decided that it’s easier to cancel graduation speeches (or pressure speakers to drop out) than brave a threatened controversy. The only way to avoid that would be to find a speaker who has never made a controversial remark in their life (or, at least, not online). But who wants to hear a speech from someone like that? As Will Creeley, FIRE’s legal director, has said, “If we treat ideas we don’t agree with as barred from campus, then really what’s left are only the most inoffensive, and by extension most uninteresting, folks.”

In a recent piece, “Cracking down on graduation speeches won’t solve the problem on campus,” the editorial board of The Washington Post notes that American universities are under incredible pressure to prove they are addressing rising antisemitism. (In the past, other issues have been at the forefront, of course, with similar results.) This pressure can result in positive change, but it also inevitably produces “performative measures that border on censorship.” As an example, the board cites New York University’s decision this past March to end live speeches entirely at some of its graduation ceremonies:

This is a lazy way to prevent more embarrassment because it avoids addressing the fundamental problem, which is that universities still need to do a better job of preparing students to engage in civil and respectful discourse once they enter the real world . . . too many elite college campuses became crucibles of conformity in recent years. People with unpopular ideas too often got shouted down or even canceled. Criticizing Israel became a shibboleth.

The solution is not to shut down live speeches. It’s to teach kids that using a graduation ceremony to scream and yell about their personal political views is a stupid and ineffective way to make the world a better place. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression says that it’s ultimately up to the university how it wants to format its ceremonies, which is correct, and that it’s good to allow community members to “express themselves liberally on campus.”

Instead of live speeches, the school has decided to play pre-recorded remarks by student speakers on a jumbotron while the speakers themselves sit silently on stage. As Steven Thrasher writes for Literary Hub, “Seeing ‘speakers’ sit on stage, mute, while a video of themselves is played for their parents will make them seem, I imagine, as if they are presenting a ‘proof of life’ video from their kidnappers before being allowed to get their diplomas or leave the stage.”

This is not a new problem. FIRE’s deplatforming database documents instances of campus censorship going back to 1998. Amazingly, 48% of all deplatforming efforts succeed, with 959 out of 2,000 recorded attempts resulting in a cancellation, disruption, or a similar outcome. Since 2014, the problem has exploded. In the 12 years since, our data shows that 67% of all recorded deplatforming attempts have taken place in this span of time. Commencement speakers make up about 19% of all campus disinvitation campaigns, targeting 382 speakers out of 2,000 total disinvitation efforts. Why does it keep happening?

After a few colleges cave to disinvitation attempts, they provide cover for others to do the same. Today’s would-be disruptors now have a surfeit of disinvitations to draw inspiration from. Two schools in particular, which we will look at below, illustrate this dynamic in stark relief. They also share a troubling pattern: universities are hiding behind vague “safety concerns” rather than standing up to political pressure campaigns.

Utah Valley bends the knee

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination on its campus last September, Utah Valley University vowed to strengthen protections for free speech and planned a civic education program to that effect. But only a few months later, Sharon McMahon, the bestselling author and civics educator dubbed “America’s government teacher,” was uninvited from giving a graduation speech at the school for being “anti-Charlie Kirk.”

The problem began when Jack Posobiec, a host and contributor at Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit co-founded by Kirk, commented on the decision to invite McMahon. He wrote on X, “What is going on here, @uvu_president?” State Rep. Trevor Lee replied that taxpayer funds should be withheld from the school. Senator Mike Lee also voiced opposition, and UVU College Republicans followed suit.

Their objection? After Kirk was killed, McMahon made a post — since deleted — listing quotes from Kirk along with the caption, “These aren’t sound bites taken out of context. Millions of people feel they were harmed, and the murder that was horrific and should never have happened does not magically erase what was said or done.”

The pressure campaign worked. UVU withdrew its invitation, citing “increased safety concerns,” and proceeded without a speaker for the first time, leaving 13,400 graduates — about one-third of whom are the first in their families to graduate from college — without a keynote address. But these safety concerns did not arise in a vacuum. As McMahon said, “The security issues really did not even come about until there was a coordinated effort on the part of Utah’s state and federal lawmakers and Turning Point USA to try and pressure the school into canceling.”

If true, the irony is painful. This is the very campus where Kirk was murdered for speaking his mind. The lesson its administration appears to have drawn from that tragedy is not that free expression must be defended at all costs, but that controversial speakers should simply be kept away from the podium. At Utah Valley, the fear of blowback has now become an institutionalized reason to silence speech. This is a textbook example of how threats of violence are used to launder political censorship under a palatable “safety” rationale, and how jawboning by government officials can coerce a public university into silencing a speaker it had freely chosen.

In a biting essay for The Free Press, “Why The Campus Where Charlie Kirk Was Killed Canceled My Speech,” McMahon wrote, “The First Amendment and Utah law protected Charlie Kirk’s right to speak on a public campus. It protects students’ right to protest against him. It protects my right to condemn his murder while speaking honestly about his public rhetoric. It protects a Utah citizen’s right to criticize me. But it does not protect public officials who use the power of their office to make a public institution punish a citizen for protected speech. That is the difference between criticism and coercion.”

South Carolina State picks a fight

The situation at South Carolina State University — the state’s only publicly funded historically black university — raises equally troubling questions about who actually controls the commencement stage. The school invited current Lt. Gov. Pamela Evette, who is also running for governor in the Republican primary, to speak at its commencement in May. But before any public announcement was made, students organized protests, a petition quickly gathered more than 20,000 signatures, and Alexander Conyers, the university’s president, caved to the pressure.

“This felt like a slap in the face to me and my fellow graduates,” said Summer Gray, a senior at the school who started the petitions to get Evette’s speech canceled. “What made me start this petition is the fact that they invited a speaker who is against everything we believe in as HBCU students. She openly stated that she is against DEI, and coming to speak to people of color with that belief is disrespectful.”

Of course, students have every right to organize, petition, and protest a speaker selection. But rather than standing by its invitation or articulating a principled reason for the change, the school defaulted to the same “safety” rationale, without saying whether any concrete threat had been made.

This case also highlights how such cancellations, regardless of the speaker’s political affiliation, invite escalating retaliation. After the school canceled her speech, Evette reposted a letter from a small group of Republican lawmakers asking the House Ways and Means Committee chair to cut more than $35 million in state funding proposed for the university next year. Evette added, “The far left has silenced freedom of speech and pushed its radical, anti-American agenda for far too long . . . not one dime of taxpayer money should ever go to a school that discriminates against conservative views. It certainly won’t happen when I’m governor.”

NYU holds its ground, kind of

Students at NYU similarly organized to object to Dr. Jonathan Haidt as a graduation speaker. In a letter to the university, student government leaders called Dr. Haidt’s selection “deeply unsettling,” arguing that another speaker would “more accurately reflect the values and diversity of its graduates.” This disinvitation attempt is especially ironic given that Dr. Haidt is an outspoken critic of cancel culture and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, which argues that schools have cultivated a mentality of fragility and emphasized personal safety and comfort over problem-solving and critical thinking skills. Thankfully, unlike South Carolina State and Utah Valley, NYU decided to stand by Dr. Haidt’s invitation.

This is not to say that NYU is a bastion of speech protection, as the university has severely cracked down on student speech at graduations. In 2025, NYU faced backlash for withholding a student’s diploma after he spoke during his graduation speech about the “genocide currently occuring.” And, as noted above, NYU is now using pre-recorded speeches, despite, as students have pointed out, recently pushing forward an initiative to get students off screens and interacting in person.

Cracking down on student speakers

NYU is not the only university cracking down on student speakers. In 2024, the University of Southern California canceled valedictorian Asna Tabassum’s speech, citing “security risks.” As is often the case, the university never specified what, if any, threats had been made. It did, however, indicate to Tabassum that the decision was based on her pro-Palestinian activism. After backlash to the cancellation of her speech, multiple invited alumni speakers were also canceled. Tabassum later wrote:

As your class Valedictorian, I implore my USC classmates to think outside the box . . . I challenge us to respond to ideological discomfort with dialogue and learning, not bigotry and censorship.

The following year, George Washington University investigated a student who called for divestment from Israel during her speech. MIT’s class president was barred from her own graduation ceremony after giving a pro-Palestinian speech during commencement the day before, in which she said “free Palestine,” adding, “the MIT community that I know would never tolerate a genocide.”

Now, during the 2026 commencement season, some schools are taking a more proactive approach to avoid controversy. Like NYU, CUNY School of Law has also reportedly nixed live speeches. Stanford tried to ban student speeches, but reversed course in response to student and faculty pushback. NYU and other schools are also announcing limitations on what speakers can wear — no decorated caps, sashes, stoles, cords, pins, or scarves.

Conclusion

From a purely legal perspective, schools having speakers make only pre-recorded speeches is fine. It’s their event, and universities and colleges can decide what they want to focus on and what kind of comments are out of bounds. If the school doesn’t want people to promote their parents’ businesses, discuss their sexual preferences, or share their political beliefs, that’s their call. But it is sad to see academic institutions so seemingly afraid of their own students, including students who won’t even be on campus any longer.

And, in making these cowardly decisions to revoke invitations or limit student speech, universities often only succeed in creating new or additional controversy while eroding already crumbling student and faculty trust in university administrations to protect speech.

Greyson Hartsell spent four years as a mechanic stationed at Camp Pendleton in California, where he spent his days as a United States Marine doing engine, transmission, and drivetrain work on Humvees, LVSRs, and 7-ton trucks. He was talented, a hard worker, and rose through the ranks to corporal.

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Once tasked with keeping equipment ready for the battlefield, he now unexpectedly finds himself on the front lines of a very different kind of battle, fighting for artistic freedom as part of a theater troupe at Cape Fear Community College in Wilmington, North Carolina.

Last month, Greyson and his fellow theater students were performing the ancient Greek play The Bacchae by Euripides. Riffing on how the women in the play became radicalized in their own time, the students included a variety of contemporary protest slogans, including “No Kings,” in the set design.

But mere hours before opening night, Greyson and the troupe found out that the school had suddenly decided that one slogan in particular — “No Kings” — had to go. Officials cited a supposed obligation of “political neutrality” (which wouldn’t apply to a student play even if the school had an institutional neutrality policy, which it doesn’t) and claimed “overt references to current political messaging” would distract from the “enduring themes of the work.”

Greyson was in disbelief. The original purpose of the play itself was to use ancient stories as a way to make allegorical references to current political events, namely the Peloponnesian War. Administrators ignored that one of the “enduring themes of the work” was a warning against tyranny — exactly the kind of warning embodied by the slogan “No Kings,” which, as far as Greyson was concerned, wasn’t a partisan phrase.

“As an American,” he told a local radio station, “I feel like the ‘No Kings’ message is more of a . . . rite of passage, since that’s how America was founded, getting away from kings, from the king of England.”

Greyson wrote to his college’s president, Jim Morton, telling him that as a Marine who took an oath to defend the Constitution, he stands by the First Amendment and the right to free expression. “Even,” he added, “when that expression may be uncomfortable.”

Throughout his life, Greyson says theater has been a constant source of community — and he wasn’t about to let that community get bullied out of its voice. As a kid, Greyson moved from Charlotte, the bustling city on the border of North and South Carolina, to much-smaller Wilmington, on the shores of the Atlantic. It was three and a half hours away, but it might as well have been another country. He didn’t know anyone. He played football. He tried baseball. But nothing felt like it really clicked. “I wrestled for one year,” he says, laughing. “That didn’t last long.”

When some friends convinced him to try out for a theater production during his first year of high school, however, he quickly found his community. “I did sports but, I don’t know, acting was just… I was just better at it, I guess.”

Greyson found another community in the Corps. But after the Marine Corps, back in school at Cape Fear Community College, Greyson picked theater back up as well. He was initially reluctant to join the production of The Bacchae. “I am not a fan of Shakespeare and old Greek plays,” he says. “I think they’re kind of hard to follow if not done right.”

He says he was so turned off by the ancient story, in fact, that he decided not to act in the play at all, and to take on a tech role in the crew instead — a first for him. Yet he was stunned when he saw the production performed for the first time. “I saw the first dress rehearsal and I was blown away by how it all came together. I was not expecting that at all. I kind of regret not acting in it now.”

Greyson attributes The Bacchae’s success to the interpretation his peers integrated into the set design, where topical political slogans implied overlap with the themes of the play. “At first, I didn’t understand the art themes for the set that the girls had decided on, but after watching it and seeing it and understanding it, I was able to kind of see it all come together. They did a really good job connecting real-world issues with an old play like this.”

Greyson says The Bacchae intersects naturally with our time in history and the social movements the set design references. His peers agree, telling WHQR the messaging was an attempt to relate the play’s thematic elements to struggles over power, as seen in protest movements past and present. In the original, King Pentheus tries to suppress the ecstatic worship of Dionysus because he sees the god and his followers as threats to his authority. Dionysus responds by driving the women of the city mad. In the end, they rip Pentheus apart — his own mother tears off his head. The whole play is a warning against the blind arrogance of a tyrant. That’s why Greyson doesn’t think “No Kings” is a distraction from its enduring themes.

Besides, the students’ set design falls into a tradition of avant-garde restagings of old, historic plays. Shakespeare’s Macbeth, for example, has been famously reimagined to critical acclaim. One such adaptation transposed the play into the high-pressure environment of a Michelin-starred restaurant, where the “three witches” were memorably recast as three trash collectors.

That creative risk, Greyson says, was what made the production work. The decision to remove the “No Kings” slogan undercut the source of the production’s success, and the spirit of the original play. Plus, Greyson says, there is a principle at stake — this is a fundamental matter of free expression. “I may not necessarily believe and have the same ideology as most of my classmates,” he remarks, “but I’m still going to try to stop someone from walking in and telling them what they can and can’t say or do.”

Administrators’ demands initially did not stop at one phrase, Greyson says. School officials also expressed concern about slogans like “We the People” and “Silence = Violence.” But when students took to defending their design, a bargain emerged from administrators: If “No Kings” disappeared, the rest might be allowed to stay. With opening night at hand, they had little choice, and painted over the slogan.

Greyson was unimpressed by the college’s explanation that this was all in the service of neutrality. To him, official “neutrality” stopped looking neutral the moment administrators ordered students to alter their expression.

“If it was really about the institution being neutral,” he said, “then they shouldn’t have said anything to stop us. They could obviously ask us and maybe suggest it slightly, but to tell us — that’s a different story. That’s them taking a side.”

“If I had been in the room,” he added, “I would have just told them to go kick rocks.”

Instead, he wrote the college president an email. Though the president never responded, another administrator did, brushing off Greyson’s concerns with vague references to political neutrality and maximizing interpretive space. Greyson says the exchange reminded him, in a small way, of the hierarchy he had known in the Marine Corps. He never pretends to have been a major or a colonel. He was a corporal, E-4, the first rank of a noncommissioned officer. “You get ignored a lot by higher-ups,” he says. “So this is kind of a drop in the bucket.”

Still, the principle mattered. Greyson did not see the students’ work as some reckless political stunt. He saw it as young artists trying to make an old text speak in the present. And he has little patience for the idea that protest only becomes respectable once history has distanced its impact. “If this was 1773,” he says, “they would say the Tea Party would have been a radical thing to do.”

After the first article about the controversy circulated, Greyson’s former classmates and even his high school theater teacher reached out to say they were proud of him for standing up against art censorship. He also remembers hearing about one especially tough local theater critic — the kind of person whose praise does not come easily — calling The Bacchae one of the best productions Cape Fear Community College had put on in years.

In her Facebook post, Mirla Criste Thompson, the local critic who herself is a theater professor, wrote that she remained “as impressed as ever by the quality of Jack Landry’s student actors,” praising their “discipline, boldness of choice, vocal clarity, utter commitment and utter fearlessness.” She singled out the Greek chorus as “particularly engaging,” writing that its members moved and chanted “as a single whirlwind of body and voice.”

It’s now late May, and the production has long since finished its run. Greyson doesn’t expect school administrators to reverse course ex post facto or suddenly discover their spines. But he does hope his peers will take something from the episode. Not cynicism, but a clearer sense of their own agency. “I don’t expect them to really do anything differently,” he says of the administration. “I think they’re just going to remain the cowards they are. But I hope that the students take a slight lesson from this and start challenging people’s authority more often.”

The curtain may be drawn, but Euripides’ words still echo: “Do not mistake the rule of force for true power. Men are not shaped by force.”

A Nevada student was expelled for putting pro-ICE stickers around his high school, according to a federal lawsuit filed by his father last week. If true, the school engaged in unconstitutional viewpoint discrimination.

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I say “if true” because, so far, all we really have to work from is the complaint itself and a vague statement from the school that, because of student privacy law, is necessarily non-specific. I have no specific reason to doubt the complaint, but it is, by its nature, one side of the story. With that caveat, let’s look at the story it tells.

On Jan. 21, 2026, hundreds of students walked out of Clark County School District schools to protest U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They gathered on school grounds, chanted, and carried signs. At least a couple of the signs, as highlighted in the lawsuit, compared ICE agents to Nazis and included swastikas. The district’s response to the walkout, in part: “CCSD encourages students to be active participants in democracy by taking the time to research important issues and express their opinions civilly and peacefully.”

N.C. was a student at East Career & Technical Academy, a school in the district. The day after the protest, N.C. arrived to school early and placed (in the words of the complaint) “approximately six” stickers about the size of a Post-it note along the walls of a hallway. The complaint doesn’t show the stickers, but describes them as AI-generated images of the school’s logo (its mascot) and the words “‘ICE Immigration Enforcement’, ‘Border Security Academy Deportation Force,’ and ‘Titans ICE’.”

The stickers were removed by the time the first bell rang, the complaint says, and the next day, N.C. got pulled into a closed-door meeting with Assistant Principal Thomas Smith. According to the complaint, Smith said that the acceptability of the student’s actions depended on “what lens you look at it through” and asked the student how he would feel if someone put up stickers that said “let’s go get whitey.”

Smith then suspended N.C. for a “racially motivated incident.”

Three days later, the student and his father appealed the suspension to Smith. According to the complaint, Smith told the pair that N.C.’s actions were “considered racism because the majority of the school is Hispanic,” and compared the anti-ICE stickers to a burning cross because it could be perceived as intimidating.

No, seriously. Seriously, that’s what the complaint says happened. The vice principal compared a Post-it sized sticker affixed to a hallway wall to a man-sized yard display engulfed in flames.

So you can see why I’m so annoyed that I don’t see a picture of this sticker. I was a kid in the 1980s. We know a thing or two about stickers. I’ve seen it all — holograms, lasers, puffy, Lisa Frank, vinyl — heck, I’ve ordered custom scratch-and-sniff FIRE stickers that smell like a campfire. You know what I’ve never seen? A sticker that preceded a lynching. It’s just not part of the whole deal. It’d be quite a dramatic shift in the Klan’s whole motif, with stickers, and Trapper Keepers, and maybe the pointy hood turned into a side ponytail with a scrunchie.

The family appealed again, this time to Principal Natasha Lerutte. On Jan. 30, they expelled N.C. for his supposedly “racist” incident of putting stickers on the wall. When the student tried to compare his actions to the walk-out, the response was that the school didn’t want to talk about other situations. (Like, say, the one where they “encouraged students to be active participants in democracy.”)

Assuming the allegations in the complaint are true, the law is pretty straightforward. Tinker v. Des Moines — decided in 1969, the year students wore black armbands to protest the Vietnam War — established that students don’t “shed their constitutional rights at the schoolhouse gate.” Schools can restrict student speech only when it would cause “material and substantial disruption” to school operations or collide with the rights of others. These stickers were removed before school started without disturbing a single class period. The disruption threshold wasn’t approached, let alone crossed.

In theory, the school could punish a student for putting up unauthorized posters (or putting them up outside of authorized areas, assuming the stickers went up in places that weren’t, like, bulletin boards). But that wasn’t the reason for the expulsion. If the complaint’s allegations hold true, the school engaged in viewpoint discrimination, letting other students engage in conduct that would merit discipline in ordinary cases (i.e., walking out) while bringing the hammer of Thor down on N.C. specifically because of his views. That’s unconstitutional.

Another reason to think the student’s story holds water is that this is not CCSD’s first encounter with viewpoint discrimination. The complaint notes a 2015 case in which the district settled a lawsuit over its refusal to approve a pro-life club at a sister school. More pointedly, a nearly identical case at ECTA itself was settled in 2024, after the Students for Life club sued over the school’s refusal to let them distribute flyers — CCSD agreed to pay $36,000 in legal fees and revise its handbook. The settlement came with a memo reminding district administrators that “students are not exempt from the First Amendment.” Apparently the reminder didn’t reach everyone.

The lawsuit was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Nevada. We’ll keep you posted as the case develops. And before someone accuses FIRE of being pro-ICE, I’ll gently remind you that we sued them yesterday.

The shock hit Clemson before the facts had fully settled. Charlie Kirk was dead. Within minutes, the ghastly footage of his murder circulated online. For many, the initial response was horror. Others found the killing justified. Some even joked about it.

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At Clemson University, students gathered hours after the attack to mourn Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. But the sadness was soon accompanied by an ominous chilling effect on speech as administrators began targeting any faculty or staff perceived to have justified or celebrated the shooting.

“As free speech advocates,” FIRE’s Adam Goldstein wrote at the time, “it places us in a painful position. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was an attack on free speech and open discourse. In a free society, we must not be afraid to express our views, no matter how strongly some might oppose them. That’s the point of free speech. But it is precisely for that reason why we must not respond to mockery of Kirk’s assassination by canceling everyone who offends us: because that too creates a society where people are afraid to express themselves.”

These words too often fell on deaf ears. In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Clemson fired two professors for social media posts about Kirk’s death. One was Joshua Bregy, who shared a post saying, “Karma is swift and sometimes ironic,” as well as one of Kirk himself saying, “Play certain games, win certain prizes.” The other was Melvin Earl Villaver Jr., who called Kirk a racist and a white supremacist and shared multiple posts celebrating and mocking his murder. Clemson initially stood by the professors, but after public backlash, both were gone within days. Clemson also fired a third staff member.

But this particular story isn’t about them — it’s about two of their colleagues. When Clemson faculty members Mike Gregory and Charlie Kurth saw what was happening, they refused to stay silent about it. Socrates constantly pulled philosophical lessons from political events of the day, engaging with the fallout over Athens’ loss of the Peloponnesian War and Athenian anxieties about dissent. In that longstanding tradition, Gregory and Kurth likewise incorporated Kirk’s killing and its aftermath into their courses, using it to bring dry arguments about civic values to life to encourage students to join the conversation.

“The only way for people to stop being scared of difficult issues is to put them in front of them and let them handle it,” said Gregory. “People realize that it’s not scary, that we don’t need to be fragile with each other around these issues. There are good ways to talk to each other.”

When they saw Clemson fire their colleagues, Kurth and Gregory sprang into action. Gregory wrote an op-ed criticizing the school for “a pattern of capitulation” in punishing faculty, while Kurth put a sign on his office door reading, “My employer is morally bankrupt.” The sign generated some attention online, including from one former South Carolina House representative who posted his disapproval on X.

But Gregory and Kurth weren’t done. “We no longer know what speech will be tolerated or punished,” they co-wrote in an article for the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Who Will Clemson Censor Next?” The result, they added, was simple: “self-censoring and silence.”

Looking beyond Clemson at the larger wave of cancel culture in the wake of Kirk’s murder, they added, “Across these cases, universities appear less guided by consistent standards than by external outrage. Terms like ‘disruption,’ ‘misalignment,’ or ‘institutional values’ function as catch-alls, invoked only after political actors or social-media campaigns generate pressure. The result is a chilling effect in which speech protections hinge not on content but on who objects and how loudly.”

On May 6, FIRE visited Clemson’s campus to honor Kurth and Gregory with our second-ever Berkson Courageous Colleague Award for boldly defending the expressive rights of their colleagues. FIRE created the Berkson Courageous Colleague Award in 2023 to honor faculty who go above and beyond to defend free speech and academic freedom, oftentimes at personal or professional cost. The award is named for Mark Berkson, a professor at Hamline University who spoke out in support of a colleague who was fired for showing images of Muhammad in her art history class. Berkson embodied the award’s values, namely courage in the principled defense of academic freedom and free speech, often at professional or personal cost.

At Clemson, FIRE hosted a 45-minute panel discussion with Gregory and Kurth in which they talked about defending free speech on campus in the midst of a firestorm of controversy around Kirk’s death. “I think that it can break through a bit of a chilling effect when you go public with some of these things,” said Gregory. “Of course, there’s risk. But the public nature of these things can have the effect of cutting through some chilling effects.”

Kurth said he wanted to remind the university that while it was probably getting a lot of pressure from politicians and donors, it had a duty — first and foremost — to its faculty and students. “The ability to speak publicly as Mike and I did,” he said, “and as others have done, is an important way to show that there are other constituents — the students, the faculty — who presumably the universities are here for, who need to be paid attention to as well.”

He added, “It’s not about checks. It’s not just about political influence. There has to be more.”

Republicans and Democrats often struggle to find common ground. But a recent congressional hearing revealed a shared conviction: free speech in higher education is essential to our nation’s future.

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To be sure, committee members diverged in important ways. Republicans focused on threats to campus free speech from university administrators, while Democrats challenged that framing, highlighting threats from state governments and the Trump administration. But from the outset of this hearing — “Speech or Silence? The Future of the First Amendment in Higher Education,” held by the Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Development — one throughline emerged: the importance of the First Amendment on campus.

“College students have clear rights on campuses,” Chairman Burgess Owens said. “Public universities should uphold the First Amendment, and private universities should abide by their own stated free speech policies.” He added, “Protecting free expression is essential not only to the educational mission of our schools, but also to the continued strength of our nation.”

Subcommittee Ranking Member Alma Adams made similar points, arguing that “every student is entitled to the full protection” of both the First Amendment and Title VI. She later added, “A campus where people are afraid to speak is not a place of learning. It’s a place of silence.”

These points echo a long line of constitutional law, which leaves no room for the view that First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses. Indeed, the Supreme Court warned in its seminal case on academic freedom that teachers and students must remain free to inquire, study, evaluate, and gain new maturity and understanding, or else “our civilization will stagnate and die.”

Other members reinforced these points. Rep. Kevin Kiley warned that without the First Amendment, we lose the ability to have the “discourse and debate on which a healthy democracy depends.” Rep. Mark DeSaulnier cited the historical importance of free speech, noting that Thomas Jefferson kept a bust of Alexander Hamilton in his home specifically because they disagreed so vigorously.

As often happens, differences emerged in the details, particularly around the nature and scale of threats to free speech, as well as how to address them. Yet even some of these differences reflected common principles. For example, members of both parties highlighted free speech concerns related to diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. Democratic Reps. Adams and Suzanne Bonamici argued that federal anti-DEI efforts are chilling protected speech on campus, including by pressuring institutions over what faculty may say or teach. Republican Rep. Bob Onder argued that DEI policies in medical education can act as an ideological gatekeeping mechanism.

FIRE has previously written about both concerns. And while the representatives sharply disagreed about what is threatening campus speech, their concerns share an important foundation: without the free exchange of ideas, effective education is impossible. Bonamici, even while arguing that the threat comes from the administration rather than campuses themselves, acknowledged that college campuses “of all places, are where we should have the free exchange of ideas.” Onder argued that “doctors, nurses, and medical students have to be able to ask questions and challenge assumptions” because “free speech is the foundation of evidence-based medicine.”

With shared principles like these in mind, we can find solutions that protect free speech for everyone on campus, regardless of their views or who is attempting to censor them. Fortunately, there are tried-and-tested, constitutionally grounded ways to do this. Many, including those highlighted below, were included in the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act, which passed the House in 2024 with bipartisan support.

At public universities, for example, Congress can:

• End the use of “free speech zones” that unconstitutionally quarantine student expression to tiny areas of campus

• Require adherence to the Supreme Court’s time, place, and manner framework for expressive conduct regulations

• Prohibit the use of political litmus tests in admissions, hiring, or promotions

• Protect students from unconstitutional, viewpoint-discriminatory “security fees”

These commonsense, widely adopted policy frameworks protect students’ rights while giving schools the flexibility to tailor their policies to institutional needs. They are not novel, unexpected, or onerous. At least 24 states have enacted some or all of them, often with unanimous or bipartisan support.

Members of Congress from both sides of the aisle have made clear that campus free speech is indispensable. Amid disagreements during this hearing, members repeatedly returned to the same core principle: higher education cannot fulfill its mission unless students and faculty are free to debate the issues of the day. We hope this shared commitment can translate into practical reforms that ensure our nation’s leaders are trained through “that robust exchange of ideas which discovers truth ‘out of a multitude of tongues, rather than through any kind of authoritative selection.’”

Reintroducing and passing the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act would be a great first step.

This essay was originally published in the California Post/New York Post on May 7, 2026.

The University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) School of Law is in the midst of a free-speech emergency.

When a major American law school teaches its students that the right way to respond to political opponents is to silence them, something has gone wrong.

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And when it then attempts to protect those disruptive students from public criticism by threatening other students’ speech, it’s a crisis.

That’s just what happened at UCLA this past month.

Last month, the local chapter of the Federalist Society, a conservative lawyers’ group, hosted a lecture by James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security.

It was quickly derailed by student protesters.

Even by the disappointing standards of a campus shout-down, this one was particularly egregious: Protesters filled the room and began disrupting the event before the introductions were even finished.

They shouted. They booed. They sounded their cell phone ringtones on cue. About 50 protesters — mostly students — later staged a distracting walk-out.

Students had every right to protest Percival. They could have rallied outside, criticized him online, or written op-eds in the Daily Bruin. Better yet, they could have asked tough questions, and made clear they despise the administration’s immigration policies. That is protected speech.

At a public university like UCLA, the First Amendment protects both the invited speaker’s right to speak and the students’ right to protest. But it does not allow one group of students to stop another group from hearing an invited speaker.

That is not protected protest. It’s mob censorship.

Then UCLA made it worse.

After video of the disruptions spread online and in the media, Assistant Dean of Student Affairs Bayrex Martí warned the Federalist Society not to identify publicly those students visible in the clips.

“If that information is shared despite the tenor of some online commentary, and an implicated student reports [prohibited] behavior,” the dean wrote, “the student organization and/or individual students could be connected to it . . . and subjected to campus processes.”

Translated from administrator-speak: If you merely identify the people who disrupted your event, and someone else later misbehaves, you may be investigated, too.

That is an astonishing message from a law school.

The First Amendment protects the right of both Federalist Society members and student hecklers to publish the names of private individuals depicted in publicly available videos. Event attendees were told beforehand that the event would be filmed and had no reasonable expectation of privacy about their presence or conduct in the room.

Worse, UCLA’s concern for adult law students facing online criticism was seemingly selective. Student protesters had already named and mocked Federalist Society members online. UCLA apparently saw no need to warn them.

The viewpoint-discriminatory message was hard to miss: If protesters identify Federalist Society members, that is campus politics. If FedSoc identifies protesters, that could become a disciplinary matter.

UCLA has yet to show any recognition of the profound miseducation it is providing its students about free speech, civic debate, and the role of the legal profession.

This mess is not just a campus speech problem. It is a legal education problem.

Simply put: Do today’s students understand what lawyers do?

Civil disagreement and the willingness to engage seriously with opposing arguments — even when objectionable — are central to the practice of law. The adversarial process relies on attorneys vigorously defending their claims and pointing out the weaknesses in the opposing arguments.

Effective advocates do not win by drowning out the other side. They win by understanding and out-arguing their opponents.

The students most opposed to the administration’s immigration policies had the most to gain from hearing Percival. Lawyers who hope to fight DHS policy must understand DHS’s reasoning and legal arguments. They chose not to.

UCLA should have treated that choice as the problem. Instead, it warned the students who hosted the event that their own protected speech could drag them into a disciplinary process.

These misplaced priorities are bad enough from law students. They are much worse from a public law school that seems happy to teach students that disruption works, criticism is harmful, and administrators may pick favorites when the politics get hot.

If this is how America is training its future lawyers, we’re all in trouble.

This essay was originally published by The Dispatch on May 6, 2026.

The Department of Justice’s recent indictment of former FBI Director James Comey has been rightly criticized as flimsy and an affront to the First Amendment. This is nothing more than a naked use of federal authority to intimidate a notable critic of President Donald Trump. It’s also something that should make conservatives uneasy.

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The Republican Party won’t always control the government, but by treating hostile political symbolism as a threat, the Department of Justice has opened a door that future administrations may be all too willing to walk through.

DOJ first sought to indict Comey in September 2025, alleging that he lied to Congress during testimony he gave in 2020. A federal judge dismissed that indictment in December on the grounds that the prosecutor, acting U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, had been unlawfully appointed. In late April, Comey was indicted again, this time over a nearly year-old social media post in which Comey had spelled out “86 47” in seashells. The government called that “a threat to take the life of, and to inflict bodily harm upon, the President of the United States.”

How are numbers threatening? The indictment has no answer, but “86” commonly means to “get rid of” or “throw out” (with “47” meaning Trump, the 47^th president). To argue that “86” means “assassinate” or “kill” requires taking an uncharitable interpretation of Comey’s post, to say the least. Even Amazon sells “8647” and “8646” (referring to former President Joe Biden) decals explicitly branded as “anti-Trump” and “funny Joe Biden bumper stickers.”

It stretches credulity to suggest that any American who buys and sells those stickers threatens death on the president. But if the DOJ’s theory were to hold, there’s no reason a future Democratic administration couldn’t say that anti-Biden or anti-Democratic Party slogans sold online, chanted at rallies, or posted on social media are evidence of criminal intent.

Whatever one thinks of Comey’s seashell arrangement, it falls comically short of the level the Constitution requires for prosecuting a “true threat.” Under the First Amendment, all speech is protected unless it falls under one of a small number of narrowly defined categories. “True threats” are one such category, but the threshold requires a serious threat to commit an act of unlawful violence.

The government will soon learn just how narrow that category is. The First Amendment gives plenty of “breathing room” for even “vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks,” including on presidents. The brilliance of these words — from Watts v. United States (1969) — is that they don’t take sides. They protect the anti-war protester just as much as the Trump rallygoer, the pro-life demonstrator, or the gun-rights activist.

In Watts, a young man attending a rally on the National Mall complained about the Vietnam War draft, stating, “If they ever make me carry a rifle the first man I want to get in my sights is L.B.J.” Watts was convicted for threatening President Lyndon Johnson.

The Supreme Court overturned Watts’ conviction in 1969, holding that his remarks were constitutionally protected “political hyperbole.” Recognizing that the “language of the political arena” can be “abusive” and “inexact,” the court emphasized that Watts’ “only offense” was a “kind of very crude offensive method of stating a political opposition to the president.”

In other words, Watts merely used sharp rhetoric to criticize a war effort he saw as unjust. Comey’s shells are no different. If anything, they’re even further outside the category of true threats than Watts’ statement about training a rifle on Johnson. But any ambiguity here is exactly why conservatives and liberals alike shouldn’t want prosecutors rummaging through our social media feeds, fishing for any hostile political slogan that could be construed as a threat.

What’s more, just because the government brands Comey’s shells as a threat doesn’t make it so. As the Supreme Court recently said in Chiles v. Salazar, “the First Amendment is no word game.” So too here. The government can’t magically disappear criticism by using ominous buzzwords like “harassment,” “misinformation,” or “threats.”

As the Supreme Court said in Watts, our “profound national commitment” to “uninhibited, robust, and wide-open” political debate requires our public officials to keep their hands off the levers of criminal charges whenever they’re offended by a critic.

The DOJ should not have brought these charges. Thanks to the First Amendment, they likely won’t stand up in court. But they may leave a lasting impact on our political culture and our willingness to tolerate sharp criticism. The next target may not be a former FBI director with elite legal representation and national media attention. It could be you: a county party member, a student with minority views on campus, or a parent who posts online about what their kids learn in school.

A casual exchange with a chatbot can help someone understand a lease, think through a medical question, or navigate a personal issue. It can become specific and personal, even though people understand it isn’t a licensed professional.

Yet even basic, exploratory conversations risk being labeled professional advice under a New York bill introduced this session.

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Senate Bill 7263 would prevent AI chatbots — defined broadly as any system that simulates “human-like conversation” and provides information or services — from generating responses that would amount to the unlicensed practice of a profession like law, medicine, or mental health, if that profession is normally provided by a human. The bill also authorizes lawsuits against chatbot companies that generate such responses, and makes clear that disclaimers alone are not enough to avoid liability.

It would be one thing if the bill was limited to unlicensed professional conduct. The state can restrict AI-powered robots from doing surgery or prescribing medicine. But some activities restricted by the bill affect only speech. And the legal context is especially murky.

New York Judiciary Law § 478 prohibits practicing law without a license, and courts have interpreted it to include providing legal advice or opinions tailored to a specific individual. When applied to human speakers, this existing law is already quite broad and raises serious free speech concerns.

Outside professional settings where someone holds themselves out as a lawyer, this law can reach ordinary, situation-specific guidance when it crosses into applying legal rules to someone’s circumstances. A casual conversation with a friend about negotiating rent gets into tenant rights and strategy. A suggestion on how to dispute a credit card charge turns into guidance on how to assert rights under the card’s terms and conditions. At that point, a friend’s advice can start to look like regulated legal advice once it offers tailored, actionable guidance about someone’s legal rights or obligations.

That risk isn’t hypothetical. New York has taken the position that a nonprofit program that trained non-lawyers to help low-income people fill out debt collection answer forms could violate unauthorized practice of law rules. In other words, even structured, form-based guidance tailored to a person’s situation in responding to a lawsuit can be unauthorized practice of law.

Given how unclear those lines already are, SB 7263 raises the risk that the bill would not only capture chatbots pretending to be lawyers, but also ordinary back-and-forth exchanges between a person and a chatbot. If someone asks whether crossing 34th Street outside a crosswalk on their daily commute is illegal, that personalized question could be treated as legal advice, creating pressure for chatbots not to answer.

Again, it would be one thing if a developer falsely claimed its chatbot was a licensed New York attorney, and it offered to write someone’s will. Laws targeting that kind of deception fit comfortably within existing fraud and consumer protection frameworks. But this bill goes further, reaching chatbots that make no such claims.

As a result, the approach taken in S. 7263 targets pure speech. AI systems generate responses to user questions, often in a conversational, tailored way. But treating those outputs as the unauthorized practice of law makes liability turn on whether the response is deemed “legal advice.” As a result, what is permitted or prohibited depends solely on what the AI system says, regardless of whether it reflects ordinary, back-and-forth exchanges of information. In doing so, the law blurs the line between protected expression and professional conduct.

If we’re purely talking about speech, whether it’s a person speaking or a developer’s chatbot providing a response, it should be free from government interference unless it falls into one of the narrow categories of unprotected speech like fraud. But states have long regulated professional conduct, and courts have upheld those rules. In Upsolve, Inc. v. James, a federal court recognized New York’s authority to enforce its unauthorized-practice-of-law statutes. However, FIRE is concerned about laws restricting the unauthorized practice of professions to the extent they reach pure speech. Such regulations raise serious constitutional concerns and warrant the highest level of judicial scrutiny, as they risk chilling valuable information sharing.

Another problem is that in order to avoid expensive liability costs, AI companies will predictably limit outputs, restrict features, or avoid certain topics altogether. Unless you can afford a lawyer for every law-related question you might have, the result is likely to be reduced access to information. For those representing themselves in court, that means fewer tools to understand the law, prepare filings, and navigate the process.

Even at this early stage, AI tools are already helping people navigate complex legal issues where traditional institutions fall short. New research released in March documents a sharp rise in people representing themselves in court alongside growing evidence of AI use. Notably, this increase was tracked in federal courts, which impose more demanding procedural and jurisdictional requirements than state courts, making the trend all the more striking. Separately, Stanford’s Justice AI Co-Pilots helps legal aid organizations navigate complex rules, draft filings, and manage high-volume cases, making a strong case that AI has a place in legal problem-solving.

As AI becomes a central tool for how people learn, ask questions, and engage with ideas, the legal frameworks that apply to it matter. But so does the distinction between professional conduct and free expression. And that balance will only become more important as these technologies continue to evolve.

This essay was originally published by The Hill on April 14, 2026.

If democracy is our nation’s engine, then political protest is its gas pedal — and it has been since our founding. Early Americans rose up to protest the tyranny of the Stamp Act and the Tea Act, fighting taxation without representation and planting the seeds of independence. Two decades later, they enshrined the freedom to protest in the First Amendment.

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All throughout America’s 250 years, that freedom has given millions the voice to demand change. It spearheaded the fight against segregation. It secured voting rights for women. And today, Americans gather in public parks and city streets for No Kings rallies, the March for Life and countless other political and social causes.

But a lawsuit that has snaked through the courts for eight years threatens our prized freedom to protest, exposing protesters to vast damages for acts they didn’t commit and chilling Americans from making their voices heard.

That should trouble any freedom-loving American.

In 2016, DeRay McKesson joined a protest against the fatal police shooting of Alton Sterling, during which a police officer was hit with a rock. But DeRay did not throw the rock. Nor did he ask anybody to throw rocks or engage in any other violence.

Yet the officer sued McKesson, instead of the rock-thrower. On what basis, you ask? The officer claims he was responsible for organizing the protest.

If you’re wondering whether the First Amendment protects against such a lawsuit, let’s be clear that it does. Nearly 35 years ago, the Supreme Court ruled in NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware that the First Amendment shields protest leaders from lawsuits, absent a few narrow exceptions, resulting from some protestors engaging in violent acts.

That makes sense. After all, given how important the freedom of protest has been to America’s history and advancement, we wouldn’t want to silence political protesters or prevent protests from ever being organized because of the threat of lawsuits.

But after eight years, McKesson still faces a lawsuit for doing no more than exercising his First Amendment rights. Why? A federal appeals court has ruled that he must face trial because he could “reasonably foreseeable” that “organizing the protest” would result in a random protester throwing a rock that hit a police officer.

That standard is called “negligence,” and it is an apt standard for car crashes and botched surgeries. But it has no place when political speech is threatened.

In fact, the Supreme Court recently ruled that the Constitution requires some subjective intent — not mere negligence — to prosecute someone for making a true threat. If that is the case, negligence is nowhere near enough to hold a protest organizer liable for something he didn’t do.

McKesson’s case poses high stakes for freedom of speech. If protesters face six- or seven-figure damage awards for acts they didn’t commit, the inevitable result will be to chill Americans from participating in the very protests upon which our nation is built. And make no mistake — those figures are not hypothetical.

Just consider the protest leaders in Claiborne Hardware, who faced having to pay a judgment over $1 million before the Supreme Court stepped in and upheld their constitutional freedoms.

You might disagree with McKesson’s message, or that of Black Lives Matter, the group he helped lead. That is your First Amendment right, just as much as it is McKesson’s right to protest or even organize a political protest and not be dragged through court for nearly a decade because of someone else’s actions. But when the rights of one are under threat, all our rights are under threat. If McKesson can face years of costly and anxiety-producing court proceedings and liability for protesting, so can anyone.

Don’t let this alarm bell deter you from peacefully protesting. Rather, keep exercising your First Amendment rights with pride and vigor. In a year when we are commemorating our nation’s 250th birthday, using your voice to stand up for the freedom to protest that inspired our founding is a great way to celebrate.

In the meantime, cross your fingers and pray that McKesson finally gets the outcome the Constitution promises.

Declining trust in higher education is mostly a self-inflicted wound, a Yale panel concluded in a report released on April 10. The primary reasons given are high costs, questionable admissions practices, and public concerns over freedom of speech and political bias. The erosion of free speech on campus is so severe, the panel said, that even tenured faculty who “have some of the strongest protections” for speech “refrain from saying what they really think.”

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This jibes with data from FIRE’s 2024 faculty survey, which found that more than one-third of respondents said they tone down their writing for fear of controversy, and more than one-fourth said they watch what they say for the same reason. So what does the Yale report reveal? And is Yale finally on the mending path?

What the report says

Even before we dive in, it’s worth noting that this report shows a major Ivy League institution conducting a public self-interrogation, and committing to do better. For that alone, Yale deserves some credit. Self-reflection on these matters is always in short supply, especially on the most prestigious campuses.

As for the report itself, after listing the three causes noted above, the panel makes 10 recommendations. Among them, it says Yale should refocus its mission on creating knowledge through research and teaching that knowledge to its student body. It says the school should strengthen the conditions on campus for free speech and formally adopt a set of principles of academic freedom, which will be set forth by a faculty committee at the end of this fall semester. It also says the school should make education more affordable and that it should reform admissions to prioritize academic merit, urging the school to promote intellectual diversity and open debate.

The panel asks the university to combat what it describes as a climate of “self-censorship driven by fear of personal attack, academic retaliation, or other political pressure.” It also cites the university’s own policy concerning “institutional voice,” which restrains Yale leadership from speaking out on major political issues unless those issues directly implicate the university’s mission and operations. Overall, the report urges the university to take concrete steps to address concerns that FIRE has repeatedly raised about campuses more broadly.

What this means

Whether this effort at reform will actually work is an open question. To be sure, strong leadership on free speech can help a university reduce its number of controversies. The shocking number of students who report being investigated or punished for their speech on campus suggests the problem is massive, and that the solution must be at least partly institutional. This can begin with an honest reflection on past failures and basic commitment to free speech. Yale has already taken a first step in that regard.

At a time when prominent universities are removing ideas they dislike from the classroom, eliminating entire academic programs they dislike, and striking deals with the government as international students are targeted for their speech, it’s refreshing to see one of the Ancient Eight self-reflect and vow to do better.

America’s declining trust in institutions — in Congress, the media, even the scientific community — hits much harder as we celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding this year. Higher education has not been spared from this crisis. But the same polls that show declining trust also show Americans want to trust again. They just need to see reasons to do so. Yale’s report gets the big things right. Now the question is whether it can make those big things happen.

California lawmakers are considering two bills that would make “anti-hate speech training” a requirement. Assembly Bill 1803 would require employers with five or more employees to incorporate such training into existing, already-mandated sexual harassment prevention programs. Under Assembly Bill 1578, a similar training would be mandated for all state and local elected officials.

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But “hate speech” includes speech protected by the First Amendment — speech the government has no business trying to snuff out with legal mandates. But also, it has no clear or consistent definition. Because of that vagueness, efforts to regulate “hate speech” risk giving the government sweeping authority to suppress views it doesn’t like. Internationally, similar laws have indeed often been used to silence political dissent. Adopting “hate speech” into law, even under the perhaps benign-sounding “anti-hate speech training,” blurs the line between unlawful conduct and protected expression.

Existing California law already requires sexual harassment training. That training is designed to provide “information and practical guidance regarding the federal and state statutory provisions concerning the prohibition against and the prevention and correction of sexual harassment and the remedies available to victims of sexual harassment in employment.” Of course, the state can regulate workplace conduct, including unlawful sexual discrimination and harassment. The state can also require employees to get training in such areas. But these bills go further.

As the Assembly Labor and Employment Committee’s analysis of AB 1803 acknowledges, “hate speech itself is not illegal but can violate employment law if it rises to an actionable level of workplace harassment or discrimination.” The problem is, most common definitions of “hate speech” end up including a lot of speech that the Constitution actually protects. In fact, even the examples used by the committee’s analysis include speech that would be protected under the First Amendment.

Recent amendments to AB 1803, citing speech that “vilifies, humiliates, or incites hatred” based on protected characteristics, do little to resolve this problem. Terms like “vilify,” “humiliate,” and “incite hatred” lack clear legal meaning, so you end up with a vague mandate that fails to distinguish between protected speech and unprotected conduct — and that vagueness has consequences.

Private employers, uncertain about how to comply, are likely to err on the side of caution by discouraging or restricting lawful speech in the workplace. Many contentious public issues, such as the war in Ukraine or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, generate strongly held and opposing views about what constitutes offensive or even “hateful” expression. Requiring employers to adopt or promote particular viewpoints about such speech risks infringing the First Amendment rights of both private employers and employees.

The government does have greater leeway when it comes to its own speech, which means legislation can require public agencies to conduct such training for elected officials. But even there, perhaps especially there, caution is warranted. Training that frames protected expression as something government agencies should suppress risks encouraging the use of public office to silence lawful speech. As Jonathan Rauch has written, “The big problem for proponents of hate-speech laws and codes is that they can never explain where to draw a stable and consistent line between hate speech and vigorous criticism, or who exactly can be trusted to draw it. The reason is that there is no such line.”

We have seen these ideas tried on campuses, and we have seen them fail time and time again. We should not be exporting them to workplaces at large or into the offices of elected officials.

Training that makes clear that certain protected expression should be avoided is nothing new. FIRE has raised similar concerns in the context of mandatory diversity training on college campuses. Such training can extend beyond fostering a respectful or inclusive environment and instead signal which viewpoints are acceptable, pressuring participants toward ideological conformity. To give a couple of examples:

• At the University of Oklahoma in 2020, participants in a mandatory diversity training program had to keep retrying questions until they chose statements acknowledging their agreement with the University’s chosen political viewpoints.

• At Boston University (which, as a private institution, was offending academic freedom but not the First Amendment) in 2021, faculty members were required to choose the institution’s preferred answers to contested social and political questions to advance, compelling their speech.

Another place where efforts to limit “hate speech” often backfires is on campus, where it ends up chilling and policing basic political expression as well as research speech, precisely because hate is subjective.

• At San Francisco State University in 2007, students were charged with harassment and creating a hostile environment for protesting terror groups. Why? They had stepped on the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which have the word “Allah” on them. Months later, a federal judge ultimately barred the university’s enforcement of its policy.

• Infamously, and also in 2007, a student employee at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was charged with racial harassment because, during his work breaks, he read the book Notre Dame vs. The Klan: How the Fighting Irish Defeated the Ku Klux Klan. A shop steward told him reading the book (about a 1924 street fight between students and Klan members and how students handled anti-Catholic prejudice) was like bringing pornography to work.

And attempts to regulate speech internationally have resulted in similar chills. For instance, in 2023 alone, British police arrested more than 12,000 people for their online speech under two laws, the Communications Act of 2003 and the Malicious Communications Act of 1988. People have been arrested for sharing memes, arguing online, and insulting people in conversations with third parties.

California can and should combat unlawful discriminatory and sexual harassment. But trying to combat the ambiguous concept of “hate speech” is unwise, and in most cases, unconstitutional.

East Dallas in the 90s was riddled with crime and turf wars. Growing up there, Victor Quiñonez found solace in his art. He was only four the first time his father, a day laborer, got deported back to Mexico. It happened several times during his childhood, so immigration law became a theme in his family life — and later, in his art.

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It turns out that he was good at art, too. His talents got him into Booker T. Washington High School for the Performing and Visual Arts. Then he got a full-ride scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Now, he’s a celebrated artist, going by the tag “Marka27,” and exhibits his work across the country.

This past February, Quiñonez had a scheduled installation titled Ni de Aquí, Ni de Allá (Not From Here, Not From There) at the University of North Texas. The exhibit features giant resin paletas (Mexican popsicles) with seals that read “U.S. Department of Stolen Land Security” and “U.S. Inhumane and Cruelty Enforcement.”

But fearing political repercussions, UNT Dean Karen Hutzel canceled the exhibition. Worse, under the cloak of night, school officials later removed student sidewalk chalk messages, posters, and other materials protesting the exhibit’s cancellation. While school administrators can regulate the time, place, and manner of such protests on campus, they must do so in a viewpoint-neutral way — and all the available information suggests that the school specifically singled out these protest messages for erasure.

The student group NOISE claims its messages, art, and flowers in honor of the exhibit were “violently taken and ripped apart in the dark of the night” at the direction of school officials. The staff who were responsible for the removal said they were told to do so by school lawyers — and that it was not part of their regular job duties.

UNT has the right to clear protest materials that obstruct walkways or prevent other normal uses of its space. But chalk and posters generally don’t do that, and the off-hours power-washing suggests the school might not be cleaning up campus so much as silencing its critics.

The Supreme Court has been extremely clear about such efforts. It has ruled that targeting expression based on its viewpoint is an “egregious form of content discrimination,” adding that government actors (including public universities) must “abstain from regulating speech when the specific motivating ideology or the opinion or perspective of the speaker” motivates the restriction. In addition, the Court said, when regulations or authorities target “particular views taken by speakers,” the violation “is all the more blatant.”

Is that what happened here? Consider: UNT policy explicitly says “chalking on University sidewalks is permissible.” And while the school does prohibit chalking on vertical structures like walls and covered areas such as atriums, video footage shows that at least some of the chalking removed at the behest of administrators was on university sidewalk space outside the College of Visual Arts & Design building, where school policy explicitly allows chalking. Even when it comes to chalking in restricted areas, staff comments suggest the school normally just lets the elements wash the messages away.

As happens so often in censorship cases, UNT’s attempts to silence dissent have only fanned the flames. The National Coalition Against Censorship and the ACLU of Texas rightly called out the school with a not-so-subtle mobile billboard truck earlier this month. Around the same time, the Dallas Observer ran the story, “An Act of Censorship Leaves UNT Facing an Identity Crisis.”

Texas is censoring its faculty at industrial scale. And it’s ground zero for America’s latest crisis in artistic freedom. The Lone Star State saw a police raid seize art off the walls from a museum last year, recalling the hysteria of the Mapplethorpe persecutions from the 1980s. But the students at UNT who staged a protest funeral for artistic freedom in Dallas this spring aren’t going to let freedom of expression die in Texas. UNT graduating arts students are protesting the school’s art censorship by boycotting the traditional on-campus “Senior Exit Show” this April in favor of an off-campus alternative. Their protest chalkings were clearly protected by the First Amendment, too.

Among the messages posted by students were “SILENCING IS POLICY” and “STOP SILENCING STUDENTS YOU ARE MEANT TO PROTECT.” UNT’s lack of self-awareness in silencing such messages is stunning.

UNT is a public university, and following the First Amendment is not optional. It must stop targeting student criticisms for erasure. On March 4, FIRE wrote to UNT regarding its decision to shutter Quiñonez’s art exhibition and its threats of possible future censorship of faculty and students whose expression falls outside the university’s comfort zone. Now, just one month later, it appears some of those threats — namely silencing student expression on themes related to the canceled exhibition — have materialized. UNT must cease its war on free expression on campus and recommit to the First Amendment — because the First Amendment means nothing if administrators can make disfavored speech disappear overnight.

A new bill under consideration in California is facing criticism for censoring speech about immigration. Elon Musk has claimed the bill would “make investigating fraud illegal.” One opponent has dubbed it the “Stop Nick Shirley Act,” named after the YouTuber known for filming alleged fraud at child care centers in Somali immigrant communities in Minnesota. But its sponsor says the bill simply protects immigrant organizations from threats of violence.

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So which is it?

The bill, AB 2624, does two things. First, it allows people who’ve faced threats or violence for providing or receiving immigration services to join California’s “Safe at Home” program, which allows people to keep their residential address out of state records. Second — and this is the part we’re focusing on — it limits what regular people are allowed to post online about immigrants and the people who help them.

Ban on threats

The bill’s sponsor, Assemblymember Mia Bonta, has said her bill has no First Amendment problems and is just about protecting people against threats, violence, and harassment. She’s right that a lot of the bill is actually aimed at speech that’s not protected by the First Amendment: threats and incitement. But some of these sections would benefit from small changes.

For example, one section prohibiting threats seems to ignore Counterman v. Colorado, where the Supreme Court held the government can’t punish someone for making threats unless they knew or at least “consciously disregard[ed] a substantial risk” that the speech “would be viewed as threatening violence.”

Another section criminalizing incitement against immigrants and service providers fails to fully reflect the Supreme Court’s standard for incitement, which requires that the statement in question be intended to cause an imminent illegal action and be likely to do so.

The bill should be amended to explicitly and exactly track the relevant legal standards, but these sections target speech that is not protected by the First Amendment — and, therefore, is within the state’s power to restrict.

Ban on posting “personal information”

The most concerning part of the bill is Section 6218.19.(b)(1), which says people who receive or provide immigration services and are protected by the bill can ban nearly anyone from posting their personal information on the internet — with “personal information” defined as anything that “relates to” them, including simply their name.

In order to face such a ban, the person making the post doesn’t have to be threatening or harassing anyone, and the post doesn’t even have to relate to immigration. The person being posted about simply has to tell them in writing that they fear for their safety “based on” illegal threats or incitement against them online. Once the poster receives the letter, they are prohibited from posting about the person who sent it for four years. If they do, the immigrant or service provider can sue to get a court order requiring removal of the information. If they win, the poster must remove the content and pay court costs and attorney’s fees, which could easily be thousands of dollars.

This section isn’t limited to content that falls outside the First Amendment. Far from it. It covers any information that “relates to” the immigrant or service provider. That means the provision could facilitate censorship of all kinds of speech the Constitution protects. And there is a significant potential pool of people who could seek protection under the bill: over a quarter of California’s population, 10 million people, are immigrants, and likely millions more people have provided them services: lawyers, nonprofit employees, social workers, doctors and other health care providers, etc. A legislative analysis from the Public Safety committee says a person has to have joined the “Safe at Home” program to avail themselves of this section, but the bill text is not entirely clear on that point. It says the person must be “subject to the protection of [the bill],” and most of the bill protects people from threats regardless of whether they’ve actually joined the program. But either way, the First Amendment problems are unchanged.

A few hypotheticals illustrate how the bill’s censorship could work:

• The managing partner of an immigration law firm who receives a threat could argue online comments about the firm “relates to” him or her, and send letters forcing removal of negative reviews of the firm.

• If an elected lawmaker or other high-ranking government official volunteers at an immigration organization and receives an online threat (as such figures often do), they could claim the right to censor people who go online to criticize their government service.

• Someone who gets help from an immigration lawyer and faces an online threat could demand that people take down unrelated social media gossip about them or group pictures on Instagram that include their face.

How does this affect journalism?

According to AB 2624’s critics, this section would censor journalism about immigration services fraud. But Bonta has said, “There are no provisions related to journalism or fraud.”

Neither claim is entirely correct. The bill includes a carve-out for journalists, but it could still be used to censor newsworthy information about immigration organizations.

The exception for journalists says the ban on posting “personal information” doesn’t apply to anyone covered under the state’s press shield law. That includes reporters or anyone else “connected with” a newspaper or other “periodical publication,” or a radio or TV station. In other words, anyone associated with a mainstream media outlet should be able to post without restriction.

For other kinds of reporters, it’s less clear. According to a report by the Reporters Committee for the Freedom of the Press, a California Court of Appeal has interpreted the shield law to at least cover bloggers, but that decision doesn’t appear to cover people who don’t post on a recurring basis. If someone captures a newsworthy video and just makes a one-off post about it, it looks like the bill would allow its censorship (assuming satisfaction of the other conditions described above).

It’s also not clear the journalism carve-out protects others who share the same information. For example, what if a journalist posts information censorable under the bill but for the journalism exception, then another person who’s not covered by the shield law incorporates the information into their own post (not simply sharing it, but creating their own new content with it)?

Making the example concrete, in the hypothetical above about the head of an immigration law firm, a journalist could post a story about the person defrauding their clients, but if someone else who isn’t a journalist mentioned the fraud in their own post, the journalist carve-out may not protect it.

What can California do instead?

While the government cannot broadly censor protected speech about victims of threats or harassment, there is plenty California can do to actually protect immigrants and those who provide services to them. Under current California law, threats and harassment are already illegal, and AB 2624 adds further civil and criminal liability for people who commit those offenses against individuals who provide or receive immigration services. Current law also enables victims of harassment to obtain court orders requiring their harasser to stop contacting them. When appropriately scoped (which is not always the case), such orders allow the state to target threats of violence without restricting protected speech.

Imagine you’re a professor who disagrees with your university’s indigenous land acknowledgement, so you write your own as a joke — and then your school investigates you for “unacceptable” and “inappropriate” speech. Or imagine you invite a controversial former Black Panther to speak on campus, so your university forces the event online.

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These are real stories, and FIRE’s archives are full of plenty more just like them. But thanks to a new measure passed in Tennessee, the university’s actions in cases like these wouldn’t just violate the First Amendment, but state law, too. The amended version of Senate Bill 1741, the “Charlie Kirk Act,” builds on the state’s existing campus free speech law to give public university students and faculty some of the most robust speech protections in the nation. FIRE provided feedback on the initial public draft and gave supportive testimony after it was amended to its current language. It now heads to the governor’s desk.

This measure has sparked controversy in part because of provisions in the initial draft that have since been amended, and in part because it’s named for Charlie Kirk, who was tragically assassinated last year. But what matters most is what the final bill as passed does, not what it’s named or what earlier drafts looked like. Let’s address some misconceptions about the Charlie Kirk Act and show why it’s a real win for both students and faculty.

Institutional commitments

The Charlie Kirk Act — introduced by Rep. Gino Bulso and Sen. Paul Rose — requires public universities to adopt two excellent free speech reports from the University of Chicago.

The first is the Chicago Statement, the gold standard for statements of commitment to free speech, which reaffirms the university’s “fundamental commitment” to the principle that debate must not be suppressed simply because others object.

The second is the Kalven Report, which plainly states the principle of institutional neutrality: “The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” Universities that fail to remain neutral on the issues of the day prompt self-censorship by students and faculty who disagree with the institution’s official views and fear disciplinary action for dissenting from them.

If Tennessee’s state universities implement this properly — as a restraint on the institution itself and not as a restraint on students or faculty, as we’ve seen elsewhere — this will further bolster the free flow of ideas on campus.

Academic freedom and faculty speech protections

The bill’s most significant contribution may be its provision on academic freedom. The bill says:

A public institution of higher education or a faculty member or agent of the institution shall not retaliate in any way or discriminate in any manner against a faculty member on account of the viewpoints expressed in the faculty member’s scholarly work, or on account of any speech or writing protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution.

Over the years, FIRE has seen countless professors investigated, disciplined, or terminated — from the left and the right — for teaching controversial materials in class or sharing their views on matters of public concern. This bill addresses these unconstitutional and speech-chilling actions by prohibiting all forms of viewpoint-discriminatory retaliation against faculty for their protected speech.

Building on existing law

Other provisions of the Charlie Kirk Act supplement or clarify Tennessee’s existing campus free speech law.

Current law says public colleges cannot disinvite a speaker invited by a student, student organization, or faculty member because others find their speech offensive or disagreeable. But universities often attempt to justify disinvitations by citing potential disruptive activities, rather than the speaker’s viewpoint. This is hardly better, as it incentivizes would-be censors to threaten disruption so that their school has an excuse to shut down the speech in question (often referred to as the “heckler’s veto”). This bill clarifies that the disinvitation prohibition extends to “threatened protests or opposition.”

It also prohibits public colleges from retaliating against individuals or denying recognition to student groups for their religious views or “position concerning abortion, homosexuality, or transgender behavior.” The First Amendment and existing state law already prohibit such retaliation, regardless of whether the speech in question concerns one of the issues above, but Bulso said he wanted to highlight these particular issues given the “fierce opposition” Kirk himself often faced when speaking on them.

And importantly, this provision was amended from its original language, which would only have protected those speaking in “opposition to” those subjects. In the final version, people on all sides of these topics receive the same treatment.

Finally, the Charlie Kirk Act clarifies what it means to “substantially obstruct or otherwise substantially interfere with the freedom of others” to express their views, which is prohibited by Tennessee’s campus free speech law. This phrase is aimed at shoutdowns, a form of mob censorship where a group engages in disruptive behavior to make it impossible for an audience to hear an invited speaker’s message.

The bill defines this language to include intentionally drowning out an invited speaker, blocking the view of an invited speaker, or physically obstructing people from attending an event. It also prohibits walkouts in the middle of an invited speaker’s remarks, but only where the walkout is intentionally, materially, and substantially disruptive to the event. The original language — erroneously quoted in some media outlets — lacked these important qualifiers.

This language protects speakers and counterprotestors alike: Students who want to hear an invited speaker will be able to do so, while protesters are free to respond in nondisruptive ways. At the same time, schools must be sure to apply this provision only to speaker events in reserved areas, not to lawful counterprotests in the generally accessible, open, outdoor areas of campus. Those areas remain traditional public forums for student expression.

The amended version also dropped both the mandatory discipline section and the private civil enforcement section, including an exception to Tennessee’s anti-SLAPP law.

Conclusion

The Charlie Kirk Act will allow members of the campus community to speak with renewed confidence. Professors can contest university positions with more protection against retaliation. Students and faculty can invite speakers without worrying that the school will shut them down because others protest.

Bottom line: that’s a significant win for free expression at Tennessee’s public universities.

Texas Tech has two months to shut down its sex and gender courses after the university system passed sweeping new guidance. This marks an escalation from previous restrictions on topics related to race, gender, and sex. It also comes amid a spate of course cancellations and changes across Texas right now. For faculty, the message is loud and clear: the Texas Tech University System does not want you to teach about sex or gender. And if you do, you’d better be careful.

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The guidance, issued on April 9, establishes a “strict prohibition” on all academic programs “centered on” sex and gender and creates a “strict prohibition” on such content in core and lower-level undergraduate courses. It also bans “instruction that advocates for concepts of inherent racial or sexual superiority, inherent bias, or collective guilt.”

Banning classes in whole areas of inquiry raises obvious academic freedom concerns. But while one can imagine a college that simply lacks classes “centered on” those topics — many certainly exist — Texas Tech’s guidance goes way past simply being bad for academic freedom and straight to being unworkable at any college or university dedicated to a liberal education.

Texas Tech’s guidance prohibits instructors from teaching that gender identity is fluid, that there are more than two genders, or that gender is distinct from biological sex. (Sorry, Plato!) In core undergraduate courses, “incidental references” to sex and gender content are to be avoided when discussing primary materials for core courses. If course material does include such content? Instructors “must not highlight, assess, or allocate instructional time to it” — with no exceptions.

Forget walking on eggshells. Faculty now need to walk across the verbal equivalent of broken glass if they dare include material that could conceivably violate these rules. If a student asks a question that mentions sex or gender? Be sure not to “assess” the question!

The guidance does make exceptions for upper-level courses, but they are not much better. Analysis of “primary works” is permitted only if it is “strictly objective” and “lacks advocacy for contemporary matters.” If any discussion of sex or gender is linked to a historical figure or event, faculty may teach about that event or figure, but must not include “contemporary . . . advocacy.” Good luck sorting all of that out, faculty members.

Restricting topics on race and sex

The guidance then doubles down on previous system guidance that prohibited faculty from teaching “as absolute truth” certain concepts:

• One race or sex is inherently superior to another;

• An individual, by virtue of race or sex, is inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, consciously or unconsciously;

• Any person should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of race or sex;

• Moral character or worth is determined by race or sex;

• Individuals bear responsibility or guilt for actions of others of the same race or sex; or

• Meritocracy or a strong work ethic are inherently racist, sexist, or constructs of oppression.

If these are presented in a course, then they are required to be presented alongside other perspectives. The university system previously singled out those ideas in a December memo establishing faculty should not “promote or otherwise inculcate” those views in the classroom, indicating that faculty who wish to express the opposing views — the state-sanctioned view — would be just fine. Regardless of what one thinks of these beliefs, prohibiting specific ideas in the classroom under such broad language is clear viewpoint discrimination, or “censorship in its purest form.”

And last but not least, the system will create standardized syllabus templates, and will require faculty “to clearly disclose all covered topics in their syllabi and faithfully adhere only to those stated concepts.” That’s not a good sign for a state that has already seen other public university systems mandate changes to hundreds of syllabi to remove objectionable course content. In this charged political atmosphere, a requirement that faculty “faithfully adhere” to syllabi content does not allow for the necessary breathing room for faculty to occasionally go off-topic or bring in current events to class discussions. Rather, it sets a conveniently movable tripwire that can be used to go after any faculty member for stray classroom remarks.

Texas cracks down on the First Amendment

The system’s crackdown is the latest in a series of course cancellations, course material changes, and faculty punishments in the state. First, we saw Texas Tech University cancel a course under the guise of reviewing faculty teaching materials. Then Texas A&M University cancelled six courses and modified hundreds of others as part of a sweeping system review of how courses discussed race and gender in class. Texas State University is being sued by two separate professors who were fired for off-the-clock speech.

Texas Tech system chancellor Brandon Creighton said that these changes are necessary to ensure that students are ready for the workforce. But against the backdrop of larger efforts to root out certain ideas from the classroom, it seems that the TTU system is going directly for academic freedom’s jugular by targeting specific, disfavored ideas. Students currently enrolled in these sex and gender majors and minors will be able to finish out their studies. And universities have until June 15 to identify what programs, majors, minors, and other certificates qualify for this directive. After that, certain ideas will be officially verboten in Texas university classrooms.

Alison Riddoch is a legal clerk for Campus Rights Advocacy at FIRE and a student at Duke Law School, class of 2027.

“There’s much misinformation about this care,” says Shelley Sella, a longtime provider of third-trimester abortions. “It’s shrouded in secrecy and, because of that, it’s stigmatized.” Sella has made public education part of her mission, which is why Medical Students for Choice invited her to give a talk on third-trimester abortion care at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center this past January. But after a campaign by TTUHSC’s Turning Point USA chapter and off-campus pro-life activists, the school canceled the event, claiming it was “not in the best interest of the university.”

But allowing the event to proceed would have been in the school’s best interests — not only because of its obligation to protect student events under the First Amendment, but also because it should aim to prepare students to respond to challenges they will surely face in their future careers.

Some topics in medicine can be uncomfortable to discuss. But debate and disagreement are signs of conversations worth having, not problems to be avoided. It is only through open discussion that we can meaningfully address questions about ethics, patient care, and medical judgment. When educational institutions censor these conversations, they prevent the very debate necessary for informed decision-making, leaving students less equipped to navigate the ethical and clinical challenges of their chosen fields.

Regardless of one’s views on late-term abortion, the ethical questions it raises are a reality that future medical practitioners must confront. Nine states and the District of Columbia currently have no abortion cutoff period. In many other states, late-term abortions are allowed if the fetus has a fatal condition or if the pregnancy threatens the mother’s health. Medical professionals need to learn as students to be prepared to communicate clearly and compassionately with future patients facing difficult decisions while balancing their own moral beliefs, institutional policies, and legal constraints.

Efforts to censor controversial medical and scientific knowledge are not new. In the late 19th century, the Comstock Act and numerous state laws criminalized distributing information about contraception and reproductive health. Classifying what we now see as basic medical knowledge as “obscene” material, these laws prevented doctors, educators, and ordinary people from making their own informed opinions. These laws also had wide-ranging negative effects on public health and health education, from preventing the sharing of information about how to prevent sexually transmitted diseases to restricting the publication of accurate medical textbooks.

Or consider the infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, in which the U.S. government deliberately withheld treatment from 400 black men with syphilis in order to observe the effects of the disease, even to the point of death. It was only through open scrutiny, public discourse, and investigative reporting that the study’s harmful practices were exposed and ultimately ended, leading to sweeping reforms in research ethics.

This stain on American medical history remains an essential topic of discussion precisely because it teaches us that suppressing difficult conversations about medical ethics can allow harm to persist — and that open, honest engagement with even the most uncomfortable chapters in medical history is necessary to prevent their repetition.

Shielding individuals from conversations to prevent potential discomfort sends a powerful but damaging message that it is better to remain silent and uninformed than to engage thoughtfully with difficult questions. But nobody benefits from ignorance, particularly in the medical arena. Reasonable people can and do disagree in good faith about the ethics of specific medical procedures, emerging technologies, and areas of scientific research.

Exposure to and discussion of controversial medical topics allows future professionals to develop their own ethical frameworks, grapple with competing values, and learn from the experiences of those who have gone before. Accordingly, these conversations have direct implications for the future of patient care, public health, and scientific research.

Advances in science and medicine will continue, raising new and difficult ethical questions that future professionals will have to confront. If students are not able to engage in these conversations in classrooms and at campus events, with the guidance of faculty and the benefit of diverse perspectives, how can we expect them to do so competently when real patients, real communities, and real consequences are at stake?

This essay was originally published by The News & Observer on April 10, 2026.

“Hey guys, welcome back to my channel,” says the young blonde host as she stands on the campus of UNC Chapel Hill. “Today I’m going to be taking a step outside of Granville and exploring a third-world country — South Campus.”

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What follows is a satire of the genre of performative allyship that some refer to as “white lady liberalism.” Our host continues, “Now I know what you guys are thinking. Stacy, isn’t that, like, super dangerous? The truth is, the people here are just like us. And I’m here to prove it. I just can’t wait to bask in their culture and in their struggle. The truth is, we have nothing to be afraid of.” But just to be safe, she adds, she is taking along two bodyguards, pepper spray, and a taser (as well as her vape).

At this point in the video, the joke could go one of two ways. This could end up being a satire of people who are foolish enough to go slumming, who think we have nothing to be afraid of, or a satire of people with such racist hyper-sensitivities that they feel the need to carry mace to visit the other half of their public Ivy campus. The joke ends up going in the second direction.

When they get to South Campus, the theme song from The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly plays in the background as if Stacy has been wandering across a desert wasteland for days. She pauses, and says she’s surprised to see South Campus has roads and buildings. One of her bodyguards notices a nearby building is missing a brick and warns Stacy to watch out for sepsis. The sketch is dripping with mockery for the soft bigotry of exoticizing ordinary places, such as by treating a section of campus as if it’s rural Chad, and the over-the-top pearl-clutching of this well-intentioned white girl whose bodyguards gasp at masonry defects.

In the next scene, a black female student recognizes Stacy and runs up to give her a hug. But Stacy recoils and pretends not to know the girl. She’s a racist Regina George from Mean Girls, warm and performative but image-obsessed and disavowing in public. In the next scene, Stacy continues the tour — “This is where they play their games, such as basketball and futbol” — and introduces herself to a young Latino boy who is in the middle of a pickup game. “Hi, my name’s Stacy. Staaacy. Me, Staaacy.” The boy catches the basketball, looks at her like she’s a moron, and shakes his head. The joke is, unmistakably, at her expense.

On April 1, The Daily Tar Heel ran several satirical headlines — “The Daily Woke Heel,” “Trump orders ALE in Chapel Hill to be replaced with ICE agents,” and “UNC brings back DEI — for whites.” Then on Monday, the student-run late-night variety show Hill After Hours released the South Campus sketch from its March 31 episode on TikTok. One black student filmed a response to the headlines and the sketch, noting that South Campus historically housed black students and calling the sketch racist. The editors of The Daily Tar Heel issued an apology and removed headlines. Things took an even darker turn when UNC Chapel Hill publicly condemned the articles and the video.

“Recent content of both a racist and insensitive nature has had a profound impact on our Carolina students and their families,” wrote Senior Vice Provost James Orr. “Any content that demeans, harms, or contributes to an unwelcoming environment in our campus community is unacceptable.” But these remarks seemingly ignore UNC Chapel Hill’s own free expression policies, state law obligations, and the First Amendment to the Constitution.

To be fair, Orr did recognize that his office has no authority over The Daily Tar Heel, saying the newspaper “operates as a nonprofit organization legally and financially independent of the university.” Still, he called the satirical articles “highly inappropriate and offensive” and said, “we unequivocally condemn them.” That didn’t stop the chill from hitting the newsroom. After the condemnation, The Daily Tar Heel announced it was adding a news adviser, seeking DEI training, and shelving satire for the rest of the semester.

As for Hill After Hours, Orr said, “Student Affairs is investigating this incident to determine more information about how and by whom the video was authorized and produced as well as next steps to address concerns.”

Investigating a student group or condemning speech is not the role of a public university. Students and student journalists do not lose their First Amendment rights just because their speech is offensive, unpopular, or badly received. The Supreme Court has made that clear: In Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri, the Court held that a political cartoon in a student paper depicting police officers raping the Statue of Liberty and Goddess of Justice was protected speech. “The mere dissemination of ideas” on campus, the Court explained, however “offensive” to others, “may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’”

But that’s exactly what UNC Chapel Hill is doing. Satire that others find offensive will continue to be shut off in the name of “decency” if the university doesn’t change course.

Constitutional law isn’t the university’s only concern. North Carolina state law requires the Board of Governors of the University of North Carolina to “remain neutral, as an institution, on the political controversies of the day.” This law enshrines a standard of institutional neutrality for UNC institutions. Institutional neutrality, as best described by the University of Chicago’s Kalven Report, means that a university “is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.” This creates space for individual and collective voices to flourish rather than chilling voices of opposition, much less humor.

This law also limits how UNC system schools can restrict student expression, specifically stating “constituent institutions shall be allowed to restrict student expression only for expressive activity not protected by the First Amendment.” Both The Daily Tar Heel‘s and Hill After Hours’ speech is protected — so UNC Chapel cannot restrict their expression, plain and simple.

Naturally, critics are free to answer The Daily Tar Heel and Hill After Hours with more speech. They can comment on the article or videos online. Or they can make their own content in response, as some students already have. But the school itself, as a public research university, is not free to answer such speech with actions designed to chill student expression.

In June 2024, the philosopher Idris Robinson traveled from Texas to North Carolina to give a talk on Palestinian resistance. Nearly a year later, Texas State University fired him for it. Then when historian Thomas Alter spoke at an online socialist conference, the school fired him too, reinstated him, and fired him again. Now in separate First Amendment lawsuits, the two professors are taking Texas State to court.

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Robinson delivered his 2024 talk, “Strategic Lessons on the Palestinian Resistance,” at the Another Carolina Anarchist Bookfair (ACAB) in Asheville, North Carolina. During his talk, Robinson described “terrorism murder” as “divine violence” and praised the October 7 attacks on Israel. When the audience noticed three people livestreaming the event, two of them Jewish, the crowd attacked them and kicked them out. Robinson was giving his talk when the fight broke out but whether he told the crowd to stop, said nothing and just watched, or made jokes as the situation unfolded, his speech was protected by the First Amendment.

Local police investigated and three attendees later pleaded guilty to assault. But the police investigation did not name Robinson as a suspect or even a witness.

Nearly a year later, one of the three victims’ livestream appeared on Instagram. Texas State put Robinson on administrative leave shortly afterwards, saying it had received “multiple complaints and allegations regarding an incident that occurred in the summer of 2024.” One month after that, they told him his contract would not be renewed.

Now, represented by First Amendment attorney Samantha Harris of the law firm Allen Harris, Robinson has filed suit against Texas State University, alleging a violation of his constitutional free-speech rights. JT Morris, a supervising senior attorney at FIRE, is serving as local counsel. The lawsuit’s argument is simple: Robinson consistently received positive reviews and was on track for tenure. But after sharing his views off campus and as a private citizen, Texas State pushed him out over a social media pile-on.

Under the law, state universities don’t get to punish faculty simply for saying things that make people uncomfortable, or for attracting negative attention to the school. Universities, especially large public institutions like Texas State University, should encourage the robust discussion of public issues, even if they offend those off campus. To begin with, public schools are funded by taxpayers and therefore function as state actors. If a public school silences a professor, that’s government censorship and a direct violation of the First Amendment. But a university also exists to pursue truth. Indeed, “Truth” is one of the four words in Texas State University’s own motto. Pursuing truth wherever it leads means one must tolerate different perspectives. As John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty, even wildly incorrect views and opinions are critical to that process for one unavoidable reason: if you never examine alternative views, you have no way of knowing whether your own views are actually correct.

Robinson’s lawsuit comes on the heels of fellow faculty member Thomas Alter’s lawsuit against Texas State, which was filed last September. As mentioned above, Alter was fired (then reinstated, then fired again) after a video of him speaking at an online socialist conference went viral. In his talk, Alter said workers must organize so they are ready to “take power” when the revolution comes. “Without organization,” he asked, “how can anyone expect to overthrow the most bloodthirsty, profit-driven, mad organization in the history of the world — that of the U.S. government?”

The only possible category of unprotected speech this might fall into is that of incitement — and it falls far, far short of the bar. The First Amendment protects most anti-government speech, even when it is really ugly or aggressive, and the only time “incitement” loses protection is when someone intends to spark immediate illegal action right now through their expression, and that said illegal action is actually likely to happen. Merely encouraging violence in general, in the future, or in some set of potential circumstances does not typically qualify. Famously, in Hess v. Indiana, the Supreme Court said that a protester’s controversial line that got him arrested — “we’ll take the fucking street later” — was protected. The speaker wasn’t calling for immediate action, but at some unspecified time in the future — “later.”

Earlier this week, Texas State community members protested in support of Robinson. In an absurd twist, an administrator confronted Alter, who was also there to support Robinson, and told him he was not allowed to protest on campus because he’s no longer affiliated with the university. Under a university policy adopted last September, individuals who are not affiliated with the university or sponsored by a student group are not allowed to protest on campus, except in very specific free speech zones. The same policy also prohibits expressive activities on campus between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. (FIRE has argued that this policy violates the First Amendment, as it is unnecessarily broad and empowers administrators to censor protected speech, and last October we also successfully obtained a preliminary injunction issued preventing the University of Texas System from enforcing this ban on expressive activities between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.)

Alter argued that the First Amendment trumped university policy. (It does.) The administrator eventually allowed him to stay, but took away his sign and told him not to participate in the protest. So the official position of the state was that he could stay in the free speech zone and be near the protest, but he just couldn’t participate. This makes no sense, but is the sort of absurd outcome that can happen when a university institutes such sweeping restrictions on free speech on campus. Public universities cannot wave a magic wand and severely restrict anyone unaffiliated with the university from demonstrating in public areas on campus. As public institutions bound by the First Amendment, they must respect the rights of members of the public to demonstrate in certain areas on campus, and they cannot arbitrarily cabin those demonstrations to one or two small places on campus.

Sadly, these two lawsuits are shocking but not surprising. Texas universities have been flouting the First Amendment for months. And while people are fighting back, there’s still no end in sight. Now faculty members must go to court to vindicate their First Amendment rights — and the rights of generations of students and faculty to come.

Imagine you are engaging in the time-honored American tradition of criticizing your local government. You air your complaints on a website you’ve set up to report on city news — and then the city threatens you with legal action and potential jail time, all because some of your comments feature the city’s seal and logos. That’s what happened to Kyle L’Hommedieu and the local watchdog group he chairs, Take Out The Trash Committee of Cape Coral.

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A Cape Coral ordinance and logo policy prohibit individuals from using the city’s seal or logo without permission. No exceptions. The policy even bans symbols that so much as resemble the city’s logos, including fictional ones. So the city sent a cease-and-desist letter to the watchdog group, threatening to pursue “appropriate legal action” that could result in a fine or jail time. Several other residents who run websites or online community forums reportedly received similar letters.

But that’s not how the First Amendment works. FIRE has stepped in to tell the city that its threats are out of sync with the Constitution. And we’re calling on the city to immediately bring its policies and actions in line with the First Amendment. City ordinances don’t trump the Constitution, and Americans don’t need the government’s permission to speak. Or to use government symbols in that speech, including — if not especially — when criticizing the government itself. That’s why the Supreme Court has upheld the right to burn the American flag or display it upside down with a peace symbol attached.

Cape Coral’s ban is a classic regulation of the content of speech. The Supreme Court has said that content-based speech restrictions are “presumptively unconstitutional.” And as FIRE has explained, the city has no trademark rights in its seal or logos. Besides, the watchdog’s website makes it amply clear that it’s a private organization, and nothing about its use of the city’s symbols suggests that the city itself endorsed any of this. And yet, under Cape Coral’s overly broad rules, not only is a group like Take Out The Trash barred from using such symbols, even this blog post violates the ordinance because we included images of the logos without the city’s permission!

Cape Coral’s rule forcing private citizens to ask for permission to speak is also a classic example of prior restraint, which the Supreme Court has called the “most serious and the least tolerable infringement on First Amendment rights.”

On top of all this, the city’s actions raise concerns that it is selectively targeting who to let speak and who to silence. L’Hommedieu says other groups used the logo “for ages” without issue, but once his group used it, they were told to stop. That would amount to viewpoint discrimination, which the Supreme Court has called an “egregious” form of censorship. The First Amendment means the government doesn’t get to decide who can criticize it — or which images they use to do so.