At the height of World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower didn’t want the military’s independent newspaper to become a propaganda tool. He expected his subordinates to keep their “hands off” Stars and Stripes. More than 80 years later, the Pentagon has fired the newspaper’s leaders after they publicly defended that very principle.

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Last week, the Pentagon fired Erik Slavin, editor-in-chief of Stars and Stripes, for “insubordination.” Slavin says he was fired for telling CBS in a recent interview that it would be a “red line” if the government told him, “Don’t run a perfectly accurate story. Run this instead. Here it is, written by the Pentagon.” The Pentagon also fired Middle East reporter Lara Korte and publisher Max Lederer. In announcing his retirement just days before, Lederer had said the paper’s “value and mission” differed “in fundamental ways” from the direction of the Pentagon’s leadership.

Eisenhower protected the paper because he understood that soldiers who cannot read the truth cannot be trusted to fight for it. Servicemembers now have reason to wonder whether what they are reading is independent news, or something the chain of command has approved before it reaches the press.

Stripes is funded and operated by the military, but the Department of Defense itself imposed rules for decades requiring the paper to operate independently of military command, with “a free flow of news and information.” The rules also explicitly gave Stripes reporters the same right as commercial journalists to ask questions and gain access.

Stripes wasn’t always fully independent. Though the original was founded to provide news to servicemembers on World War I’s Western Front, it was mired in censorship. The paper’s Board of Control battled the editorial leadership over content, with its founding officer Guy T. Viskniskki removing stories that might hurt morale on the front. However, other sources — including the paper’s final issue during this initial run — claim it maintained editorial independence. The paper was shut down at the end of the war, but the idea that the military could offer an independent newspaper survived.

In 1942, when Eisenhower helped revive the paper, Gen. George C. Marshall called it “a symbol of the things we are fighting to preserve and spread in this threatened world. It represents the free thought and free expression of a free people.”

Eisenhower enforced that principle. In 1945, Gen. George S. Patton threatened Stripes cartoonist Bill Mauldin over his “Willie and Joe” comic strip, in which Mauldin mocked Patton’s strict rules requiring frontline soldiers to remain clean-shaven at all times. Patton called the cartoon characters “goddam bums,” berated Mauldin in his office for 45 minutes, and threatened to throw him in jail. But Gen. Eisenhower, then the supreme allied commander in Europe, told Patton to back off.

The tension didn’t disappear after World War II, and it became especially vivid in Vietnam. In a 1970 article filed from Saigon, Stripes reporter Bob Hodierne wrote how a soldier whose company had been mauled at Hamburger Hill probably knew less about the battle than his mother back in Des Moines. That is, unless he was lucky enough to get his hands on a copy of the Pacific Stars and Stripes. “Stripes was the one place,” he explained, “that G.I.’s could sometimes read about the shooting, bleeding, bombing, gassing, dying, and killing.”

Hodierne added, “Daily calls to the paper’s Saigon bureau about stories that just didn’t do the military any good were so common that if a day went by when one didn’t come in, the civilian bureau chief, Pat Luminello, would fret.”

One senior officer objected to the paper calling Hamburger Hill “Hamburger Hill,” rather than using the military designation “Hill 971.” Another senior officer was more up front about the basic problem, repeatedly complaining that “Stripes reporters asked questions.”

But that was, of course, the whole point. The military didn’t need another publication that simply repeated what commanders wanted troops to hear. Servicemembers already had official channels for that. What they needed was a newspaper that would tell them what was happening, including what was going wrong.

By the late 1980s, recurring allegations of censorship and command influence became serious enough for Congress to investigate. It instructed the Department of Defense to “manage” the “inherent conflict” between censorship and military objectives. Shortly thereafter, the DoD codified regulations requiring Stripes to operate free from “news management or censorship,” complete with a civilian editor.

The Pentagon has now dismantled much of that framework. On Jan. 15, it removed the old regulation from the federal rulebook, saying the same rules would now be covered by a separate Defense Department directive. But a March 9 memo imposed new restrictions on what Stripes could publish, banning wire-service and syndicated content (even cartoons), restricting FOIA requests, imposing a “good order and discipline” standard, and expanding Defense Department oversight of editorial decisions.

Then when Slavin and Lederer raised concerns about this, the Pentagon fired them. The Pentagon also fired Korte for covering topics the administration disfavors — including, of all things, Bad Bunny concerts. And when ombudsman Jacqueline Smith, the person tasked with defending the paper’s independence, criticized the rule change, the Pentagon fired her too. All because the Pentagon wants to eliminate purported “woke distractions” at the paper.

Announcing the rule change, the Pentagon’s top public affairs official Sean Parnell posted on X:

We will modernize its operations, refocus its content away from woke distractions that siphon morale, and adapt it to serve a new generation of service members. Stars & Stripes will be custom tailored to our warfighters. It will focus on warfighting, weapons systems, fitness, lethality, survivability, and ALL THINGS MILITARY.

Stripes has always focused on “warfighting.” That’s not what’s at issue. What is in dispute is whether those boys at Hamburger Hill had the right to know what they had survived just as well as their mothers back home. It’s a dispute about whether the paper will continue to represent a beacon of press freedom within the world’s most powerful military.

Where World War I officers censored content to improve morale, their World War II counterparts declined to censor for the same reason. Eisenhower and his compatriots realized that morale depends on credibility, because you can’t inspire someone to push on if they don’t believe what you’re saying. True morale derives from the spirit of freedom: the enduring feeling of control over what you say, read, and think. At its best, Stars and Stripes harnessed that feeling for servicemembers. It exemplified that true freedom of speech and freedom of the press lies in the ability to speak critically about your country — even (and especially) during wartime.

Across the country, school libraries have become a recurring front in political and cultural fights, with controversial books drawing objections from parents, activists, and public officials alike.

Let’s be clear: Parents and community members have every right to criticize what their schools make available and ask officials to reconsider particular books. That’s free speech, too.

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The problem arises when one individual or group’s political views determine which ideas students can explore in their school library. Massachusetts’ Freedom to Read Law offers a promising solution, one that FIRE has long called for: due process for books.

That means fair and clear procedures for reviewing challenged library materials. The Massachusetts law establishes significant procedural safeguards for challenges to books in the state’s public school libraries. It’s consistent with many of our recommendations, such as considering challenged works as a whole, applying legitimate educational criteria rather than political preferences, and keeping challenged books available until the review is complete.

The Freedom to Read Law also limits who may initiate a formal challenge: current students, their parents or guardians, and school staff. That helps ensure the review process is reserved for members of the school community rather than outside groups seeking to dictate what books are available to students.

Before a challenged book can be removed, the law requires notice, a public hearing, and review by a committee of school personnel. The committee must find, based on clear and convincing evidence, that the material as a whole lacks educational, literary, artistic, personal, or social value, or is not age appropriate for any student at the school.

Just as importantly, the challenged book stays on the shelf while that process plays out. Removing a book first and asking questions later can accomplish the censor’s goal before anyone has determined whether the challenge has merit.

Of course, not every decision to remove a school library book is unjustified. Schools necessarily curate their collections for reasons such as educational suitability, quality, or age appropriateness. A book might be damaged or outdated, or removed simply to make room for new volumes. But the power to curate is not a license to censor.

Massachusetts’ law strikes a good balance. It lets schools maintain age-appropriate library collections, while minimizing the risk that books will be removed for illegitimate ideological or partisan reasons.

In Board of Education v. Pico, a plurality of the Supreme Court said school boards cannot remove books simply because they dislike the ideas in them. The justices emphasized that schools must follow “established, regular, and facially unbiased procedures for the review of controversial materials.” While school officials retain significant authority to oversee library collections, that authority remains subject to the First Amendment.

The new law also says that when adding books to a collection, selected material must “be age appropriate,” “serve an educational purpose,” and “be based on the teacher’s or employee’s professional training and not on personal, political, or doctrinal views.”

In other words, the law’s demand for viewpoint neutrality runs both ways. Librarians cannot use their authority to stock shelves according to their own politics any more than school boards can use theirs to purge books because they dislike the ideas inside them.

The Freedom to Read Law also protects school employees from punishment for good-faith decisions about library materials. Those protections can help ensure that fear of political retaliation does not dictate what students can read.

As schools implement the new law, they should also follow FIRE’s recommendation that review committees issue a written decision explaining their reasons for retaining, relocating, or removing challenged material. Written decisions enable public scrutiny, create a record for judicial review, and make it harder to disguise ideological censorship as a judgment about educational value or age appropriateness.

Book challenges are not going away. Clear procedures will not eliminate disagreement over what books belong in school libraries. But Massachusetts’ approach ensures those disagreements are settled through rules designed to keep official decisions focused on legitimate educational considerations rather than politics.

Other states should take note.

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

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

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

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

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

Cutting off ICE criticism

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

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

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

The school blocked the piece’s publication, too.

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

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

Skirting around speech standards

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, they passed one that gutted them.

Making prior review permanent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

When government officials threaten to sue and prosecute their constituents over speech, the public should get to see the evidence.

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Earlier this year, the City of Manton, Michigan, passed a vague resolution condemning what it alleged was “a deliberate, ongoing, and escalating campaign of cyberbullying, online harassment, and personal attacks directed at City Commissioners.” Those so-called attacks included social media posts that allegedly contained “deliberate falsehoods” or threats, or targeted commissioners in “an offensive personal manner.”

The resolution placed “the individual or individuals responsible for this conduct on formal public notice that their behavior has been observed, documented, and reviewed.” It further stated the commission may direct the city attorney to explore legal remedies, including cease-and-desist letters, referring individuals to the county prosecutor for investigation, or bringing civil lawsuits.

What were the social media posts that led commissioners to pass the resolution? We don’t know, because the city refuses to say, even after FIRE filed a public records request.

In some circumstances, online communication can cross the line into true threats or unlawful harassment. But we’re not just going to take city officials’ word for it, especially when the speech at issue criticizes those same officials, giving them a personal incentive to suppress it.

Officials inflating the definition of “threats,” “harassment,” and “bullying” to encompass constitutionally protected speech is nothing new. And the resolution itself raises red flags, making references to “personal attacks” and “false,” “misleading,” and “inflammatory” statements — categories of speech that are not, absent more, outside the First Amendment’s protection.

While the resolution references Michigan’s harassment and cyberbullying statutes and acknowledges First Amendment protection for criticizing government officials, without being able to see the speech that actually led to the resolution, the public cannot independently judge whether the city is accurately applying the First Amendment’s narrow exceptions.

As the Supreme Court has recognized, the First Amendment reflects our “profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open,” and it “may well include vehement, caustic, and sometimes unpleasantly sharp attacks on government and public officials.”

Uncomfortable or offensive commentary doesn’t lose constitutional protection simply because elected officials slap a “harassment” label on it.

So, FIRE submitted a public records request for information about the commission’s adoption, discussion, drafting, interpretation, and potential enforcement of the resolution — including copies of the social media posts that prompted it. We’re concerned that the resolution might have been issued in response to protected speech and could have a broad chilling effect on Manton residents who regularly take to social media to criticize their elected representatives. In fact, FIRE had been privately contacted by several individuals who believed the resolution was intended to do just that.

The city refused to disclose records showing what prompted or justified the resolution, citing an exemption under Michigan’s Freedom of Information Act that permits officials to withhold certain kinds of personal information. The city said the withheld records included Facebook posts and other communications containing material that was “personally and emotionally offensive” to a commissioner and that further disclosure would constitute an unwarranted invasion of the commissioner’s privacy.

The city also said it had no records indicating it had pursued any of the legal remedies contemplated by the resolution. That’s good news, but FIRE still thinks the city has some explaining to do.

The Facebook posts may be “personally and emotionally offensive” to a city official, but that doesn’t mean they reveal the sort of intimate or confidential details that Michigan’s FOIA privacy exemption protects.

As we argued in our appeal of the city’s denial of our FOIA request, the city failed to meet its burden of proving that the withheld records are exempt from disclosure under Michigan law. The relevant exemption requires the government to prove both that the requested records are “of a personal nature” and, importantly, that the release of those records would constitute a “clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy.”

Even assuming that the withheld records are “of a personal nature” within the meaning of the law, the city can’t establish that releasing them would be a clearly unwarranted invasion of privacy.

First, to the extent any of the withheld records include publicly available social media posts, it’s hard to see how withholding them serves any privacy interest. The cat’s already out of the bag.

More importantly, those records would contribute significantly to public understanding of the city’s actions — which is the purpose of FOIA — and may be one of the few ways Manton residents can actually learn what sort of speech the city believes warrants legal action.

As we told the city: “The requested information forms the asserted factual basis for an official resolution in which the City makes serious allegations about the speech and conduct of members of the public and announces its intent to pursue legal remedies against them and potentially others.” How is the public supposed to meaningfully evaluate the city’s actions — including whether it is respecting First Amendment limits on its authority — without access to the communications on which they are based?

The city commission invoked particular communications to justify action against its residents. It can’t now hide that information from public scrutiny just because the contents are “personally and emotionally offensive” to a public official.

The city has 10 business days to respond to our appeal.

Bob Corn-Revere is chief counsel for FIRE and he served as chief counsel to former FCC Chair James H. Quello.

Now that ABC Network has sued the Federal Communications Commission for violating the First Amendment in response to your unprecedented gambit of seeking to deny renewal of its television station licenses, I suspect you are not feeling a lot of love these days.

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It is widely said that you are nothing but a political hack who sold out your previously professed beliefs about free expression and the rule of law for the short-term goal of being named FCC chairman, that you corrupted the agency’s nonpartisan purpose by focusing its efforts on punishing perceived critics of the Trump administration, and that you regularly prostrate yourself with cringe-worthy displays of servility to soothe the president’s fragile ego.

All these things may be true. But the criticism is terribly unfair because it fails to acknowledge your substantive accomplishments. When the dust settles, it may turn out that you have done more than any FCC chairman since the agency’s creation in 1934 to advance full First Amendment protection for the broadcast medium.

For starters, you have become a catalyst for bipartisanship. You united 13 former top FCC officials from across the political spectrum to publicly oppose your various efforts to punish ABC (and the number is 14, if you count me, who filed a separate opposition). This impressive list includes six former commissioners (four of whom served as chairman), chiefs of staff, bureau chiefs, and a general counsel. Three of the four former chairmen are Republicans.

Bringing together a group of individuals who hold sharply different views on politics and broadcast policy is no small feat. I don’t know of anyone else who could have managed it. But Ronald Reagan’s FCC chair, Mark Fowler, crystallized the motivation for this kumbaya moment in a sworn declaration filed in the ABC lawsuit: “Never in its history has the agency ever acted so corruptly and unlawfully to intrude on broadcasters’ First Amendment rights.”

As it turns out, your bad example has proved to be a powerful unifying force. And the feeling may well be unanimous. There is not a single living former FCC commissioner or high-level staff member who has publicly endorsed your stated views of the law or your actions against ABC. So, congratulations.

Another accomplishment is that you brought the Commission’s jawboning out in the open. Jawboning is the practice of misusing regulatory processes and employing threats to coerce the government’s targets into silence. The Supreme Court recently —and unanimously — reaffirmed that such tactics are illegitimate and unconstitutional. The FCC has long been guilty of this practice, and commissioners of both parties have engaged in it. Just never so openly or to this extent.

But jawboning cases were always notoriously hard to prove because the pressure tactics usually were brought to bear in back rooms and behind closed doors. That is no longer true. In your zeal to curry favor with your boss, you have made your threats openly on social media and at other venues. You have reposted and amplified President Trump’s dyspeptic rants about the media and his condemnation of certain on-air personalities.

Most notorious was the podcast interview where you delivered an ultimatum to the Disney Corporation (owner of the ABC network) that it must do something about late-night host Jimmy Kimmel “or there will be additional work for the FCC ahead,” adding, “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Simply breathtaking. Not since the term “wardrobe malfunction” was coined to describe the 2004 Super Bowl incident with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake has a phrase associated with an FCC proceeding inspired such widespread reaction (and mockery).

Ted Cruz, the Republican chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, called your remarks “dangerous as hell,” likening them to a mafioso threat. Your Kimmel ultimatum even caught the attention of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, who called it out in his concurrence in Trump v. Slaughter. After citing your remarks and expressing concern about the accumulation of executive power, Justice Gorsuch suggested the courts may need to become more active in checking its misuse.

And this foreshadows what may be your most lasting achievement. The campaign against ABC through a series of escalating demands, abusive investigations, and the threat to its licenses has given the network no realistic option but to sue the FCC. The lawsuit sets forth in vivid detail the many ways in which the Commission has abused its own processes, violated due process, and ignored the law in retaliation for being on Trump’s wrong side. The FCC’s actions betray the agency’s purpose and violate the First Amendment.

But by overreaching to the extent that you have, the FCC under your management has opened the door for a judicial response even before the end of your ABC show trial. That change of venue takes the matter out of the FCC arena, which currently is run by political whim, and into court, which is governed by the rule of law. It also takes the timing out of your hands, where the game has been to slow-roll the process to make it as painful and expensive as possible.

Judicial oversight promises to end not only your current abuses but could lead to more lasting positive changes in the law. As a regulated medium, broadcasting has been subject to less robust First Amendment protections under obsolete precedents like Red Lion Broadcasting Company v. FCC. Although the FCC never had the authority to regulate broadcast programming in the ways you now claim, courts up until now have been reluctant to overrule it for lack of a clear case of FCC overreach. You have solved that problem in spades.

Once in court, it will be difficult to avoid dealing with these old precedents, which are the elephant in the room. The process of correcting the law began in the 1980s when the FCC under Mark Fowler eliminated the FCC’s fairness doctrine because it was inconsistent with the First Amendment. And now, with your ongoing demonstration of just how partisan and out-of-control the Commission can be, it is, as Justice Gorsuch put it, “time to return, all the way, to the Constitution.”

And that will be your true legacy. These positive developments may just be the result of your unprincipled blunders, but they are accomplishments nonetheless. Thank you, Brendan Carr.

Douglass Mackey and Don Lemon likely agree on almost nothing.

Mackey is the pseudonymous pro-Trump provocateur who, as “Ricky Vaughn,” built a large Twitter following during the 2016 campaign, including with two false vote-by-text memes that eventually made him (briefly, until an appeals court threw out the conviction) a felon: images telling Hillary Clinton’s supporters they could skip the polls and vote by text.

Lemon is the longtime CNN anchor, who left the network in 2023 and turned up at a St. Paul church this past January with a camera running and as anti-ICE protesters disrupted a Sunday service.

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Their politics, their audiences, and their sensibilities run in opposite directions.

What they share is a charge. Both were charged under 18 U.S.C. § 241, the federal conspiracy-against-rights statute. Mackey was charged in 2021, days into the Biden administration. Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit held that Mackey hadn’t actually conspired with anyone. Lemon was charged this year, by the Trump administration. His charges are still pending, but the government’s burden of proof remains a heavy one.

The common thread for both Mackey and Lemon is that a single word — conspiracy — has proved elastic enough to be stretched toward a meme-maker and a journalist by administrations that agreed on little except the usefulness of the stretching.

We have to be cautious about what we call a conspiracy because expression that’s actually a conspiracy is unprotected by the First Amendment. Lawyers would describe the specific carve-out as “speech integral to criminal conduct.”

For example, in Giboney v. Empire Storage & Ice Co. (1949), the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment offers no shelter to speech “used as an integral part of conduct in violation of a valid criminal statute.” As FIRE’s guide to unprotected speech puts it, a robber’s demand at gunpoint is not protected, and neither is extortion, solicitation of a specific crime, or criminal conspiracy.

So what’s a conspiracy, and what isn’t? Let’s look at the history of Section 241.

The original Klan-buster

Conspiracy against rights became a federal crime because an exasperated country wasn’t sure what else to do.

On Oct. 20, 1870, South Carolina state lawmaker Wade Perrin was tortured and assassinated by a mob in Laurens County, South Carolina. Perrin, a black man and minister, appears to have been targeted in order to suppress black suffrage. He had won re-election the day before. At least seven other Republicans were killed as well. Two days later, the governor sent President Ulysses S. Grant a letter warning that parts of his state had descended into lawlessness.

“Colored men and women have been dragged from their homes at the dead hour of night and most cruelly and brutally scourged, for the sole reason that they dared to exercise their own opinions upon political subjects,” wrote Governor Robert K. Scott. He described the state’s inability to counter the group, explaining, “Our state militia are but imperfectly drilled, and are necessarily employed in their daily avocations as laborers . . . while their opponents are largely composed of those who were engaged in the Confederate Armies, accustomed to the use of fire-arms, thoroughly drilled and armed with the most improved weapons.”

What isn’t clear, but is asserted by some sources, is that the Laurens mob might have been affiliated with the Ku Klux Klan. A congressional investigation said the armed white men in Laurens County were not in disguise and did not hold Klan rallies. But the Klan, founded by Confederate veterans in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1866, had grown into a paramilitary movement bent on toppling Republican governments and restoring white supremacy — and had already taken hold across most of upstate South Carolina.

This was the environment that created the Enforcement Act of 1870, which had been signed by Grant that May. Its sixth section said if two or more people “band or conspire together, or go in disguise upon the public highway, or upon the premises of another” to “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any citizen” using or trying to use their constitutional or legal rights, then they would be held guilty of felony and fined, imprisoned, or both. Through successive amendments and recodifications, this would eventually become the modern Section 241, and that core language — “injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate” — survives verbatim.

Whether the Enforcement Act of 1870 worked really depends on what you consider success to look like. The newly formed Department of Justice, led by former Confederate turned civil rights enforcer Amos Akerman, went on a campaign of extraordinary enforcement. In October 1871, Grant suspended habeas corpus in nine South Carolina counties, sent in federal troops, and brought Klansmen to trial. Armed with both the Enforcement Act and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, Akerman’s department secured some 3,000 indictments and hundreds of convictions, often before majority-black juries, and broke the first Klan within a few years.

Not among those convictions were the men accused of murdering Wade Perrin. Six men were ultimately rounded up. None were charged with murder, which was a state crime, and it wasn’t clear at the time a federal court could hear it, as they were charged with (according to a Dec. 16, 1872, newspaper report) “conspiracy to injure, &c., citizens of African descent on account of their suffrage.”

The jury deadlocked. (Two of the men were later re-arrested in 1875 on murder charges, but it’s not clear they were ever tried.)

When the government tried the same statute against the perpetrators of the 1873 Colfax Massacre, in which a white mob killed dozens of black men — by some counts more than a hundred — at a Louisiana courthouse, the Supreme Court threw the convictions out. In United States v. Cruikshank (1876), Chief Justice Morrison Waite reasoned that the rights the defendants had violated constrained only government action, not the conduct of private individuals, so the federal indictment could not stand. The ruling drained the statute of much of its force against private racial violence and helped usher in the retreat of Reconstruction.

In 1873, after Grant’s second inauguration, his administration dropped the pending Klan cases. President Grant pardoned Klansmen already convicted and announced a policy of clemency for those not yet tried. Enforcement Act prosecutions were essentially abandoned after 1874.

The law that would become Section 241 went largely unused for the better part of a century, to be revived in 1966 when the Court sustained the law’s use in United States v. Price, the prosecution arising from the Mississippi murders of the civil rights workers Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner by a group that included law enforcement officers. The question that likely sank the Perrin prosecution — what constitutes an agreement — was never really specific to the Enforcement Act, which eventually would become Section 241. That’s a problem for every conspiracy charge. The sharpest example comes in the late 1950s.

Even mobsters need an actual agreement

On Nov. 14, 1957, a New York State Police sergeant named Edgar Croswell drove up to a hilltop estate in Apalachin (pronounced app-uh-LAY-kin, not like the mountains), a hamlet near the Pennsylvania border. For some time, Croswell had been watching the property’s owner, a beverage distributor and fine, upstanding pillar of the community named Joseph Barbara, also known as Joe the Barber, a member of the Buffalo crime family. When he drove by on that day, Croswell saw luxury cars with out-of-state license plates. He took down some plate numbers.

What Croswell had stumbled onto was a national summit of organized-crime leaders. Officially speaking, to this day, nobody can authoritatively establish why leading figures from mob territories across the country decided to visit the quiet hamlet of Apalachin. Unofficially, in years since and through much later informant testimony, the likely purpose was that Vito Genovese wanted to cement his own ascendancy and settle the division of the late Albert Anastasia’s operations, after Anastasia suddenly and involuntarily vacated his position as head of what would become the Gambino crime family.

When state troopers set up roadblocks around the estate, the gathering dissolved into farce — men in expensive suits fleeing on foot through the woods — and officers detained roughly 60 mob figures from across the country. Among them was a Pennsylvania underboss named Russell Bufalino. Asked why they had come, the men gave nearly identical answers: they had heard their friend Barbara was unwell and had stopped by to wish him well.

The raid was a watershed. It forced J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, which had long denied that a national crime syndicate existed, to concede otherwise. But it left prosecutors with a familiar problem. Attending a meeting is not a crime. And because the government didn’t have the benefit of hindsight that we do, it admitted at trial that it could offer no evidence of the gathering’s purpose. So it charged about 20 attendees under the general federal conspiracy statute, 18 U.S.C. § 371, with a different offense — conspiring to obstruct justice and commit perjury — on the theory that because the men had given the same evasive account of their visit, they must have agreed among themselves to conceal it. A jury convicted, and the men drew prison terms of three to five years.

The Second Circuit reversed every conviction. In United States v. Bufalino, the court explained that the similarity of the men’s stories proved nothing about coordination. Each had an obvious and independent reason to be guarded about an afternoon in that company, and the government offered insufficient evidence that they had agreed to lie, versus individually decided to lie.

In the cold light of day, what the government had was a bunch of disreputable people acting evasively when grilled by the cops. That’s parallel conduct, but parallel conduct isn’t conspiracy. Broadly speaking, people who join a secret society are individually adequately motivated not to tell law enforcement about its dealings. No further agreement is required.

The conspiracy that wasn’t

In the fall of 2016, one of the louder pro-Trump voices on Twitter belonged to a man who did not exist. “Ricky Vaughn,” a name borrowed from Charlie Sheen’s wild-pitching character in Major League, was the alias of a Florida man named Douglass Mackey, who by Election Day had a large following and a talent for the provocations that travel fastest online. His posts drew congressional notice the next year in connection with alleged social-media interference in the presidential race.

The posts at the center of his case were three posts or reposts containing deceptive vote-by-text memes. One showed a black woman in front of an “African Americans for Hillary” sign next to an inviting instruction: “Avoid the Line. Vote from Home.”

There is no such way to vote, which was the joke, or the scheme, depending on who described it. At trial, the government said at least 4,900 unique phone numbers texted Hillary Clinton’s name or a variation of it to the number promoted in the images, though it offered no evidence that anyone was actually kept from voting. Mackey had not invented the memes; they were publicly available and widely circulated, pulled from the open internet, and he posted them, he later testified, for attention.

Then, for years, nothing. The memes were public and the controversy was public, and the matter sat untouched through the entire Trump administration. Only in January 2021, more than four years after the memes appeared but only two days after President Biden’s inauguration, did the government charge Mackey with a single count of conspiring to “injure, oppress, threaten, and intimidate” citizens in the exercise of their right to vote.

Federal agents took Mackey into custody at his Florida home on the morning of Jan. 27, 2021. By his account, he was handcuffed and driven to the courthouse before anyone told him the charge. He appeared before a magistrate and was released on bond.

The government’s theory was conspiracy. Mackey, prosecutors said, had joined a loose group of pseudonymous influencers who coordinated in private Twitter message groups to push deceptive material at Clinton supporters. He was tried in Brooklyn in early 2023, and the jury convicted him on the single count, though only after the jury repeatedly told the court it was deadlocked. He was sentenced to seven months in prison, and the Second Circuit let him remain free during his appeal — a signal in itself, since that bond requires a finding that the appeal raises substantial questions.

It raised one the court found decisive. In July 2025, a unanimous panel reversed the conviction and ordered the trial court to enter a judgment of acquittal. The failure was the one the Mafia conspiracy prosecution had named more than 60 years earlier: the government proved that Mackey posted the memes but not that he had agreed with anyone to do so.

And it should have known that.

Mackey had not even been a member of the private message groups during the period when the conspiracy was supposedly formed, and according to the appellate court, the government “failed to offer sufficient evidence that Mackey even viewed — let alone participated in — any of these exchanges.” This was, once again, parallel conduct, not a conspiracy. The case turned on the single word the statute is built around — “conspiracy” — and on the government’s failure to prove it. The Second Circuit never actually reached Mackey’s First Amendment defense.

Squeezing Lemon into a conspiracy

Don Lemon spent 17 years at CNN, where he anchored its prime-time hours before leaving in 2023 for an independent career. On Jan. 18, 2026, a group of protesters entered Cities Church in St. Paul during a Sunday service. Their grievance was specific: they said one of the church’s pastors was an official at the local ICE office.

Lemon was there with a camera, livestreaming. What he was doing there is the heart of the case. The government describes a coordinated takeover of a house of worship; Lemon says he was a journalist covering a newsworthy protest. Lemon’s footage of the event is public and he has maintained throughout that he was working as a reporter.

Prosecutors allege that specific things about Lemon’s coverage indicate his intent to participate in a conspiracy. For example, the indictment notes that during interviews, Lemon would “remind certain co-conspirators to not disclose the target of the operation” and that he “stepped away momentarily so his mic would not accidentally divulge” parts of the planning. At one point he thanked an organizer for her actions and reiterated that he wasn’t disclosing plans for the protest. During his narration, Lemon said the “whole point of it is to disrupt and make people uncomfortable.”

Lemon was charged with conspiracy against the right to exercise religious freedom at a place of worship — Section 241 again — along with a count under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, the 1994 law, usually invoked to protect abortion clinics, that also reaches interference with religious worship (we’re going to focus on the conspiracy charge here). It is unclear whether the government has ever invoked Section 241 to protect First Amendment religious exercise before.

That novelty might explain how hard it was to get the charge in the first place. The Justice Department first sought arrest warrants from a federal magistrate judge in Minnesota, who found no probable cause as to Lemon and his producer even while signing warrants for several of the protesters. Prosecutors then pressed the matter to the district’s chief judge, Patrick J. Schiltz, who declined to grant their request immediately. Schiltz’s written response was pointed: the government had lumped all eight protesters together, asserting things true of some but not all; two of the five it wanted arrested were “not protestors at all” but “a journalist and his producer”; and there was “no evidence that those two engaged in any criminal behavior or conspired to do so.”

The Justice Department sought relief from the Eighth Circuit without success. Only then, having been turned away by every judge asked to examine the evidence, did it take the route that needs no judge’s sign-off: a grand jury indictment, returned Jan. 29. Lemon was arrested the next day. Some career Justice Department prosecutors reportedly declined to take part in charging Lemon and the other journalists, believing the evidence insufficient.

Journalists hold no special license to break generally applicable laws. Once the pastor asked Lemon to leave, he no longer had a right to stay, and the protesters’ decision to commandeer a private house of worship to deliver a political message was not protected expression.

A trespass could be charged as a trespass. But Lemon was not charged with trespassing. He was charged with conspiracy against rights. Unlike the general federal conspiracy statute used in Bufalino, Section 241 requires proof that he conspired to deprive the congregation of its religious freedom, and that charge demands proof of something the others would not: that he knowingly agreed with others to do this thing, and that he or his co-conspirators threatened or physically obstructed congregants.

The question is whether the government has that evidence. What they put in the indictment was: Lemon used the word “we.” He thanked an organizer and said he would not reveal the target on his stream. He narrated the day for his audience and stood closer to the action than a cautious reporter might. The government recasts each of these as an overt act in a criminal agreement. In fact, seven of the 28 enumerated overt acts are First Amendment activities such as word choice, livestreaming, and the editorial discretion of what not to share. But sharing a group’s general purpose is not the same as joining its unlawful one, and the Mackey panel was explicit that the government cannot establish an agreement by pitching a shared purpose at a high level of generality.

Lemon’s opposition to the pastor’s immigration work, which he made no effort to hide, supplies that general purpose. Whether the evidence supplies anything more remains to be seen.

Lemon is closer to the line than Mackey ever was. Mackey was never in the room where the scheme was built. For Mackey’s case to have been a conspiracy, the government would’ve needed to supply evidence of his telepathic ability. Lemon was in the room and spoke in the first person plural once he arrived. But presence and sympathy alone do not a conspiracy make. Based on the publicly available evidence, it is far from clear that Lemon entered into the agreement that the conspiracy charge requires.

There’s a second issue with using 241 in this way: it protects rights secured by the Constitution or U.S. law. The right to freedom of religion runs only against the government. A private citizen who disrupts a worship service does many things, but is not in a position to violate the First Amendment. That’s the same type of line the Supreme Court drew in Cruikshank in 1876.

And this is where Lemon’s FACE Act charge might come into play, in theory. The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances ACT, or FACE Act, is a U.S. law that creates a statutory protection that the protest arguably violated. But that isn’t the charge in the indictment, and that would be the novel use of a statute (the FACE Act) to meet a requirement in a novel use of another statute (Section 241), and it’s an awfully long way from the conspiracies that Section 241 was created to punish.

On Aug. 7, Lemon filed a motion to dismiss the indictment for “violating the First Amendment and failing to state an offense.” Separately, he’s moved to dismiss on the grounds that the indictment is rooted in the president’s “long expressed animosity towards Mr. Lemon based on years of critical reporting.”

Same same

In 1871, federal prosecutors used a conspiracy statute against men in disguise who rode at night to keep their neighbors from voting. In 1966, they used it against the murderers of three young men who had come to Mississippi to register voters.

In 2021, they used it against a man who posted a meme. In 2026, against a journalist who filmed a protest.

The two modern defendants would recognize almost nothing in each other, which is why their cases belong side by side. In Mackey’s, the Second Circuit did not ask whether his politics were attractive or his memes defensible. It asked whether the government had proved he agreed to anything, and finding that it had not, ordered him acquitted. The courts weighing Lemon’s case face the same question, and the answer should not depend on the direction his camera happened to point.

A conspiracy statute with an elastic notion of agreement is proving to be a lure that prosecutors can’t resist. The safeguards against abuse are unglamorous: an agreement that must actually be proved, a right that must actually be denied, force that must actually be used. Applied with rigor, those safeguards spared a meme-maker under one administration. A journalist facing prosecution under the next is owed the same rigor, no more and no less, and none of it turning on politics.

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

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

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

It’s time for a change.

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

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

Protecting teachers and their work

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

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

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

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

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

Making universities find the balance

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Giving the protections teeth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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United States to vet foreign journalists’ social media posts

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

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

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

France’s under-15 ban stalls

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

The latest in hate speech law

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

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

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

UK regulators and media clash

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

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

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

Brazilian influencer sentenced for ‘social racism’

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

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

Political censorship across Asia and beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pope Francis’ memoir censored in Russia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And neither should we.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Pentagon has declared war on its press pool. Although it may adopt certain rules about who enters, those rules must comply with the Constitution. And rules that punish journalists for asking questions or publishing information officials would rather keep hidden violate the Constitution at every turn.

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Yet since May 2025, the Department of Defense has done precisely that through its restrictions on the Pentagon press corps. The New York Times has challenged those restrictions in two lawsuits. The Pentagon won a temporary victory in the most recent battle, successfully obtaining a hold on an earlier District Court ruling halting part of its policy, but the war is far from won as the courts continue to consider constitutional challenges to the Pentagon’s current policy.

The Pentagon restricts access

In May 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum limiting journalists’ physical access inside the Pentagon. After news organizations reported in June that an early U.S. intelligence assessment found American strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities had caused less damage than President Donald Trump and Hegseth publicly claimed, the department clamped down even harder, limiting reporters’ movement and threatening their credentials if they “solicited” or obtained information officials had not authorized for release — even unclassified information. The Times sued, arguing that the policy violated both the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process.

“This policy reeks of prior restraint,” the Society of Professional Journalists said in a statement.

If they wanted to keep their credentials, Pentagon reporters had until Oct. 14, 2025, to sign on to the new rules. Instead, more than 30 news organizations — including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and Fox News, Hegseth’s previous employer — refused. The next day, dozens of journalists surrendered their badges and left the building, ending some news organizations’ decades-long presence there.

A week later, Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell suggested the changes were also aimed at reshaping coverage, attacking the departing journalists as “self-righteous” activists, and praising their replacements as people who would “circumvent the lies of the mainstream media and get real news to the American people.” The Pentagon then credentialed a new group that included administration-friendly outlets and influencers. Mainstream outlets, including those who walked out, have continued to report on the U.S. military from outside the Pentagon.

The restrictions get blocked

The Times challenged the policy in court and on March 20, Senior U.S. District Judge Paul L. Friedman ruled that the policy violates the First and Fifth Amendments. He agreed with The Times’ assertions that the policy discriminated based on viewpoint, having been implemented with the intent to “chill” news coverage the DoD considers unfavorable.

Friedman cited episodes in the months leading up to the October policy in which Hegseth, Parnell, and other DoD officials responded to negative coverage in the media by attacking the outlets, including calling them “Trump-hating media” and The Times a “Fake News” publication. The court observed that their replacements were specifically “individuals and outlets who had expressed ideological agreement with and support for the Trump administration in the past.”

The DoD had argued that the policy did not discriminate based on viewpoint because it applied to all members of the press corps. However, just because a policy applies to all publications does not mean it is content-neutral if it was adopted “because of disagreement with the message [the restricted speech] conveys.” Ultimately, Friedman enjoined and vacated the challenged portions of the October policy, barred the department from using them against Times journalists, and ordered the Pentagon to re-credential Barnes and other Times journalists.

The Pentagon creates new restrictions

Three days later, the Pentagon issued an interim policy that moved reporters’ workspaces from their traditional location inside the building to an external annex, and required journalists to have an official escort before entering the Pentagon and limiting entry to scheduled interviews, briefings, and other approved events.

The interim policy also replaced the former ban on “soliciting” unauthorized information with a new ban on “intentionally encouraging, inducing, or requesting” an unauthorized employee to disclose it. And violations could still cost a journalist Pentagon credentials.

But that didn’t solve the constitutional problems Friedman noted because reporters gather news by requesting information. A rule that treats those acts as potential credentialing offenses gives officials enormous leverage over the reporting produced about them.

The interim policy also treats a promise of confidentiality as possible evidence that a reporter induced an unauthorized disclosure. But confidentiality is a routine reporting tool, especially when sources fear retaliation for discussing lawful, unclassified, or embarrassing information. Treating it as evidence of misconduct risks punishing protected newsgathering without proof of wrongdoing.

On April 9, Friedman ruled that parts of the interim policy violated his March order and blocked them as applied to Times journalists. The D.C. Circuit later allowed the escort requirement to remain in effect during the appeal, and the Times filed a second suit directly challenging that requirement and other portions of the interim policy.

What it all means

The practical consequences of escort policies that reduce access are substantial. Journalism often begins with an unplanned conversation: a question in a hallway or a clarification after a briefing. An escort’s constant presence makes those exchanges difficult and may deter employees from speaking at all. By relocating the press corps to an outside annex and permitting entry mostly for scheduled events, the rules replace independent reporting with managed access.

The department’s briefing record also illustrates the cost of reduced access. Hegseth went more than eight months between appearances at the Pentagon briefing-room podium, between June 26, 2025, and March 2, 2026. Even during active military operations, formal briefings have been sporadic, making independent access to knowledgeable officials more important. Despite the ongoing war in Iran, the Pentagon has not held a formal press briefing in over two-and-a-half months, citing operational security concerns as the reason.

The Pentagon may impose neutral security rules, protect genuinely classified material, and punish its employees who unlawfully disclose it. What it cannot do is make favorable coverage the price of access or transform ordinary reporting methods into evidence of lawbreaking.

Thankfully, the journalists who surrendered their credentials have continued reporting from outside the building, and their work shows that the Pentagon cannot eliminate scrutiny simply by emptying the press room. But distance, escorts, and managed appearances do make scrutiny harder. That’s a problem for all of us. If the government can control every encounter it has with the press, it can control every detail of what the public gets to know. And that’s no way to protect America’s enduring promise that the government is accountable to the people, not the other way around.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The federal directive was already dead

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

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

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

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

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

NYU’s censorship problem

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

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

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

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

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

Association is not segregation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ally Duong studies at Rutgers Law School and is a documentation volunteer for the non-profit fan activist group Organization for Transformative Works and their virtual archive of fan works Archive of Our Own. Previously, she interned in the contracts department at Deep Vellum Publishing, formerly Dalkey Archive.

“Romantasy” is a genre marriage of romance and fantasy that has been selling books like wildfire. And this year, your local bookstore’s romantasy section is likely lined with covers featuring a curly-haired brunette heroine next to a suave, silver-haired hero–all because fans who saw what an author couldn’t see decided to write stories about a couple that never came to be.

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Much of the latest wave traces back to the couple Draco Malfoy and Hermione Granger, two of the best-known characters in JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. In Rowling’s books, Draco and Hermione remain enemies and never become romantically involved. But fans have spent countless hours imagining an alternate reality, producing more than 100,000 online stories about “Dramione” on Archive of Our Own alone.

Now some of those fan works are making the leap from online archives to traditional publishing. The attraction for publishers is obvious: a popular fanfic may arrive with a ready-made audience and social-media buzz. But that shift raises a serious legal question: What must an author change before an unauthorized derivative work becomes an independent — and lawfully marketable — novel?

Copyright protects expression, not every idea

Critics of the fanfiction-to-publishing pipeline call the practice unethical, legally questionable, or both. They argue that authors are profiting from characters, settings, and stories someone else created. But the necessary extra labor of reworking a story to transform it from internet fanfiction into a traditionally published book leaves little doubt that such books are legal to sell under a copyright law doctrine called “fair use.”

Copyright protects an author’s original expression, but it doesn’t protect abstract ideas, general themes, stock characters, or familiar plot devices. The fair use doctrine recognizes that people must be allowed to use copyrighted material in certain situations to allow free expression, satire, and parody to flourish. Fair use is decided on a case-by-case basis with courts weighing four factors:

1. The purpose and character of the use, including whether it is commercial

2. The nature of the copyrighted work

3. The amount and substantiality of the copyrighted material used

4. The effect on the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work

The key question is: How much is a copyrighted work transformed? In other words, is the original work used to express something different?

For traditionally published fanfiction, however, courts may never need to reach fair use. The threshold question is whether the rewritten book still copies protected expression at all. Copyright law requires only a “modicum of creativity” for a work to contain copyrightable expression. If only unprotected ideas, tropes, and conventions remain, there may be no infringement to excuse.

Filing off the serial numbers

Fanfiction culture has proved fertile ground for artistic expression. Copyright law nurtures that creativity by protecting an author’s particular expression rather than the underlying ideas. Humans have always retold familiar stories. Shakespeare borrowed plots. West Side Story reworked Romeo and Juliet. Countless romances owe something to Pride and Prejudice. Copyright does not demand that each new book emerge from a cultural vacuum. If it did, creativity would be stifled and expression severely limited on the grounds that practically no story is entirely original.

Fanfiction has also been quietly making its way onto bookstore shelves for years. Fifty Shades of Grey began as a Twilight fanfiction titled Master of the Universe. After the name and references were changed, only devoted “Twihards” were likely to see Edward Cullen and Bella Swan behind Christian Grey and Anastasia Steele.

Fan communities call that revision process “filing off the serial numbers.” The author reworks the original characters’ names, identifiable locations, invented terminology, and other features tied to the source material. The online version is often deleted before the new edition is commercially released. Some changes are so thorough that rewritten works leave behind only common tropes and scènes à faire — standard plot elements for a particular genre. Those features generally cannot be copyrighted. Otherwise, such common elements could be used as evidence of copyright infringement (“Look! This story has an elf! It’s Tolkien plagiarism!”), and the first author to write about them could fence off whole genres of storytelling.

From Reylo to The Love Hypothesis

Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis offers a useful example. The novel began as Head Over Feet, a Star Wars story pairing the protagonist Rey with the villain Kylo Ren. It was traditionally published in 2021, and a film adaptation is scheduled to premiere on Prime Video on Sept. 23, 2026.

In the reworked edition, Rey and Kylo Ren are no longer heroes in a galactic war. They instead become university researchers Olive Smith and Adam Carlsen, who hilariously end up “fake dating” despite being polar opposites. The only surviving similarities are the enemies-to-lovers foundation of the romantic relationship, some physical traits, and familiar tropes of opposites attracting and a tall, dark, brooding love interest. These building blocks are not the property of Lucasfilm and are too general to belong to any one creator.

Tropes and scènes à faire make a genre like romantasy, but it’s the particular expression of each one that creates copyrightable books.

One judge, 6,000 pages, and hot paranormal boys

Building on the infamous “omegaverse litigation,” a recent federal case illustrates the distinction. In Freeman v. Deebs-Elkenaney, Lynne Freeman claimed that Tracy Wolff’s Crave series copied Freeman’s unpublished paranormal-romance manuscripts.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon read more than 6,000 pages of romantasy fiction across the competing works to determine whether two paranormal romance books were substantially similar enough to be copyright infringement. Her answer was no; there are some tropes that are simply conventions of the genre and cannot be claimed by one person.

“Both include the inevitable love story between the heroine and a hot boy who turns out to be a paranormal,” McMahon wrote. “This is ‘romantasy’ fiction, so there has to be a romance, and hot boys are a staple of the genre.”

Dramione in chains

So is the case closed on traditionally publishing fanfiction? Probably not, because publishers are pushing the envelope, particularly with the latest trend of reworked Dramione fanfiction, beginning in 2025 and now in full swing. These works far more openly use the Dramione relationship to market the new books. Some hardly even try to pass as original. Julie Soto’s Rose in Chains, previously the Dramione fanfiction The Auction, centers around a magical boarding school, a heroine named Briony (rather than Hermione), and a villainess named Veronika (certainly not Voldemort).

These characters and their world are distinct from the Harry Potter universe, yet their origin is no secret. Publishers are using marketing tactics that directly target Dramione fans, riding the coattails of the Harry Potter intellectual property, with some cover designs and promotional materials winking at the pairing through silver-haired men, curly-haired women, and so on.

Despite exploiting the Harry Potter link for marketing, Dramione fans aren’t picking up the rewritten works because of their origins in Harry Potter. They are reading these stories for the romantic relationship, which never appeared in Rowling’s work. The space that Dramione reworked fanfiction takes up on shelves isn’t taking away from Harry Potter itself. They may even be helping keep the series relevant in the marketplace.

While an evenhanded application of the fair use factors weighs in favor of the right to publish such fanfiction, it remains to be seen how the courts will actually view the situation. Without any public cases targeting this specific issue, the legality of more lightly reworked fanfiction is still murky. But while resistant readers may bristle at the similarities, reworked fanfiction, fueled by nerdy devotion, have rightfully found a place on bookshelves and in readers’ hearts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Eternally Radical Idea with Greg Lukianoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We should take him at his word.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In my experience, that classroom was exceptional.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Into the light

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

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

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

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

Cardinal rule

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

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

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

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

Shining a light on campus crime

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

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

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

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