The War on Student Speech

Mohsen Mahdawi arrived for an interview with the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services office in Colchester, VT., on April 14 of last year with dreams of becoming an American citizen. Instead, he left in handcuffs.

A Palestinian refugee and green-card holder, Mahdawi has lived in the U.S. since 2014. As a Columbia University student, he joined campus protests urging the university to divest from Israel over its military campaign in Gaza, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack that left more than 1,200 Israelis and foreign nationals dead. The conflict ignited a storm of demonstrations on campuses across the country, pitting students, faculty members and administrators against each other and in some cases leading to violence and arrests.

Mahdawi was aware that other international students—including fellow Columbia alum Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk at Tufts University—had been arrested for their pro-Palestinian advocacy. But he remained hopeful that his years-long quest for citizenship, which carefully followed established legal processes, would be rewarded. Yet when he showed up at the Colchester office for his interview, ICE arrested him “without any explanation,” he told Inside Higher Ed. He believes it was for “practicing my First Amendment rights” and “protesting and speaking peacefully.”

In the U.S., the rights to protest and speak freely are codified in the Constitution and apply to all persons in the country—not just citizens. Recently released court records show that Mahdawi and others apprehended for pro-Palestinian activism were, in fact, arrested for speaking out. They reveal that government officials sought to justify such arrests not by alleging criminality but by accusing the activists of speaking up for Palestine, expressing antisemitism and undermining the foreign policy of the United States.

Though he was never accused of a crime, Mahdawi spent 16 days in jail before he was released. In granting Mahdawi’s release, a federal judge noted he received more than 90 letters of support, including many from Jewish individuals, and posed no danger to the community. The court also referred to the government’s actions as chilling and “intended to shut down debate.”

DHS officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed. But just last week a federal immigration judge ruled against the Trump administration’s efforts to deport Mahdawi, ending a legal battle that lasted nearly a year.

In a separate case, U.S. District Judge William Young ruled last month that the federal government’s policy of targeting international students and faculty members for exercising their free speech rights was unlawful and violated the First Amendment. “There was no policy here,” Young said. “What happened here is an unconstitutional conspiracy to pick off certain people.”

The court ruling reflects what academic experts and First Amendment advocates have been saying for months: that the Trump administration is stifling free speech on campus, particularly in support of liberal causes, by arresting students purely for their activism—and seeking to hold universities accountable by investigating them for tolerating antisemitism. That, in turn, has prompted not only greater restrictions on campus protests and censorship of student media, but also a rise in student self-censorship.

“The state of free speech on college campuses right now is both precarious and quiet,” said Kristen Shahverdian, program director for campus free speech at the nonprofit PEN America. “Faculty and students tell us there is a ton of anxiety on campus, and that anxiety is leading to self-censorship, opting to just not say something that they think might cause controversy.”

Speech Under Fire

Student activism has been a source of friction on U.S. campuses since at least the Vietnam War, though the rich history of such protests dates back centuries. In the 1700s, students protested over rancid butter in the dining hall at Harvard University and onerous religious rules at Yale University. But mass campus protests in the last century have been increasingly focused on geopolitical matters, particularly left-leaning issues, which some critics argue have undermined the truth-seeking mission of the university and placed undue pressure on students to conform with popular political causes.

In recent years, campus free speech debates have been dominated by concerns that conservative voices are being stifled by students shouting down speakers whose views they dislike. Survey data shows that many students, conservative and liberal alike, remain afraid to express their views on campus, especially related to Israel and Palestine.

But the pro-Palestinian demonstrations and encampments that sprang up on many campuses in spring 2024 created unprecedented conditions for an aggressive crackdown on student speech. Unlike during previous protest movements, such as the Vietnam War, when most students took one side of an issue against the adult establishment, the pro-Palestinian movement pitted pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian students—and faculty—against one another, fueling tensions that spilled into classrooms, dorms and quads.

That unrest collided squarely with President Donald Trump’s re-election and his second-term agenda, which included targeted attacks on both immigrants and “woke” higher ed institutions.

At the same time, a number of state legislatures passed educational gag orders and college leaders began to show greater willingness to restrict student protests and censor or defund student media outlets—often in the interest of appeasing lawmakers or donors to help preserve funding. Experts say that trifecta has produced the biggest threat to students’ free speech rights in decades.

“I don’t think we’ve ever seen, at least in my professional life, this kind of assault on campuses and their students that we’ve seen in the past year,” Ben Wizner, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Inside Higher Ed last month. “We’ve seen students hauled off to detention … because they penned op-eds that did not conform to the president’s policies. We’ve seen the [Trump] administration cut off scientific research funding to universities because it didn’t like the way that they were handling campus protests.”

Data shows suppression of speech has mushroomed.

Officials at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression told Inside Higher Ed that 2025 marked an all-time high for entries in its Students Under Fire database, which documents efforts to suppress legally protected speech. FIRE logged 273 entries last year, beating the record of 252 set in 2020, the year the database was established. FIRE officials also note they are fielding more complaints about suppression of left-leaning speech.

“In 2020, students and student groups were targeted by their peers from their political left for speech about race. After October 7, [2023], things shifted. It was students being targeted more by administrators from their political right for speech about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” explained Logan Dougherty, a senior researcher at FIRE.

Some critics contend that threats to free speech increasingly come from students and faculty themselves.

“We continue to see a pattern where there are some people on campus who think that other voices should not be allowed, that they should be shouted down or that they should somehow be blocked from speaking,” said Steve McGuire, the Paul and Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative-leaning group.

For example, nearly a third of Jewish students surveyed by the American Jewish Committee and Hillel International reported feeling that their colleges have promoted antisemitism or that officials have allowed a learning environment hostile to Jews to develop.

Palestine Legal has seen an explosion in requests for help related to speech issues. Last spring the organization said calls for legal support had increased by 600 percent since 2022. (Those numbers include requests from professors, as well as college and high school students.)

Palestine Legal attorney Radhika Sainath argued that while pro-Palestinian advocacy is increasingly being suppressed, such crackdowns are used to restrict speech on other issues.

“We’re feeling the effects beyond Palestine, beyond speech supporting Palestinian rights. We at Palestine Legal have been saying for years that Palestine is the canary in the coal mine when it comes to suppressing student speech, academic freedom or social justice movements,” Sainath said.

Others argue that the federal government’s aggressive approach to controlling student speech grew out of the higher ed sector’s resistance to previous attempts to reform the campus free speech climate to allow more robust discourse and stop hecklers’ vetoes.

And speakers are still occasionally being shut down by a heckler’s veto; pro-Palestinian demonstrators at Sarah Lawrence University shouted down New York Times journalist Ezra Klein last month, interrupting an event to accuse him of being “an apologist of white supremacist views and an accessory to genocidal state violence.” Protesters also shouted down an Israeli journalist at Haverford College earlier this month, reportedly declaring, “When Gaza has burned, you will all burn, too.”

The incident prompted condemnation and promises of reform from college officials. But it’s those kinds of campus speech breakdowns that have led to greater scrutiny from the federal government, argues Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute.

“The conclusion on the right was that these efforts to work through traditional processes weren’t getting the job done,” Hess said. “And what you have seen arise instead are those who are much more strident, much less interested in due process and procedure and much more willing to embrace restrictions on campus speech from the other side of the ideological spectrum.”

While Hess is “generally supportive of the points that the administration is making,” he said, it’s essential that the federal government operate with full regard for due process.

“And that’s not what we’re seeing.”

Consequences for Speech

Legal experts note that students are increasingly being punished for constitutionally protected speech.

Last August, fresh off a suspension, the George Mason University chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine posted a video on Instagram that referred to Israel as a “genocidal Zionist state” and called for the “full liberation of Palestine from the river to the sea,” a phrase that many Jews interpret as a call for the destruction of Israel and the Jewish people. Other language in the video also triggered alarms, such as “belly of the beast” and “turtle island,” a name that some Indigenous people use for North America. Legal documents show those four phrases were the central concern for GMU officials, who demanded that students remove the video or risk suspension.

Vice President of University Life Rose Pascarell told students the video violated the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which GMU adopted in 2024.

Sainath said this is a clear example of a university trampling on protected speech; critics have argued that the IHRA definition, which Columbia, Harvard and others have also adopted, is overly narrow and chills speech critical of the Israeli government—a view shared by one GMU student involved with SJP.

“The IHRA definition was used as a censorship tool that’s designed to silence speech in support of Palestinian rights. So it has actually been weaponized at George Mason University against Palestinian and Muslim students,” said the student, who requested anonymity. “Academics, students, professors are frequently and falsely smeared as antisemitic solely for their speech and support for Palestinian rights.”

University officials defended their demands to take the video down.

“In the balancing test between honoring free speech and following federal law to prohibit conduct that would violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, George Mason chose to prioritize safety and prompt action against allowing for the creation of a harassing and threatening environment,” a George Mason spokesperson wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed.

First Amendment alarms are also ringing over the expulsion of Guy Christensen from Ohio State University over distasteful comments about the murder of two Israeli Embassy staffers in May 2025. His remarks included a shot at New York Democratic representative Ritchie Torres, who had stated, “There is no genocide in Gaza.” Christensen said in a video directed at Torres that “what you’ve said and done will haunt your family for eternity.” He added, “If you’re still alive, [you will] end up in a Nuremberg trial” with other elected officials.

Trump administration officials soon seized on the videos and Torres called on the U.S. Capitol Police to investigate Christensen over alleged threats. Amid the backlash, Ohio State officials quickly expelled Christensen without a disciplinary hearing.

The ACLU sued on his behalf, alleging that Ohio State retaliated against Christensen for protected speech and violated his due process rights by not granting him a hearing prior to expulsion. A judge concurred, finding in favor of Christensen in a preliminary ruling in January.

Ohio State officials disagreed with the ruling, alleging that Christensen’s speech was threatening.

“Ohio State has an unwavering commitment to free speech. We welcome and support numerous demonstrations, rallies, protests and similar events each year, and we encourage students, faculty and staff to speak out about issues that are important to them,” spokesperson Benjamin Johnson wrote in an email to Inside Higher Ed. “When protected speech becomes incitement or threats of violence, we will always move quickly to enforce the law and university policy.”

Censoring Student Media

Experts say college administrators have also stepped up censorship of student publications. In some cases, officials have punished students for coverage of pro-Palestinian protests and related arrests; in others, they’ve defunded news publications focused on Black students or women—part of a wider crackdown on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives designed to appease conservative lawmakers. Student journalists have also complained about decreasing access to campus officials eager to avoid Trump administration scrutiny.

“These last couple of years have been unlike any other that I’ve ever seen,” said Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the Student Press Law Center. “The scale and audacity of some of the attacks on student speech and on student media in particular are unprecedented.”

Calls to the Student Press Law Center’s legal hotline were up 15 percent from 2024 to 2025, with a 38 percent increase in requests related to censorship, according to data shared by the organization.

Hiestand highlighted two incidents as particularly troubling.

In October, officials at Indiana University censored its student newspaper, demanding an upcoming print edition refrain from publishing news content. Indiana Daily Student adviser Jim Rodenbush pushed back on the directive and was subsequently fired. IU officials did not provide a comment to Inside Higher Ed, instead sending a previously released statement from IU Bloomington chancellor David Reingold in which he denied censoring the newspaper.

That was just one of multiple First Amendment controversies at IU, which revised its expressive activity policy in 2024, imposing sweeping restrictions on free speech. Earlier this year a judge deemed the new free speech policy unconstitutional and paused its enforcement. He also determined that the university violated students’ First Amendment rights and required officials to expunge reprimands from the records of 10 protesters who had been punished.

Hiestand also pointed to a decision by University of Alabama officials to stop publishing two student magazines. One, [Alice], catered to a female audience, and the other—Nineteen Fifty-Six—focused on Black students. Alabama officials cited a July memo from U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, which declared various diversity, equity and inclusion practices to be illegal. Hiestand framed the decision as unnecessary—required neither by the memo nor the law—demonstrating how the Trump administration’s policies have compounded the free speech tensions unleashed by the pro-Palestinian protests, prompting universities to undercut student publications due to DEI concerns.

“I will say that I am aware of no other school in the country right now besides the University of Alabama that has used this DOJ memo to target specific student publications,” Hiestand said.

Alabama officials did not respond to a request for comment from Inside Higher Ed.

College administrators have targeted individual students as well as publications. Last year, Gregorio Olivares Gutierrez, then editor of the University of Texas at Dallas student newspaper, The Mercury, asked a student who submitted an op-ed about the Israel–Hamas conflict and campus antisemitism to make factual revisions. After edits he deemed insufficient, Gutierrez published the letter with a disclaimer.

The student filed a formal complaint, prompting a UT-Dallas investigation that found Gutierrez responsible for “discriminatory harassment” tied to his editorial decisions. He was later fired amid broader tensions over the paper’s coverage of the arrests of pro-Palestinian protesters and student deaths by suicide—reporting that prompted administrators to remove newspapers from circulation. Fellow Mercury staffers who went on strike in response were also fired.

UTD officials say Gutierrez violated newsroom bylaws by holding a second campus job, overspending on print copies and excluding an adviser from meetings. He disputes those claims, saying some of those concerns were never raised. He also noted that a newly appointed newspaper adviser sought prior review of all content and threatened to bar students from journalism conferences if they refused.

“It was a slap in the face to be told this thing that is expressly illegal, that was prohibited by Mercury policy for decades, is now a requirement if you want to go to educational conferences,” Gutierrez said.

University officials largely denied his allegations.

“These allegations are misleading and omit key context,” a spokesperson wrote by email, emphasizing that “the complaint was filed by another student, not the university.” Officials wrote that “the student editor” was removed “for violating media bylaws” and UT-Dallas “is committed to providing students with a professional journalism experience in a manner that complies with applicable state and federal law.”

Both free speech groups and the Society for Professional Journalists have rallied to Gutierrez’s defense, accusing UT-Dallas of suppressing student news.

Worse Than McCarthyism?

Experts have compared the current status quo to the McCarthy era, when Republican senator Joseph McCarthy launched numerous investigations into academics and other intellectuals in the name of fighting Communism, creating a significant chilling effect on free speech in the United States.

Some suggest the latest crackdown on speech may be even more consequential.

Robert Cohen, a history and social studies professor at New York University and a scholar of the Free Speech movement of the 1960s, argued that McCarthy was much more limited than Trump in his ability to punish those he disagreed with politically. Cohen pointed to efforts by the Trump administration to strip federal research funding from universities over complaints of campus antisemitism as one example of the way the government is using leverage that McCarthy never had.

“If you compare Joseph McCarthy’s power to Donald Trump’s power, there is no comparison. McCarthy could make a lot of noise and poison the atmosphere, but Trump can essentially blackmail universities, saying, ‘If you don’t get rid of campus dissent on Israel and deprioritize diversity, we’re going to take away federal funds.’ That’s very serious business,” Cohen said.

Cohen also accused universities of capitulating to Trump, pointing to settlements with the federal government—including the one Columbia signed in which it agreed to overhaul student disciplinary processes, maintain tighter protest rules and review certain programs.

Mahdawi, now a graduate student at Columbia, concurred, accusing the university of “doing the dirty work for the government.” He alleged that the agreement has had a stifling effect on students who are afraid they will be punished for sharing their perspective on campus.

“Unfortunately, on an institutional level, the government has succeeded in chilling speech,” Mahdawi said.

A Columbia spokesperson dismissed such concerns, writing in an email that the “commitment to academic freedom, freedom of expression, and open inquiry is unyielding.” They added that all community members are able “to speak out on issues about which they are passionate, and we have implemented programs to help encourage healthy dialogue and debate within our community, while centering respect for each other and the Rules of University Conduct.”

McGuire at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni has been critical of disruptions at Columbia and the rhetoric used by pro-Palestinian protesters but noted that it is important to distinguish conduct from speech. While speech should be largely unrestricted, he said, disruptive conduct does not carry the same protections and risks damaging the quality of education expected by all students across a university.

“The academic functions of the institution need to be the ones that are paramount. Especially when protest activities overly interfere with the academic functions of the institution, it’s legitimate to put some limits on those. And of course there are also civil rights considerations,” McGuire said.

A Path Forward?

On many campuses, the focus of student protest has shifted with the political winds. In recent months, demonstrations have focused less on Gaza and more on immigration enforcement actions. The fallout from the murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk also remains a friction point as the organization expands to numerous campuses, prompting pushback from students wary of the growing conservative group.

At some institutions, students protesting ICE activity have faced arrest, while elsewhere campus controversies have erupted over how universities respond to disruptive speakers and online backlash against attendees. While those flashpoints may not fracture campuses as deeply as 2024’s pro-Palestinian protests, they underscore a familiar reality: that contentious student speech never disappears, but what’s considered offensive or unacceptable simply migrates across topics.

Still, some experts see signs of hope for improving free speech on campus.

McGuire pointed to the push by many colleges to adopt institutional neutrality policies aligned with the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven report and add free speech modules to student orientations. Many institutions have also overhauled time, place and manner policies to create clear rules for student protests and introduced constructive dialogue programs to foster healthy debate.

While Shahverdian believes the free speech environment on campus is chilled, she emphasized that the sector is not monolithic. Attention is “often skewed right to a lot of elite campuses and universities or major flagship universities,” she said, but many colleges are leveraging resources such as PEN America’s Campus Free Speech guide to help them navigate student protests.

In many cases, the courts have defended student speech against government attacks. And some experts are hanging their hopes on students to fight back against First Amendment restrictions.

“We need young folks to recognize that they do have a great deal of power,” Hiestand said. “We’re all kind of scared right now about what the ramifications are, but we need heroes. Luckily, we do have a number of young journalists that have stepped up and taken on that hero role.”

Cohen concurs, arguing that the fight to protect First Amendment rights on campus will ultimately fall to students themselves, because with few exceptions, most college administrators “have shown they’re not capable of taking free speech and academic freedom seriously enough to push back in any kind of sustained way against the Trump administration.”

But as colleges try to navigate a fractious First Amendment landscape, a new protest movement is growing. Students across the nation are pushing back on the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, setting up a new battlefield for 2026. If the encampment protests revealed anything, it was that college officials were ill-equipped to respond to outbursts of student activism. Now, as the next controversy looms, it will ultimately test whether colleges have learned to apply clearer rules, more viewpoint neutrality and greater restraint, rather than recalibrate only after the crisis has passed.

This piece was originally published by Inside Higher Ed on February 24, 2026.