When conservatives fought against cancel culture on university campuses, they developed a special attachment to the first revision. They argued that it was not Americans to punish someone for exercising their right to speak freely.
But today, many of the same conservatives who currently hold power in the state and federal governments are behind the growth of the crackdown on political expression at universities in a way that seeks to avoid the free constitutional ones guarantee.
President Trump and Republican lawmakers say new laws and policies are needed to protect students from harmful and unwanted content, prevent harassment, and prevent conformance.
To that end, Trump threatened to withhold hundreds of millions of federal dollars from the university as he moved slowly to quell the protests that many Jewish students felt were threatened. And Republicans in the state legislature drafted a sweep ban on the “indoctrination” of classrooms and the display of certain LGBTQ symbols. They also called for the removal of art they deemed inappropriate.
In some cases, the Trump administration has said existing federal laws already give the president all the power he needs to act. For example, when Trump said he would deport student activists, he argued that he was acting in the interests of American foreign policy.
Needless to say, the administrative authorities said they would not be bound by the initial amendment regarding non-citizens.
“This is not about freedom of speech,” said Secretary of State Marco Rubio. “This is about people who don't have the right to be in the US in the first place. No one has the right to a student visa. No one has the right to a green card.”
Critics of this broad approach, including part on the right, say they are just as heavy and wise as Republicans claim the left was headed towards them.
“It really exacerbates the situation,” said Greg Lukianov, chief executive of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a campus free-speaking group representing moderates and conservatives who claim to have been retaliated with political views.
“Now we have all this federal pressure and pressure from the state government. Sometimes it's really direct, clear, and sometimes it's blurry and confused,” he said, adding, “More few people care about the nonpartisan defense of free speech right now.”
For many First Amendment experts and academics, new laws and orders reveal particularly insidious threats. It is a civil servant willing to sort out the power of the state against those they dislike.
“Many people in elected offices are very comfortable with the idea that they should use that office to control the spread of ideas and information,” said Jonathan Friedman, managing director of Penn America, a free speech advocacy group.
“And on a basic level, that makes all of this very dangerous,” Friedman added.
The role of the federal government in some aspects of education is rather limited, but it has a powerful tool that the Trump administration wants to use. For example, you could launch a civil rights investigation or withhold research grants.
States that provide more funding to public schools and universities than federal governments have greater leverage and control.
The law, approved last month by the Ohio Senate, sets parameters for the debate of “controversial beliefs or policies” at state universities, including climate change, electoral politics, abortion, and immigration. The bill requires that teachers “do not attempt to indoctrinate social, political or religious perspectives.”
The sponsor says its purpose is to “enable students to exercise their rights to free speech without the threat of retaliation.” If that becomes law, the university must post a syllabus of all faculty courses online, along with the professor's contact information and professional qualifications.
Many states aim to diversity, equity and inclusion programs in university employment and admissions. But Arizona Republicans are going even further by trying to remove the subject from their classrooms entirely. The state Senate this month approved a bill that rejects funding to public universities or universities that teach about contemporary American society through an academic framework of concepts such as “critical theory, white people, systemic racism, systemic racism, anti-racism, microattacks.”
The bill awaiting Utah governor's signature would ban pride flags on public schools and government property.
In some cases, Republicans directly interfere with campus activities. A North Texas University student overthrew a Palestinian pro-art exhibit last month after a Republican lawmaker complained of mentioning genocide in Hebrew.
At Texas A&M University, authorities banned drug performances on campus and said it was “inconsistent” with the university's value to host events “involving biological men wearing women's clothing.”
The American education system has long been a target for conservatives, many viewing it as hostile to their values. Over the past few years, the country's most explosive political and cultural clashes over Covid policy, racial inequality, gender identity, immigration and Gaza have unfolded in the intensity of campus quads, school board meetings and classrooms.
The destructive student protest was an animation issue for Trump. In 2017, he proposed to cancel funds from the University of California, Berkeley after the university cancelled the appearance of professional right-wing provocateur Milo Iannopouros.
Today, Trump declared in his recent speech to Congress that he “bringed free speech back,” but continues to oppose academic circles, but this time using the power of the president.
After his administration announced it had cancelled $400 million in funding for Columbia University, jurists accused students and faculty of not protecting “anti-Semitic violence and harassment,” jurists called the move an existential threat to academic freedom.
“We are pleased to announce that we are a great leader in our efforts to help people understand the importance of our efforts,” said Lee C. Bollinger, former president of Columbia University.
Some conservatives said this type of action was no surprise that it was expired.
“When you receive federal funding, you agree to comply with all sorts of rules,” said Ilya Shapiro, director of constitutional research at the conservative Manhattan Institute. For example, universities agree to comply with certain accounting standards and anti-discrimination policies.
These rules are not always consistently enforced, Shapiro said. He added that the Trump administration has also not been “accurately legally accurate” in much of what it has done.
“But some of this shift in the atmosphere that elected Trump wants law and order in many ways,” Shapiro said. “And that includes the university campus.”
The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, born in Syria and the owner of the green card he studied in Colombia, was one of the most aggressive moves by the Trump administration in an effort to punish pro-Palestinian protesters. Halil has been a spokesman for a group of students who employ hard-core anti-Israel rhetoric and support the liberation of Palestinians “by any means including armed resistance” that support the liberation of Palestinians.
When announcing the arrest, the Department of Homeland Security accused Khalil of combining himself with Hamas, the designated terrorist organisation. voicing support for But while such a cause is not a crime, the Supreme Court has declared that all sorts of hateful speeches are protected by the first amendment, supporting the death of soldiers at funerals and, in certain cases, to announce a fiery burn.
“It can't be a crime, or even a civil crime, simply to hold and express a heinous view,” said Anne Coulter, a conservative fire truck whose university speech is the target of protesters and sometimes threatened by violence.
Coulter is a hardliner of immigrants who admitted to rarely hearing deportations she doesn't support, and said the president would set a terrible precedent by giving a protected speech — which may be offensive — the reason for deportation Legal green card holders like Mr. Khalil.
But Eugene Voloff, a senior fellow at the Hoover Association at Stanford, said the law is not always clear when non-citizen speeches are at issue. And he said Trump's attempts to punish non-citizens appear to be consistent in many respects with the powers Congress has already given the president.
Does that mean that Mr. Halil, a constitutionally protected act, could be deported to protest? “The only honest answer,” Vorov said, “We don't know.”
Conservatives have recently tested the scope of the First Amendment in other ways. Ed Martin, a Trump-appointed US lawyer for the District of Columbia, told the dean of the Georgetown University Law Center that he had begun a “study” into the education and promotion of school diversity, equity and inclusion, insisting that he would not hire students from universities that would continue to offer such programs.
In response, the school's dean William Trenore wrote in a letter that the First Amendment guarantees Georgetown, a private Catholic institution, “the ability to decide on academic basis, teaching, what to teach, what to teach and how to teach.”
“This is the foundational principle of the constitution,” Trenor continued. “It was recognized not only by the courts but by the government you serve.”
