History is rarely lost all at once. More often, it slips away — one forgotten battle at a time.
For Daniel Watts, that revelation arrived with the quiet ping of an alumni email. The Guardian, the campus newspaper at the University of California, San Diego, was seeking alumni donations to stave off financial collapse. Watts, who used to write for the paper, took interest — and noticed something unusual.
Buried in their appeal, the editors blamed The Guardian’s decline, in part, on a now-defunct satirical campus paper. The Koala, informally known as “The Motherfucking Koala,” had a reputation for irreverence — in 2003, it published an issue titled Jizzlam, a parody of Playboy Magazine for Muslim men.
But for Watts, The Guardian’s jab at The Koala represented a fading understanding of the hard-won battles for a free press at UCSD.
Censorship is like poison gas: effective when your enemy is in sight — but the wind has a way of shifting.
The Koala wasn’t just a juvenile snark sheet, but an unruly bulwark of the First Amendment. In 2015, after lampooning “safe spaces,” The Koala faced defunding efforts by a student government, prodded by administrators. But with the help of FIRE and the ACLU, they fought back and won. In The Koala v. Khosla, a federal appeals court affirmed that public universities can’t defund a student publication just because they dislike what it prints, marking a victory for all campus newspapers — including The Guardian.
But that history, along with nearly $800,000 in public funds that UCSD spent on litigation in an effort to silence its own students, now seems to have vanished.
“Reading that email,” says Watts, “and realizing that even the official student newspaper had no idea about UCSD’s history — or the sacrifices made to protect their right to publish — was a galvanizing moment.”
He adds, “If the university won’t teach students the history and value of free speech, then who will?”
Love, loyalty, and liberty: ASU alumni unite to defend free speech
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The mission of ASU Alumni for Free Speech is to promote and strengthen free expression, academic freedom, and viewpoint diversity, both on campus and throughout the global ASU community.
So Watts stepped into the breach, founding Tritons United for Free Speech, an independent group of UCSD alumni committed to defending free expression at their alma mater.
Watts knows the terrain well.
As an undergraduate, he battled administrative efforts to censor TV broadcasts and student publications. Late nights were spent scrolling the internet and cold-calling local lawyers in search of anyone to defend them.
“No one ever answered,” he recalls. “FIRE would write letters, but they didn’t litigate back then and the ACLU was spread thin. We were on our own.”
It was a lonely education but a clarifying one. Watts decided to go to law school. “I wanted to be the kind of lawyer who would pick up the phone,” he says.
Over the past 15 years, Watts has built a robust legal career defending the First Amendment rights of students and journalists across California, arguing an anti-SLAPP case before the California Supreme Court and even running for governor in 2021 on a platform of “Free Speech. Free College.”
Now, through Tritons United for Free Speech, Watts is channeling those lessons into a new kind of advocacy. The group’s mission is threefold: educate students about the history of free speech, especially at UCSD; reform campus policies that stifle free expression; and connect students under fire with alumni who can offer legal aid, journalistic expertise, or public advocacy.
“Students are like a country without an army,” says Watts. “They have moral suasion, but they lack resources — funding for litigation, experience navigating bureaucracy, or simply the wisdom of age. Alumni bring all that, as well as staying power and historical memory.”
But the fight won’t be easy.
FIRE’s most recent College Free Speech Rankings place UCSD at a middling 133 out of 251 schools overall. More troublingly, UCSD ranks 205th on the question of whether students feel comfortable expressing ideas. Among UCSD students surveyed, 78% say shouting down a speaker is sometimes acceptable; 28% say using violence to stop speech is sometimes acceptable; and 48% say they self-censor on campus at least once or twice a month.
These numbers reflect a striking cultural shift.
“When I was at UCSD in 2001,” Watts recalls, “the student government would occasionally vote on whether to defund The Koala. Every time, it was unanimous — 20 to 0 against censorship.”
By 2015, the vote was again unanimous — 22 to 0, with 3 abstentions — but this time to defund The Koala. Even The Guardian greeted the news with a gloating article, quoting the immortal words of American diplomat Paul Bremer after the fall of Saddam Hussein: “Ladies and gentlemen, we got him!”
Watts was appalled. “You’re a newspaper! And you’re celebrating censorship?!”
Today, he fears, many students seem to believe that free speech is conditional. Good for me, but not for thee. They’ve forgotten, or more likely have never learned, as former ACLU Executive Director Ira Glasser warns, censorship is like poison gas: effective when your enemy is in sight — but the wind has a way of shifting.
As students cycle through every four years, faculty grow fearful of speaking out, and administrators grow ever entrenched with power, institutional memory slowly fades.
Alumni are the living link to that past — and the stewards of its future.
“That’s why Tritons United for Free Speech exists,” Watts says. “And that’s why I’m not giving up.”
If you’re ready to join Tritons United for Free Speech, or if you’re interested in forming a free speech alumni alliance at your alma mater, contact Bobby Ramkissoon at bobby.ramkissoon@thefire.org. He will connect you with like-minded alumni and offer guidance on how to effectively protect free speech and academic freedom for all.
