A federal court has once again vindicated FIRE’s longstanding concerns with the Trump administration’s unlawful and unconstitutional approach to enforcing Title VI — including combatting antisemitism — in higher education. This time, the smackdown came in a ruling for plaintiffs at the University of California.
In a blistering opinion, the court found that the Trump administration has weaponized federal funding and “flouted the requirements of Title VI and Title IX,” all with the goal of “bringing universities to their knees and forcing them to change their ideological tune.”
In light of this and a similar victory for Harvard in federal court, universities should take note: if they stand up for themselves, their students, and their faculty in court, there’s a strong pathway to victory.
To avoid future losses in court, the Trump administration must cease its pressure campaign and follow the congressionally mandated procedure for enforcing federal civil rights laws. Failure to do so will only hurt students who have actually experienced discriminatory hostile environments and need serious, lawful federal oversight. The federal government should seek to get things right the first time and not let procedural infirmities and unlawful demands delay civil rights enforcement.
Unlike the Harvard case, which was brought by university leaders alongside other stakeholders, this suit was filed by associations and labor unions that represent over 100,000 UC employees, faculty, and students. They brought their case after the administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2 billion and froze further research funding, asserting that UCLA violated the Equal Protection Clause and Title VI.
UCLA may well have failed to protect some of its Jewish students from unlawful discrimination, and the federal government should ensure that the university is now complying with Title VI. But the court found that the administration’s goals go far beyond the issue of antisemitism, explaining:
The record shows that Defendants engaged in a concerted policy to use allegations of antisemitism to justify funding cancellations, when their intent is to coerce universities into purging disfavored “left” and “woke” viewpoints from their campuses and replace them with views that the Administration favors.
This, of course, violates the First Amendment. And the court notes that even if the administration were solely focused on combatting antisemitism, it could not “accomplish that goal by coercing the UC into adopting practices with widespread chilling effects on constitutionally protected speech.”
Accordingly, the court’s preliminary injunction prohibits federal agencies from withholding funds, “or threatening to do so, to coerce the UC in violation of the First Amendment.” And just to ensure its message is clear, the court provided examples of funding conditions that would violate the plaintiff’s First Amendment rights, including:
Requiring the UC to make hiring, firing, or funding decisions on the basis of Plaintiffs’ members’ protected speech or freedom of assembly.
Requiring the UC to restrict its curriculum, scholarship, or research based on the Defendants’ preferred viewpoints.
Requiring the UC to screen international students based on “anti-Western” or “anti-American” views and/or “socialize” international students to favored “norms.”
Beyond the First Amendment, the court also found that the administration failed to “follow longstanding, legally-required process that is intended to safeguard against coercive or retaliatory government actions under Title VI and IX.” These procedural failures include denying UCLA a hearing and the opportunity to voluntarily remedy alleged violations, failing to provide a written report to Congress, and failing to limit the scope of funding suspensions to noncompliant entities.
The federal government has a legal and moral obligation to ensure that schools are protecting students from discrimination, including antisemitism. But it must meet that obligation in ways that uphold the law and the Constitution. Unfortunately, the administration’s strategy has so far failed on both fronts. And ultimately, those hurt most by this failure will be students in need of lawful civil rights enforcement.
Imagine a fourth-grade classroom in which the teacher uses AI to generate a video of Ronald Reagan explaining his Cold War strategy. It’s history in living color, and the students lean in, captivated. Now imagine that same teacher facing thousands of dollars in damages under the proposed NO FAKES Act because the video looks too real.
That’s not sci-fi. It’s a risk baked into this bill. The NO FAKES Act, introduced this year in both the House and Senate, would create a new federal “digital replication right” letting people control the use of AI-generated versions of their voice or likeness. That means people can block others from sharing realistic, digitally created images of them. The right can extend for up to 70 years after the person’s death and is transferred to heirs. It also lets people sue those who share unauthorized “digital replicas,” as well as the companies that make such works possible.
A “digital replica” is defined as a newly created, highly realistic representation “readily identifiable” as a person’s voice or likeness. That includes fully virtual recreations and real images or recordings that are materially altered.
The bill bans unauthorized public use or distribution of “digital replicas.” But almost all of the covered “replicas” are fully protected by the First Amendment, meaning Congress cannot legislate their suppression.
Can someone own a voice? Breaking down the right of publicity.
What to do if a company makes a copy of your voice and profits from it without your permission.
The bill does list exceptions for “bona fide” news, documentaries, historical works, biographical works, commentary, scholarship, satire, or parody. But there’s a catch. News is exempt only if the replica is the subject of, or materially relevant to, the story. At best, this means any story relating to, say, political deepfakes must be reviewed by an attorney to decide if the story is “bona fide” news and the deepfake is sufficiently relevant to include in the story itself. At worst, this means politicians and other public figures will start suing journalists and others who talk about newsworthy replicas of them, if they don’t like what the person had to say.
Even worse, the documentary, historical, and biographical exceptions vanish if the work creates a false impression that it’s “an authentic [work] in which the person actually participated.” That swallows the exception and makes any realistic recreations, like the fourth-grade example above, legally radioactive.
The reach goes well beyond classrooms, too. Academics using recreated voices for research, documentarians patching gaps in archival footage, artists experimenting with digital media, or writers reenacting leaked authentic conversations could all face litigation. The exceptions are so narrowly drawn that they offer no real protection. And the risk doesn’t end with creators. Merely sharing a disputed clip can also invite a lawsuit.
That’s a digital heckler’s veto whereby one complaint can erase lawful speech.
The law also targets AI technology itself. Section 2(c)(2)(B) imposes liability on anyone who distributes a tool “primarily designed” to make digital replicas. That vague standard can easily ensnare open-source developers and small startups whose generative AI models sometimes output a voice or face that resembles a real person.
Then there’s the “notice-and-takedown” regime, modeled after the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. The bill requires online platforms to promptly remove or disable access to any alleged unauthorized “digital replica” once they receive a complaint, or risk losing legal immunity and facing penalties. In other words, platforms that don’t yank flagged content fast enough can be on the hook, which means they’ll likely delete first and ask questions never. That’s a digital heckler’s veto whereby one complaint can erase lawful speech.
On paper, the NO FAKES Act just looks like a safeguard against misleading and nonconsensual deepfakes. In practice, it would give politicians, celebrities, and other public figures new leverage over how they’re portrayed in today’s media, and grant their families enduring control over how they can be portrayed in history.
And let’s not forget that existing law already applies to digital replicas. Most states already recognize a right of publicity to police commercial uses of a person’s name, image, or likeness. Traditionally, that protection has been limited to overtly commercial contexts, such as advertising or merchandising. The NO FAKES Act breaks that guardrail, turning a narrow protection into a broad property right that threatens the First Amendment.
Creativity cannot thrive under constant permission. New mediums shouldn’t mean new muzzles.
AI-generated expression, like all expression, can also be punished when it crosses into unprotected categories such as fraud or defamation. Beyond those limits, government restrictions on creative tools risks strangling the diversity of ideas and free speech makes possible.
Creativity cannot thrive under a constant need for permission. New mediums shouldn’t mean new muzzles.
When she was 10, Ella Spurlock spent her free time making little booklets for her grandparents — drawing and coloring short, stapled stories about flowers, her dog, or whatever caught her eye that week. “I would staple them and give them to my Nana and Pop,” she remembers. “I liked making something that lasted.”
A decade later, in her freshman year at the University of Central Oklahoma, she found an adult version of that ritual: a byline. Her first story for The Vista, a feature on an art gallery show, ran on a Wednesday. She knew the issue was out before class ended. She sprinted from the Liberal Arts Building to the nearest news rack, slid a copy free, and saw her name there in the ink. The Vista, founded in 1903, is Oklahoma’s oldest student newspaper, an abiding symbol of a free press on campus — and now Spurlock was part of that history.
“I sent a picture to my dad and grandparents,” she says. “Then I showed it to my roommate. I was so excited — just over the moon.”
She folded the paper and carried it all day, the same way she had with those prized booklets years ago.
That memory has since taken on a strange weight. The very spring after her first story in The Vista, UCO administrators began discussing a “digital transition,” foreshadowing the end of the paper’s print edition. They said it was about the budget. But Spurlock suspected more. Administrators at UCO had voiced their displeasure with the paper’s investigative work before.
Under Pressure: The Warning Signs of Student Newspaper Censorship
Colleges are more obsessed with ‘protecting the brand’ than they’ve ever been before. The result? An epidemic of student media censorship.
Print funding supposedly hinged on votes that administrators didn’t control. In May 2025, the Student Media Advisory Board met and voted unanimously to fund The Vista and its sister broadcast program, UCentral, with a $56,000 budget — enough to maintain the paper’s biweekly print schedule through the end of the year. Despite the vote, administrators overruled the board and announced that the historic paper would cease to print and would go digital-only in fall 2025.
On July 21, faculty adviser Erika Williams emailed Dean Elizabeth Maier regarding the push to end print. Later that day, Maier replied that going digital “was a statement, not a request,” adding, “That decision is final and not up for debate or negotiation.”
Andrew Frazier remembers that summer as a blur of forwarded messages and quiet anger. He had just started reporting for The Vista. “I came in around July or August,” he says. “I was pretty vocal about how frustrated I was — not even about it going digital, but about the lack of transparency. They were lying to us, pretending not to know things, and gaslighting us.”
Frazier grew up in Oklahoma City, watching his father read the newspaper over breakfast every morning. He remembers well the ritual of the paper being folded and refolded, the sound of the pages, his father’s occasional comments, the smell of coffee. “I’d see him sitting out there every morning,” Frazier says, “and when he finished, I’d pick it up and read the comics — Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes.”
That’s part of why the summer’s news stung. The Vista is older than the state of Oklahoma. Yet its steward had decided the printed page was no longer worth keeping. “It was everything I hate,” Frazier says. “Spin, control, top-down messaging — happening right here, in my own community.”
The university didn’t budge. Their plea for a free press had fallen on deaf ears.
UCO administrators said print was too expensive and outdated. But their actions belied their true motives. After the advisory board’s unanimous vote to keep printing, Dean Maier floated a “Vista Going Digital Launch Party” and even offered to pay for refreshments. Board chair Joe Hight objected that the administration’s decision ignored both data and process. When Hight shared a letter from Vista donors Jim Epperson and Bob Ray, in which they warned that ending print would betray The Vista’s tradition as “a watchdog . . . protected by the First Amendment” — the university didn’t budge. Their plea for a free press had fallen on deaf ears.
Not only that, but the university kept pushing to ensure their voice wouldn’t find a print audience. Students asked if they could print using money from the Dennie Hall Endowment, an alumni fund for The Vista. Administrators said no. At a budget meeting before the semester, students say they were warned that if they printed with donor funds, the university would cut funding for the entire student-media program. “They read our emails out loud,” Spurlock remembers, referring to messages students had written to professors, asking for help. “And then they said they’d cut everything if we printed. That’s when I cried.”
A week later, at administrators’ direction, facilities workers removed The Vista’s newspaper racks from campus.
Ella Spurlock, managing editor at the University of Central Oklahoma’s independent student newspaper, The Independent View.
By fall, Frazier and several other students decided that if The Vista couldn’t publish freely, they’d build something that could. They called it The Independent View. It was scrappy, student-run, and fueled by small donations and borrowed space. “It feels like a startup with your friends,” Frazier says. “We’re all in it together, building something honest.”
Their first major story, published in their inaugural edition on Oct. 28, showed exactly why that sense of independence mattered.
The play they tried to cancel
In late September, two UCO juniors, Maggie Lawson and Liberty Welch, were preparing to direct the play Boy My Greatness, about the boys who played women’s roles in Shakespeare’s England. “It’s so heartbreaking but also so heartwarming,” Welch told The Independent View. “You see these people who are exactly like you, but it’s 1606.”
The students had spent months rehearsing. Their actors were cast, their set built, and the script licensed from the playwright. Then, hours before their first dress rehearsal on Sept. 3, the play lost university support. The reason? Senate Bill 796, Oklahoma’s new law restricting DEI programming at public colleges.
At first, no one could say who made the call. The Independent View’s coverage detailed what the university had tried to obscure: that the decision had come not from the theater department, but from upper administration, which cited legal concerns over the play’s “contract requirements.”
Lawson and Welch were offered a choice: pick a different play under university oversight, or continue without university support. They chose independence.
That night, they posted a TikTok explaining what happened and launched a GoFundMe, hoping for a few hundred dollars. Instead, they raised nearly $10,000 overnight, and their story spread across campus and into national outlets like Playbill.
“We thought we’d get a couple hundred bucks and a pat on the back,” Welch said. “We were shocked when it blew up.”
To the students behind The Independent View, the story wasn’t just about a canceled show. It was about how easily art and journalism could be choked by the same bureaucratic caution. “If they can pull a play hours before rehearsal,” Frazier said, “what can’t they pull?”
The story they erased
For Spurlock, the stakes were clear long before that first edition of The Independent View. Her breaking point had come months earlier at The Vista, when she covered the University of Central Oklahoma Student Association and its student activity fee allocations. The fee is approximately $5 per student. Spurlock found that the UCOSA president controlled roughly 84% of the funds — but couldn’t fully account for them.
When Spurlock pressed him, UCOSA President Cooper Autry stalled and evaded. “He did not want to talk to me,” she recalls. “I had to follow up three times.” She spoke to an anonymous source within UCOSA who confirmed the numbers. Spurlock filed her report and saw it pass through every level of review. With no red flags raised in the editorial process, The Vista took the article to press. Then, UCOSA leadership and university staff demanded a meeting. “They printed out my story and highlighted everything they didn’t like,” she says. “They called it defamation.”
She remembers the meeting feeling like a trial. Around the table sat UCOSA’s president, vice president, two advisors, and a university budget administrator. On her side were a fellow student, Jake Ramsey, and her faculty adviser, Erika Williams. “It felt like divorce court,” she says. “They tore it apart, line by line.”
‘Once you’ve had your story deleted, you know how easily the truth can just… vanish.’
When the meeting ended, administrators told Spurlock not to worry, that it was “not a big deal.” But she left shaken. “I didn’t know if I’d done something wrong,” she says. “I just knew I was supposed to be learning to be a watchdog, and instead I was being told to sit down.”
Williams, who had told Spurlock beforehand that the piece was solid, took the story down from The Vista’s website soon after. “They didn’t fix an error,” Spurlock says. “They erased a story.”
The numbers she’d reported never changed. The university never issued a correction. That experience shaped how Spurlock saw everything that came next: the summer votes, the override, the disappearance of the newspaper racks. “Once you’ve had your story deleted,” she says, “you know how easily the truth can just… vanish.”
That disappearing act gets even easier when the story is never printed on paper in the first place. So when the print ban came, she recognized the pattern. “I’m not here to cover up the ugly,” she says. “I’m here to make it known.”
Broken eggs
In late October, FIRE sent a letter to UCO President Todd Lamb, accusing the school of violating the Constitution by meddling in The Vista’s operations. The letter cited every detail the students had described — the print ban, the confiscated racks, the threats to defund the program, and the retaliation against those who resisted. It even noted an earlier remark Lamb made to a former editor suggesting the paper stop focusing on “broken eggs” and focus instead on “perfectly good omelette” stories.
FIRE called the university’s actions a “prior restraint on expression” and a form of viewpoint discrimination, urging UCO to lift the print ban and reaffirm its student journalists’ right to publish freely. So far, the university has stayed silent.
‘It was never about printing a paper. It was about how they took away our voice.’
Meanwhile, The Independent View grows. Its newsroom is a patchwork of laptops, coffee shops, and Zoom calls. Reporters write between classes and part-time jobs. Their funding comes not from the university but from alumni and locals — many of them graduates who remember reading The Vista in its heyday.
“We’re not funded by the university,” Frazier says. “Our funders just want good, honest news.”
Spurlock’s old copy of her first article sits in a drawer in her dorm room. The paper has yellowed a bit. Before the first edition of The Independent View went to press, she recalled missing the smell of ink, the weight of the page. “At the end of the day,” she says, “it was never about printing a paper. It was about how they took away our voice.”
She thinks back to the crooked staples of her childhood booklets, where she got her first taste of the power of storytelling — the pride of putting ink to an idea, shaping something lasting from scattered scraps. She knows now that making something real means breaking a few eggs.
And at The Independent View, they’ve only just started to cook.
If you’re a free-speech lawyer, you face a choice: Either expect to be disappointed by people of all political stripes — or go crazy. I choose low expectations.
Again and again, political actors preach the importance of free speech, only to reach for the censor’s muzzle when it helps their side. If, like me, you defend free speech as a principle rather than invoke it opportunistically, you get distressingly accustomed to seeing the same people take opposite positions on an issue, sometimes within the space of just a few months.
On the first day of his second presidential term, for example, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship,” castigating the Biden administration for pressuring online platforms to censor Americans’ speech. Last Thursday Mr. Trump mused that when broadcasters portray him negatively, “maybe their license should be taken away.”
Or consider hate speech. The concept was developed in the 1980s by leftist legal scholars like Richard Delgado and Mari Matsuda, and it shaped the campus speech codes and so-called political correctness of the 1990s. Intellectuals on the right were quick to contest the idea of hate speech — U.S. law does not recognize a general hate-speech exception to the First Amendment, and never has. Charlie Kirk rejected the idea of using hate speech rationales to crack down on free speech. Yet after Mr. Kirk’s assassination, Republicans rushed to promise crackdowns on hateful expression, deploying the same concept.
Critics of the idea of hate speech, including my organization, have long warned that the concept is so vague and broad that it provides a handy weapon to censor almost any opinion.
Last week, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed that “we will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” When Mr. Trump was asked about this statement by Jonathan Karl of ABC, he said that Ms. Bondi would “probably go after people like you,” and that Mr. Karl’s network — which last year settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Mr. Trump — paid “$16 million for a form of hate speech.”
Critics of the idea of hate speech, including my organization, have long warned that the concept is so vague and broad that it provides a handy weapon to censor almost any opinion. Unfortunately we have been vindicated on this point.
Consider, too, the fight against so-called misinformation and disinformation. The Biden administration created (and then quickly shuttered, following criticism) an advisory board at the Department of Homeland Security on the threat of disinformation. The Biden administration also pressured social media platforms to censor Americans who posted what the administration considered obvious falsehoods, including the suggestion — now considered plausible by a large assortment of mainstream institutions and experts — that the coronavirus originated from a laboratory in Wuhan, China.
Today, the right is making the same mistakes. The late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel included a line in a recent monologue suggesting that Mr. Kirk’s killer was a Trump sympathizer — which prosecutors’ documents seem to contradict. In the wake of conservative outrage, ABC suspended Mr. Kimmel’s show. That was an overreaction: If partisan wishful thinking were a regulatory infraction, few comedians or commentators on the left or the right would still have a job. (ABC said on Monday that it would resume Mr. Kimmel’s show on Tuesday.)
It’s possible that Disney, ABC’s parent company, would have punished Mr. Kimmel on its own. But the Trump administration took the initiative. Before ABC suspended Mr. Kimmel’s show, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, said during a podcast interview: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct, to take action, frankly on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the F.C.C. ahead.”
Using your opponents’ nastiest tools doesn’t persuade them to disarm; it inspires retaliation.
And then there’s cancel culture. The right has long balked at the use of social pressure to punish conservative thinkers by, for instance, getting them fired from their jobs. The rise in cancellations that began around 2014 was initially celebrated by the left, which it defended as “consequence culture.” Now comes the inevitable role reversal. A few days ago, Vice President JD Vance urged those who saw people celebrating Mr. Kirk’s assassination to “call them out,” including by calling “their employer.”
I don’t like having to make a case for human rights such as freedom of speech by appealing to self-interest; these are supposed to be rights whose importance transcends one’s personal needs. But for political partisans, it’s often the only argument that cuts through. So here’s my practical warning: The weapon that you reach for today will be used against you tomorrow.
Using your opponents’ nastiest tools doesn’t persuade them to disarm; it inspires retaliation. Tit for tat, forever and ever.
“Free speech for me, but not for thee” is an all-too-familiar impulse in politics. But the point of the principle of free speech is that how we respond to ideas we don’t like is ultimately not about our opponents’ rights — it’s about ours.
ROCHESTER, N.Y., Oct. 20, 2025 — A former doctoral conducting student at the Eastman School of Music who was silenced after reporting harassment by a faculty member is standing up for herself in the way she knows best — by conducting a classical music concert in support of free expression.
Rebecca Bryant Novak will conduct a volunteer orchestra at the Hochstein School of Music Performance Hall in Rochester, N.Y., on Thursday, Nov. 20, in a concert sponsored by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, our first-ever classical music concert in support of free speech. The evening will feature Beethoven’s Fidelio Overture and selections from Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 — two works that faced censorial pressure in their own time and which emphasize the timeless connection between civil liberties and artistic expression.
The event will also feature internationally acclaimed violinist Lara St. John, praised by The New York Times as “a high-powered soloist.”
For Bryant Novak, who was expelled from the University of Rochester earlier this year after filing a complaint against one of her professors at Eastman, the evening will provide her not only with an opportunity to create wonderful music but to send a message to the school that she will not be intimidated into silence.
“All I’ve wanted since I came to Eastman was to become a conductor and share my appreciation for great music with others,” Bryant Novak said. “I’m looking forward to doing so this evening — while reminding Eastman that I’m not going away.”
Shortly into her first semester as a doctoral student in fall 2023, Bryant Novak complained about behavior by a professor who she said made sexist comments.
After a yearlong investigation, a panel of faculty and administrators agreed that the professor had indeed violated Rochester’s harassment policy and that Eastman’s Title IX coordinator had mishandled her complaint.
Despite all this, Eastman allowed the same school authorities to retain oversight of Bryant Novak’s academic trajectory — with one official telling her that the school restricted her performance times because of her complaint against the professor.
When Bryant Novak complained, Eastman did nothing. As a result of the alleged retaliation, Rochester opened a second investigation into Eastman’s mishandling of the situation in December 2024, and Bryant Novak publicly disclosed the university’s new investigation in a Substack article on Feb. 10.
Two weeks later, Eastman abruptly expelled Bryant Novak, citing a failure to make academic progress, even though the school never showed that she met that criteria. In doing so, the school ignored its written policy that calls for students to be given ample notice if they are in danger of falling short of academic standards.
FIRE is calling on Rochester President Sarah C. Mangelsdorf to immediately reinstate Bryant Novak and ensure that she is able to complete her doctorate under the oversight of Eastman faculty and officials who are not already subject to investigation for misconduct in her case. And we’re not alone. Over 800 members of the public have signed on to our Take Action campaign telling Mangelsdorf to heed the call.
In any case, Bryant Novak won’t be banished from the conductor’s podium. We hope to have you join us for “Outspoken: Music for Free Speech,” an evening championing the right to free expression — hers and yours.
The concert is free and open to the public. To attend, RSVP here to reserve your spot.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization dedicated to defending and sustaining the individual rights of all Americans to free speech and free thought—the most essential qualities of liberty. FIRE educates Americans about the importance of these inalienable rights, promotes a culture of respect for these rights, and provides the means to preserve them.
CONTACT Karl de Vries, Director of Media Relations, FIRE: 215-717-3473; [email protected]
A federal judgeon Tuesday temporarily blocked University of Texas System officials from enforcing a state law that bans free speech and expression on public campuses between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression sued leaders of the UT system in Septemberon behalf of student groups who argued the law violated their First Amendment rights.
U.S. District Judge David Alan Ezra, a Reagan appointee,found that plaintiffs raised “significant First Amendment issues” with the law and its application, and he granted a preliminary injunction on enforcement while the case plays out.
Dive Insight:
Texas passed SB 2972, earlier this year in the wake of 2024’s wave of pro-Palestinian protests on U.S. campuses.
“In April 2024, universities across the nation saw massive disruption on their campus,” state Sen. Brandon Creighton, the primary author of the bill, wrote in a statement of intent. “Protesters erected encampments in common areas, intimidated other students through the use of bullhorns and speakers, and lowered American flags with the intent of raising the flag of another nation.”
Along with specifically prohibiting First Amendment-protected activityovernight, the law also bars the campus community from inviting speakers to campus, using devices to amplify speech and playing drums or other percussive instruments during the last two weeks of any term.
In its complaint, FIRE called the law “blatantly unconstitutional.”
“The First Amendment doesn’t set when the sun goes down,” FIRE senior supervising attorney JT Morris said in a September statement. “University students have expressive freedom whether it’s midnight or midday, and Texas can’t just legislate those constitutional protections out of existence.”
Ezra agreed in his ruling.
“The First Amendment does not have a bedtime of 10:00 p.m.,” the judge wrote. “The burden is on the government to prove that its actions are narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling governmental interest. It has not done so.”
In his ruling, Ezra wrote that the law’s free speech restrictions were not content-neutral and so must survive a strict legal test for the government to show that the law is the least restrictive possible to achieve a “compelling” goal.
The judge pointed to public posts by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and the bill’s statement of intent, both decrying the pro-Palestinian protests. Abbott described the protests as antisemitic and called for the arrest and expulsion of protestors.
“The statute is content-based both on its face and by looking to the purpose and justification for the law,” Ezra wrote.
Ezra also highlighted that the statute carved out an exception for commercial speech in his ruling.
“Defendants betray the stated goal of preventing disruption and ensuring community safety by failing to expand the Bans to commercial speech,” he wrote. “Students can engage in commercial speech that would otherwise violate the Bans simply because it is not ‘expressive activities,’ no matter how disruptive.”
In response to the law, the University of Texas at Austin adopted a more limited version of the policy that only banned overnight expressive activities in its common outdoor area that generate sound to be heard from a university residence.
However, Ezra concluded the pared-down policy wasn’t enough to protect students’ constitutional speech rights, as UT-Austin could change it or enforce it subjectively.
“The threat of prosecution arises not only from UT’s adopted policy but also from the legislative statute,” the judge wrote. “As adopted, UT Austin is not currently in compliance with the statute, and at any point could change or be instructed to change its policies to comply with the law.”
FIRE cheered the injunction on Tuesday.
“We’re thankful that the court stepped in and halted a speech ban that inevitably would’ve been weaponized to censor speech that administrators disagreed with,” FIRE Senior Attorney Adam Steinbaugh said in a statement.
In its lawsuit, the free speech group has asked the judge to permanently block the law’s enforcement.
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After the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, universities faced a dilemma that has become grimly familiar in the age of social media: what to do when a member of the campus community says something online that others find intolerable.
Within days, institutions moved with visible urgency. Some suspended employees. Others terminated them outright. A few launched “investigations” whose conclusions seemed preordained. FIRE has condemned these actions (when taken by public institutions) as violations of the First Amendment and intervened in over a dozen cases.
Yet the punishments themselves tell only half the story. Equally revealing were the justifications universities offered for them:
Clemson University declared that free speech “does not extend to speech that undermines the dignity of others.”
The University of Mississippi stated that a fired staff member’s comments about Kirk “run completely counter to our institutional values of civility, fairness, and respecting the dignity of each person.”
The president of Austin Peay State University said a faculty member’s social-media post “does not align with our commitment to mutual respect and human dignity” and was therefore grounds for termination.
The message these colleges sent was unmistakable: offensive speech is not merely offensive, it is an assault on human dignity itself. And that, in the eyes of administrators, makes it punishable.
The impulse to regulate speech in these circumstances is understandable. When tragedy strikes, ordinary condemnations can feel hollow beside the enormity of what has been lost. Requiring respect for “dignity” seems to offer something more; something higher: a recognition of our shared humanity, a pledge to the campus community that while ideas may be contested, no person will be debased.
But the moment “dignity” becomes a standard of compliance, it stops inspiring behavior and starts regulating it. The language of virtue invariably becomes the grammar of control.
The moment dignity must be imposed, it has already been lost.
The trouble with “dignity” begins with its vagueness.
“Dignity” can mean many things: (a) the inherent value of the human person; (b) the social honor one commands in the eyes of others; (c) the inner self-respect that resists humiliation; or all the above. These meanings both overlap and collide. Which, then, is a university to enforce: the idea of respect, the appearance of respect, or the feeling of respect?
There is no objective way to make this decision. And when a rule depends on subjective perception, it cannot be applied fairly. What one dean calls satire, another may label cruelty. What one student finds invigorating, another experiences as demeaning. And all of these people may be completely in earnest. Under such conditions, enforcement becomes a matter not of principle but of preference.
And because “dignity” sounds so unimpeachably virtuous, its invocation cloaks coercion in benevolence. Who, after all, would dare oppose dignity?
From this vagueness comes overbreadth. When “attacking dignity” can mean almost anything, it ends up encompassing nearly everything.
Universities that rightly prohibit harassment or discrimination — categories of unprotected acts that may involve expression — increasingly extend those prohibitions to merely “undignified” expression, which is protected. The University of Michigan’s harassment policy, for example, forbids conduct that diminishes “individual dignity.” Similarly, Penn State’s harassment policy defines discriminatory behavior as violating “the dignity of individuals.”
Penn State Revises ‘Principles’ in Victory for Free Speech
Once disagreement itself is framed as a denial of dignity, even empirical or policy debates about healthcare, sports, or law are reclassified as “harassment” rather than legitimate discussion. The zone of the impermissible grows, and the culture of caution grows with it.
Faculty and students, uncertain where the invisible boundary lies, retreat into self-censorship. They learn to treat disagreement as danger and discomfort as moral injury. The less precise the rule, the wider its reach. The wider its reach, the more timid the discourse. Administrative control breeds emotional fragility, and emotional fragility, in turn, justifies greater administrative control. It’s a feedback loop of moral protectionism.
What is at stake is no less than the mission of the university itself. Higher education exists not to shield its members from offense, but to teach them how to confront it; to refine judgment through exposure to conflict; to cultivate reason through disagreement. The “dignity rule” diminishes the (ahem) dignity of that mission. It transforms the university from a marketplace of ideas into a tribunal of sentiment.
To be clear, none of this is to diminish the importance of human dignity itself. Indeed, any university worthy of its title should strive toward cultivating an educational environment wherein all members of the campus community are treated with equal dignity. But when vague and overbroad noble values become instruments of coercion, liberty is often the first casualty.
This is precisely why the Supreme Court has consistently rejected attempts to limit speech on the grounds of indignity. In Snyder v. Phelps (2011), the Court held that even the Westboro Baptist Church’s vile protest at a fallen soldier’s funeral — which most Americans would see as a profound affront to dignity — was protected expression. In America, the right to speak, to offend, and to argue is not the enemy of dignity, but its precondition.
That is, to affirm the value of human dignity is not to be shielded from ridicule or offense but to be recognized as a rational, moral agent capable of hearing, weighing, and responding in kind.
In short: the moment dignity must be imposed, it has already been lost. And when universities attempt to enforce it, they risk betraying their commitment to free speech and the mission of education itself: to cultivate minds capable of reasoning in the face of offense, and of finding in that encounter — not in its suppression — the measure of their humanity.
FIRE staff also take your questions on Charlie Kirk’s
assassination, President Trump’s lawsuit against The New York
Times, cancel culture, and more. Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 01:42
Attorney General Pam Bondi’s comments that “hate speech” is
distinct…
Dinah Megibow-Taylor is a rising second-year at the University of Chicago while Eli Kronenberg is a rising junior at Northwestern University. Both are former FIRE summer interns.
How sure are you of your own consciousness? Of the accuracy of your memory? Of the solar system’s shape?
However well you think you know these things, there’s a chance you could be wrong, and learning to keep this in mind is crucial to maintaining a culture of civil discourse and free speech. How, you ask?
This year, the FIRE summer interns took a poll, rating our certainty of God’s existence on a scale of 0 to 100%, and found that our responses averaged out to 49%.
Early in our 10-week program, we had heard countless stories of previous intern classes embroiling themselves in heated political debates in the Tinker Room at the office of FIRE in Philadelphia, broadcasting their disagreements to the rest of the office. Yet from the get-go, our cohort took on a less confrontational dynamic, exemplified by one Friday when we decided to explore our religious beliefs.
As each intern expressed a level of certainty in the existence of God, something interesting happened: our conversation turned into an exercise of epistemic humility. The next Monday, one intern said she wanted to change her answer — from 100% certainty to 99%. This was a crucial reminder that even our most cherished beliefs should remain open to debate, for that simple 1% shift opened the door to a rich, good-faith ideological exchange. And it reminded us that even for basic factual matters, such as the earth being round or that one plus one makes two, there can be a dangerous element of outsourcing one’s knowledge to second-hand sources and centuries-old conclusions.
After all, no less than the math gods Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell once tried to prove that one plus one makes two — and the result, their magnum opus Principia Mathematica, ended up being 379 pages long. The point is, even seemingly self-evident truths can be painfully difficult to actually prove, and many if not most of the things we assume to be true have never gone through such a rigorous process. As Russell once put it, “In all affairs, it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.”
Similarly, in Plato’s Apology, Socrates famously declares himself wiser than a certain unnamed statesman because unlike the statesman, Socrates knew better than to be too sure of things. And, in J.S. Mill’s On Liberty, we find the line, “The beliefs which we have most warrant for, have no safeguard to rest on, but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded.”
That’s how safeguarding a touch of uncertainty, even when it comes to your most tightly held beliefs, can help promote a culture of free speech. Because people only become censorial when they are sure of themselves. But if you keep open the possibility that you might be wrong, and that the other person might be right, you are more likely to want to hear what they have to say.
In his book Kindly Inquisitors, journalist Jonathan Rauch reminds us that nobody has perfect access to the truth. He refers to the refusal to seriously consider that you are wrong as intellectual fundamentalism. To avoid this trap, we look to FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff’s summation of Mill’s argument for free speech. Mill says there are only three possibilities for any given belief, each of which lends itself to open and vigorous debate: you are totally right, you are totally wrong, you are partially right.
If you are not entirely correct, it benefits you to hear from others who may have the puzzle pieces you are missing, and if you are entirely correct, hearing from critics may sharpen your argument and help you better spread the truth.
Consider the case of Megan Phelps-Roper, who was raised in the Westboro Baptist Church, the granddaughter of the group’s founder. From the age of 5, Phelps-Roper held up crude signs declaring gay people worthy of death at the church’s notorious pickets, including at military funerals.
“I believed what I was taught with all my heart,” Phelps-Roper said in a 2017 TED talk, “and I pursued Westboro’s agenda with a special sort of zeal.”
Yet, over time, she began to interact with ideological opponents on the internet, and slowly came to question the church’s doctrine. She is now an outspoken critic, and speaks movingly about the importance of civil discourse and holding empathy for even those whose views we consider extreme. Her uplifting story demonstrates that it’s possible to be completely certain in one’s worldview, and then to have those beliefs flipped on their heads.
Ask yourself, the last time you realized you were wrong about something, did you feel that you were wrong beforehand? Probably not, or you wouldn’t have held that belief. Yet you felt sure, all the same. What this teaches us is that our feeling of certainty is an unreliable counselor at best.
One of our first tasks as interns was to familiarize ourselves with Judge Learned Hand’s “The Spirit of Liberty” speech. “The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right,” he professed. To be free is to be humble, to recognize our limitations, and to ceaselessly interrogate ourselves and each other.
