Recent news discourages college students from taking intellectual risks. They didn't need the nudge.

Yahoo

04-04-2025

College students already shy away from expressing controversial viewpoints, writes Eric Thomas. The new political climate makes it even less likely that they speak up. (Tim Carpenter/Kansas Reflector)
Separated by six states and a time zone, students at two universities got opposite lessons about free speech last week.
In Somerville, Massachusetts, immigration officials detained a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. It's not certain why she was taken into custody, in full view of security cameras. However, in her university's student newspaper last year she co-signed an op-ed that condemned her university's investments because of links to Israel, among other critiques.
When contacted by multiple publications, the federal government fueled the suspicion that the editorial led to her detainment by refusing comment. Her friends wondered what other reason could there be, especially knowing that a pro-Israel website had spilled her private information onto the internet — an obvious intimidation effort before she was arrested by masked, plainclothes officials in unmarked cars.
The implicit message from the government: The First Amendment offers flimsy protection for international college students right now.
On that same day — more than 1,400 miles away in my lecture hall at the University of Kansas — I asked my students to take a First Amendment risk. Actually, asked isn't a strong enough word. I needled and begged students to propose something risky. I coached them on how to recognize something truly risky. I celebrated the best risky ideas with applause and fist bumps.
In that introductory journalism class, we were proposing newsworthy journalistic story ideas. After years of teaching this skill, I know that if today's students aren't prodded, they overwhelmingly suggest predictable and safe story ideas.
They say, There is a new coffee shop near campus.
Or, The football stadium is under construction.
Each story has been covered before. Why would the students propose them? These topics are risk-free. Easy. Simple. Blandness is their allure.
Students routinely stash away the realities of college life — and they need encouragement to voice them.
One student raised her hand and said, What about my roommate who got a zero on a paper for using AI, even though she didn't? Another says, What about a story about college cocaine use? From the left side of the lecture hall: I know some people who sell their driver's licenses on Instagram for other college kids to use as fake IDs.
At that moment, they discovered the thrill of risky ideas. They laughed nervously at the off-limits ideas as they flowed from one group, then another.
Over a few class periods, we spent more than 120 minutes developing these stories, providing feedback and cajoling courage. This is the coaching that today's university students need.
Long revered as places that liberate young people's thinking, colleges have become more and more intellectually safe.
You don't need to trust my personal anecdotes. After all, I am comparing memories of my undergraduate campus during the 1990s to my teaching years during the 2010s and 2020s. Just because I remember daily verbal sparring in the speaker's circle at the University of Missouri doesn't mean it's true.
Instead, check out the results of the Knight Foundation's annual study. The most recent poll relied on 'a representative sample of 1,678 currently enrolled college students.'
'Discomfort with the speech environment on campus is rising, and 7 in 10 students say speech can be as damaging as physical violence.'
'Two in 3 students say self-censorship limits educationally valuable conversations on campus, and 2 in 3 report self-censoring on some topics during classroom discussions.'
'While 9 in 10 college students continue to feel that citizens' free speech rights are very important to them, fewer students believe their freedom of speech is secure in 2024, down 30 percentage points from 2016.'
Who are the students who feel that it's 'becoming harder to express themselves'? Black students have had the lowest confidence of any segment each year, and they find free speech increasingly difficult. For their part, Republicans respond that it is more difficult for them than Democrats, but that gap has narrowed. Every segment of the college population sees free speech rights declining or, at best, holding steady.
If you need more, read this year's report from the Foundation of Individual Rights and Expressions. While it doesn't provide a nationwide portrait of free speech on U.S. campuses, it ranks the schools. Kansas State ranked 18 while KU ranked 203 of 251 universities. The study's five-year run and increased scope this year point to the national interest in student speech at this political moment.
Back in my classroom, I called on a final student, asking what risky topic she imagined: the conflict in the Middle East.
Here, I paused.
Amid my lectures about being bold and taking intellectual risks, what should I tell international students about taking a risk and writing about the Middle East? The Trump administration has zip-tied a blinking, neon asterisk onto the topic.
It says, *Speak out and find out.
The Tufts student, Rumeysa Ozturk, is not alone in suffering consequences for pro-Palestinian activism and speech. According to the New York Times, another international student from Iran has been detained under unclear legal pretenses while a permanent resident of the United States was removed from Columbia University's student housing after being involved in demonstrations against Israel.
Free speech about this narrow topic might cost students their personal freedom.
Reasonable minds may disagree about the conclusions in the commentary that Ozturk wrote. You might believe that universities should divest, that they should stand by Israel or that they should not make political statements at all. Regardless, it's difficult to find radical language in the legislative actions that Ozturk and her fellow authors proposed.
The arrest of Ozturk redefines risk in university classrooms from the East Coast to the heartland, which seems to be the Trump administration's objective. Why not inject free speech anxiety into campuses already hobbled by funding cuts and right-wing suspicion?
Chilling anti-Israel speech on college campuses further muzzles our already timid students. In the past decade, they've been cowed by a toxic cultural cocktail. Political polarization made them nervous both on social media and their high school classrooms. The murder of George Floyd supercharged discussions about racial injustice.
Pandemic-era lockdowns sheltered students from tough in-person debates. Even high school hallway fights disappeared during the lockdown. Many students can simply no longer argue.
Add to that, many students report being nervous that their authentic classroom curiosities will be recorded and posted online, leaving them 'canceled.' A contentious classroom is high-stakes, unfamiliar terrain.
The ruthlessness of these arrests, therefore, is two-fold. First, university students sit in Louisiana detention centers awaiting hearings and possible detentions. That human reality bites hard.
Second, a few scattered arrests at distant universities might temper students' courage — first about Israel, and perhaps about more to come. Will this news restrain my students in Kansas from saying what they think?
*Speak out and find out.
These arrests have changed my calculus as a teacher and mentor about how I would advise international students who want to express themselves.
Be careful, I would say. Even with summer approaching, it's getting chilly on campus.
Let's hope that my advice, like the weather, is temporary. But I suspect it's the climate.
Eric Thomas teaches visual journalism and photojournalism at the William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Kansas in Lawrence. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.