Talking Trump and free speech for UnHerd, FIRE sues Texas A&M for censoring drag, TIME gets our College Free Speech Rankings wrong, & more!

Bringing you the latest free speech news (3/9/25)

Story of the week

• Trump’s college funding threat puts free speech at risk (UnHerd) by me &

  Adam Goldstein

Yesterday, President Donald Trump took to Truth Social to address incidents like these across American campuses. He announced harsh punishments for student “agitators”, and threatened to revoke federal funding from universities which fail to sufficiently clamp down on “illegal protests”.

Unfortunately, though, his proposed solutions only deepen the free speech crisis on campus by triggering serious constitutional concerns. In fact, nearly everything in Trump’s post is either confusing, a chill on free speech, or both.

This week in FIRE’s blog

• LAWSUIT: LGBTQ student group sues to overturn Texas A&M’s unconstitutional drag ban

The regents’ attempts to justify the drag ban as anything other than illegal viewpoint discrimination are feeble. The board admits they want to ban drag on campus because they find it “demeans women,” “promotes gender ideology,” or runs contrary to their “values”—- but the First Amendment squarely protects speech that offends and even angers others. And in all cases, it prevents campus officials from silencing speech because they disagree with the “ideology.” As a taxpayer-funded university system, Texas A&M campuses cannot treat some student events differently simply because they dislike the view being expressed.

• FIRE calls out 60 Minutes investigation as 'political stunt' in comment to FCC

• Americans overwhelmingly support free speech — but 10% endorse calls to violence by Emily Nayyer

• Govs. DeSantis, Hochul threaten academic freedom with political interference by

  Robert Shibley

• Statement on President Trump’s Truth Social post threatening funding cuts for ‘illegal protests’ by Alex Morey

• Nassau Community College punishes students, but won’t tell them why by

  Graham Piro

• Key takeaways from OCR’s Title VI FAQ clarification by Tyler Coward

This week in ERI

• No More ‘Trust us, we’re the administrators!’ by

  Sean Stevens
  & me

London Calling: Ronnie’s First Amendment Roundup

• Ermold v. Davis

A nice reminder from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit of the evergreen, ever-important rule that private individuals and groups/associations have First Amendment rights, while government actors operating in official capacities exercise powers. Davis is a Rowan County, Kentucky clerk sued for not issuing licenses to same-sex couples despite being eligible to marry under the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision. Davis defended by invoking (among other things) the Free Exercise Clause, analogizing to the landmark free speech decision in the New York Times v. Sullivan defamation case, and others in which the Supreme Court held the First Amendment can be a defense. But the Sixth Circuit held “Davis cannot raise a Free Exercise Clause defense because she is being held liable for state action, which the First Amendment does not protect.” As the court explains, that defense must “fail under basic constitutional principles,” because the First Amendment “protects ‘private conduct,’ not ‘state action.’” The court notes the First Amendment “shields Davis where she ‘functioned as a private citizen,’ but not where she ‘engaged in state action,’” and held that “that binary is outcome-determinative.” Public officials don’t lose their First Amendment rights on taking office. They continue to hold them in their personal capacities while speaking as private citizens rather than wielding powers of their office, or threatening, explicitly or implicitly, to do so. Such as in NRA v. Vullo, last Term’s Supreme Court “jawboning” decision, where the defendant New York insurance regulator claimed browbeating insurance companies to discontinue insuring the NRA was an exercise of free of speech – not so, the Court held, if anything it was an exercise of regulatory authority infringing NRA’s First Amendment rights (just as argued in FIRE’s Vullo amicus brief; FIRE made a similar point in its U.S. News v. Chiu amicus brief objecting to an award of attorney fees to a City Attorney who claimed U.S. News unmeritoriously sued to block his asserted speech right to subpoena materials it uses to publish hospital rankings, even though his investigation was an exercise of official power).

International free speech stories of the week

• Ministers urged to act after Hong Kong activists’ UK neighbors ‘bribed’ to hand them into Chinese embassy (Sky News) by Alix Culbertson

• Lahore man gets death penalty, fine in blasphemy case (Dawn) by Wajih Ahmad Sheikh

Pre-order of the month

• FIRE Senior Scholar of Global Expression (and ERI’s own ‘International free speech stories of the week’ contributor!)

  Sarah McLaughlin
  ’s upcoming book is officially available for pre-order. "Authoritarians in the Academy: How the Internationalization of Higher Education and Borderless Censorship Threaten Free Speech” (Johns Hopkins University Press) is due out in August. Secure your copy today!