Columbia University’s student journalists will return next month to a campus very different from the one I began covering just a few years ago. During my time as an undergraduate, my class witnessed sustained protest movements, an escalating institutional response, and growing uncertainty around the boundaries of free speech and press.

Student journalists at Columbia are now well aware that their coverage may land them in bureaucratic hot water. In the aftermath of the 2024 student encampment in protest of Israel’s actions in Gaza, student journalist Lara-Nour Walton was investigated for her on-scene reporting, as she detailed in The New Arab. She was contacted by Omar Torres from the consulting firm Grand River Solutions, which Columbia seemingly contracted to facilitate disciplinary investigations. The charges were dropped right before her investigative hearing.

In May 2025, after covering a pro-Palestinian protest at Columbia’s Butler Library, I was placed on interim suspension along with three other student journalists. I was banned from campus, while the three other journalists from Barnard, an affiliate school of Columbia, were given 48 hours to leave student housing. We were accused of the same infractions as everyone else who was present at the protest. Thankfully, once we quickly appealed with evidence of our journalism, our interim suspensions were lifted within the day.

Whether these cases resulted from overreach or error may matter less than the effects they had on the culture of journalism among Columbia undergraduates. It is hard to overstate the climate of fear that now has taken hold among student journalists.

Things weren’t perfect before these incidents, but student journalists did not need to worry that reporting on or criticizing university leadership would lead to disciplinary investigations.

Training to cover protests for student outlets now includes a tense conversation on the possible risks, which range from physical dangers of being in protest environments to disciplinary consequences and public doxxing.

When I meet incoming members of the news team at student radio station WKCR, I train them to take photos of themselves with their press badge at every protest and sharpie the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press legal hotline number on their arm, along with teaching them the basic tenets of professional conduct.

Such fear was reignited during my 2026 graduating class’s final months at Columbia. In April, a student was investigated for passing out flyers pertaining to the board of trustees and the so-called ghost trustees who “continue to exert significant influence” over the university.

As detailed by the Columbia Daily Spectator, the student newspaper, the flyers “feature the pictures and names of 13 administrators and trustees, criticizing their influence over the University.” Accusations against them include brokering Jeffrey Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, securities fraud, and funding the right-wing blog Stand Columbia.

In an April 8 statement, Columbia said the flyer “singl[ed] out community members by name and photograph,” “included inaccurate and inflammatory claims,” and alleged that disseminating such information “exposes individuals to ongoing harassment and the spread of false and unfounded allegations.” The university, however, did not identify any specific false and unfounded claims.

The statement added, “Freedom of expression is a bedrock of our institution. . . . But the deliberate targeting of individuals, whether in person or online, even to make what seems a critical political point, undermines the meaningful exchange of ideas that sustains our community.”

On March 12, 2025, Columbia announced the creation of an anti-doxxing policy that laid the groundwork for the school’s pushback against the flyers. The policy forbids revealing someone’s “private email, personal phone number, home address,” and “personally identifying images,” and banned “online communication that intimidates, threatens, targets or otherwise causes harm to an individual or individuals.”

If distributing flyers about university governance can trigger a disciplinary investigation, student journalists are left to wonder where the “exchange of ideas” ends and information that “otherwise causes harm” begins.

Journalism is not doxxing, nor is naming or photographing people in positions of power. The flyers did not include anyone’s home address, social security number, or other information typically at issue in doxxing cases.

What would happen when, say, student journalists investigate, uncover, and publish information on administrative officials? Is this the same as doxxing? Are these students subject to the same discipline as the student who passed out flyers? Are we expected to not identify the very people we’re reporting about?

According to Spectator, when Claire Shipman, then the acting university president, was asked about the flyers in a University Senate student affairs committee, she responded, “This may well be free speech.”

Private universities such as Columbia may regulate speech according to their own rules and regulations. Despite this, these institutions should make every effort to allow for free speech and the rights of the free press.

Many universities ostensibly value free expression, but Columbia holds a unique place in the free speech ecosystem. It hosts the Pulitzer Prizes, as well as the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Columbia Journalism Review. It is home to a prestigious graduate journalism school. If the university believes in the First Amendment, and markets the prestige of its journalistic institutions to prospective students and donors, it should abide by its principles even if not legally required to do so.

Columbia’s July 23, 2025, settlement with the Trump administration further unsettled student journalism. The Knight Institute warned of its “far-reaching implications for free speech and academic freedom at Columbia.”

Foreign student journalists who end up in disciplinary proceedings must now worry not only about their standing at Columbia, but also about the settlement’s requirement that the university “provide the government, ‘upon request,’ with records relating to disciplinary actions taken against foreign students.”

Considering the Trump administration has attempted to or successfully deported former Columbia students for their speech on campus, namely protester Mahmoud Khalil and student journalist Alistair Kitchen, students’ fear is justified.

But even before the settlement, the university was adopting Trumpian tactics. Defining doxxing broadly to encompass routine journalism and activism is straight from Trump’s playbook. When a university with such a prominent place in journalism normalizes these antics, it allows Trump to escalate his war on speech even further.

Although the investigation into the flyers has ended, much like the interim suspensions of student journalists were quickly rescinded, each disciplinary hearing and probe further chills free speech.

Student journalists require a clear commitment that when they are acting reasonably within norms of journalism, they will not be subject to investigations and punishments that interrupt their education. That includes recognizing them as journalists in training, and understanding that mistakes are inevitable for students as young as 18 years old.

Universities that train future journalists — whether public or private, Columbia or elsewhere — should not be places where practicing journalism is itself a risk to completing that education.