Yesterday was my last day as an Opinion editor for the News. I am proud of the work this desk has done over the past year, and I know that it is in good hands going forward. I am also concerned about the way that government power is being used to suppress campus speech, particularly in student newspapers. 

In the last few weeks of my editorship, I received several emails from international students and alumni requesting that pieces they wrote be archived, because they were afraid that federal immigration authorities would use their writings as a pretext for deportation or revoking their visas. I read all the columns they were concerned about. Many were pro-Palestine, but none could be construed as pro-Hamas or antisemitic. 

But I understand why students are afraid. On March 25, Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student at Tufts University, was snatched off the street by masked immigration officers. Ozturk was in America legally under a student visa, which was revoked on March 21 without her knowledge. She is currently being held at a detention facility in Louisiana. The Department of Homeland Security claimed that Ozturk’s visa was revoked because she had “engaged in activities in support of” Hamas; Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that he revoked the visa because Ozturk had engaged in “activities that are counter to our foreign, to our national interest, to our foreign policy.”

What Ozturk did was co-byline an opinion piece in the Tufts Daily, calling for “the Tufts administration to meaningfully engage with and actualize the resolutions passed by the [Tufts Community Union] Senate.” These resolutions, according to Ozturk’s column, included calls for Tufts to “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide, apologize for University President Sunil Kumar’s statements, disclose its investments and divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” 

I encourage you to read Ozturk’s column in full. You may disagree with her requests; you may find them profoundly insensitive or disrespectful. But is a graduate student expressing her views in a college newspaper a threat to the national interest? No. What is a threat to our national interest — indeed, to the foundations of our republic — are attempts to use government power to suppress unpopular speech. 

To be clear, I am not particularly sympathetic to pro-Palestine campus protesters. Too often, protesters have been unable to stay focused on the tragedy of civilian deaths. Last spring, I saw posters on Cross Campus decrying the Israeli government for imprisoning Walid Daqqa — who was locked up for having kidnapped, tortured and killed an off-duty Israeli soldier. I do not think that President McInnis issuing a statement or the Yale endowment divesting its relatively tiny holdings in defense companies would change the decision-making of either Hamas or the American or Israeli governments. To the extent that campus protests had any effect on government policy, they made the situation on the ground worse for Palestinians by helping elect Donald Trump, who has allowed the ceasefire to lapse and has mused about American “ownership” of Gaza.  

So again, I do not agree with pro-Palestine protesters. But as an American, I will defend their constitutional right to free expression. In a recent piece, Josh Danziger ’28 wrote that when “elite students continue to sneer at the nation that sustains them” — referring to the protestors who tore down the American flag on Beinecke Plaza last year — it is “only a matter of time until America stops footing their bill.” Danziger writes that this was not “just a rejection of a flag” but also “a rejection of the values it stands for.” He goes on to say that these students are “lucky” because defiling the flag is a crime in France and Germany. 

In the same paragraph, Danziger cites Texas v. Johnson, a case in which the Supreme Court held that burning the American flag is protected under the First Amendment. Danziger seems to think that the Trump administration is justified in withholding federal funding from universities because certain students engaged in speech that most people find offensive. He says that he decries the “impacts” of university funding cuts, but concludes that if Yale students engage in “raucous protests and flag desecration,” then it is “only a matter of time until America stops footing their bill.”

“If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment,” wrote Justice William J. Brennan Jr., “it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.”

In the United States, free speech matters. Harmful speech, tasteless speech and hateful speech — so long as it does not constitute a true threat or fall into some other narrowly circumscribed forbidden category — are punished by norms rather than laws, because we rightly recognize that unfettered discourse is valuable enough to make any speech-chilling government action seriously harmful.

By urging the dilution of speech rights for those who do not perform sufficient gratitude for holding those rights in the first place, Danziger would have the state vindicate the protesters’ argument that America does not live up to the principles it espouses. He would also undermine the core argument of the case he cites: that disrespecting the flag is a form of political expression that is protected by the First Amendment. But more importantly than that, he would set up a new and corrosive conception of free speech not as a freedom fundamental to Americans, but as something to be protected or punished at the discretion of a given president based on the speech’s perceived propriety. 

Danziger’s argument is dangerous because it actively tears at the very rights which he chastises student protesters for failing to appreciate. The First Amendment should not turn on an undergraduate’s estimation of the snideness — or the good faith — of speakers. Nor should it turn on an administration’s estimation of the same qualities. This is America. Protections for speech must be robust and content-neutral. And attacking that principle is far more anti-American than any lack of reverence with which Danziger could accuse the protesters who offend him.

Note: Danziger’s piece was the last column that I edited for this desk. The column you are reading now was written after the News concluded elections for the Managing Board of 2027, and the new Opinion editors were selected. Read Danziger’s original piece here. Read Danziger’s response here.

MILAN SINGH is a junior in Pierson College studying Economics and a former Opinion editor for the News. His column, “All politics is national,” runs fortnightly. Contact him at milan.singh@yale.edu.