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The Trump administration’s cancellation of grants related to topics like race and gender “really runs afoul of the Constitution,” Deutchman said.
The University of California National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement launched in 2017, at a time when students were shouting down conservative speakers on campus, raising questions about what role the First Amendment did—and should—play in higher education.
Just eight years later, things have only gotten more complicated—first in the aftermath of an explosive protest movement against Israel’s war in Gaza and then in the wake of the Trump administration’s censorship across all areas of academe.
Amid the chaos, the center and its fellows—researchers from a breadth of disciplines who work on projects related to open expression and civic engagement—continue to educate universities about the First Amendment and investigate the day’s most pressing free speech issues.
Its executive director, Michelle Deutchman, who worked as an attorney for the Anti-Defamation League for 14 years before joining the center, stopped by the Inside Higher Ed office in Washington, D.C., last week to discuss the federal government’s attacks on free expression in higher education. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
1. What are your biggest concerns with regard to the Trump administration and free speech and open expression in higher ed right now?
Well, sadly, there’s kind of a long list. I think, from my vantage point, one of the greatest concerns is seeing students, and particularly international students, being, basically, taken away on what appears to be the basis of viewpoints and opinions that they might have shared, either in the form of protest or, in one case, an op-ed. That really flies in the face of exactly what the First Amendment is supposed to protect against, especially in a public institution, which is that it’s supposed to be a restraint on government. In fact, what we’re seeing right now is the government stepping over the line of what is permitted, and that is definitely creating, I think, a chilling effect, not just for international students, but for students across the board, whether they’re protesting or not.
I also think that the specter of investigations on campuses—this list of 60 campuses [being investigated for alleged antisemitism], this idea that if you’re on a campus that’s potentially going to be under investigation—might impact what you say in class, outside of class, how you teach, everything that’s fundamental to the academy.
2. What are some of the most common questions you’re getting about what is going on?
Deutchman has led UC’s National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement for eight years.
I don’t get as many questions as you would think, because I don’t give legal advice, and right now, what a lot of people want is legal advice. But I think one of the things that I’m struggling with is, how do you talk about open expression and dialogue in a moment when it’s largely being suppressed on campuses? One of the questions that people have been asking is what to say to students about the risk factors in terms of being very vocal with your opinions, and how should administrators address that—both wanting to, of course, encourage them to use their voices, but also wanting to be transparent about what the risks might be.
There’s just a lot of other, bigger questions that are just about, what does this mean in general for higher education? Is this like an existential moment? What about the coercive use of money? A lot of questions of: Can the government do that? And I think it’s a really challenging situation where the answer is: Not sure that they should be doing it, but they are. So, how do we handle that sort of in-between space while we wait for the law to catch up to what’s going on on the ground?
3. There’s been a lot of emphasis on civic dialogue education as one antidote to tensions around political speech on campus. Do you feel like this moment is sort of setting those efforts back at all?
I don’t want to say they’re setting them back. I worry a little that they might be getting set aside. And that’s a concern that I’ve had, really, since after Oct. 7, where we saw so much time and energy go into the basics about the First Amendment and about time, place and manner, and about whether or not to use law enforcement, that there became a big focus on the enforcement regulations as opposed to sort of education. I think now, so much energy is being put into how to defend higher education against this assault that I worry that efforts that focus on how we teach not just students but all members of higher education communities to engage with one another and listen to one another and build the muscle of civic dialogue—I worry that there isn’t enough bandwidth to pay attention to that, and setting it aside, I think, is to the detriment of everyone at this moment.
4. How is Trump’s cutting of grants his administration deems related to diversity, equity and/or inclusion connected to the government’s other attacks on speech?
I think that the cutting of those kinds of grants is just another attempt at government censorship of speech. Expression and speech are the cornerstones of the creation and transmission of knowledge. So, I think that it you’re stopping grants about certain topics, topics that are either being researched or topics that are being taught, that is something that falls sort of in the viewpoint discrimination area and really runs afoul of the Constitution. We’ve certainly seen some successes in court cases and injunctions, but I think part of the problem is the gap between when an executive order is signed and when an injunction happens, the chilling effect that happens across the university, and this idea that I don’t know that you can unring certain bells.
5. Though many are calling the Trump administration’s attacks unprecedented in many ways, there have been other moments in history when free speech on college campuses has been under assault. What do those moments teach us about what is happening today?
I wish I could tell you that I am a historian, but I’m a lawyer, so I don’t necessarily have that historical perspective. Certainly, I think people say that this is the greatest threat to academic freedom and to the autonomy of the university since McCarthyism. It’s hard to know how, then, to take that information and do something with it, right? I mean, the hopeful take is: Well, we made it through that, even though it was a dark time.
I mean, look, I’m a [University of California, Berkeley] Cal Bear. UC had people do loyalty oaths; it was not a good moment, and look where we are now. I think that is sort of the optimistic hope.
I think the less optimistic [perspective] is that, in some ways, what we’re experiencing is much more far-reaching, and we will just have to wait and see what happens.
