As the situation on Columbia’s campus deteriorated earlier this year, the university’s then-president consulted with powerful politicians about the bad optics of the protests.
Administrators postponed an event featuring Simon Amaya Price, who once identified as transgender but later reconnected with their biological sex, following backlash from campus community.
Students, faculty, and invited speakers faced retaliation nearly every single day after October 7 for expressing their political beliefs, according to a FIRE investigation.
UMD’s dictate that ‘only university-sponsored events’ would take place on the one-year anniversary of Hamas’s attack on Israel ran headlong into the First Amendment.
