President Trump made a post on social media March 4 stating colleges, schools and universities would lose federal funding if they allowed “illegal protests.” What constitutes an “illegal protest” wasn’t clearly defined in the post.
The president made the post after protests regarding the war in Gaza on the campuses of Barnard College and Columbia University, in which one resulted in the injury of an employee on one of the campuses. Since then, $400 million in federal funding has been pulled from Columbia University. The college is fighting against it.
The post made on Truth Social further explained students who engaged in these illegal protests would be deported back to their home country if they weren’t American citizens and American citizens would be expelled from the college, or depending on the crime, arrested. No congressional policy has been made toward these statements.
Dr. Russ Witcher, a professor of journalism law at Tennessee Tech, gave insights into if Trump could legally act on this post’s statements. “As far as the big picture, as far as that being constitutional, I’d say no. First of all, it’s not defined properly and even if it is defined properly, I can’t imagine how a court, ultimately the Supreme Court, would say that that is constitutional because even non-Americans are allowed to protest in this country. It’s not just limited to American citizens.” He further explained this move would ultimately be shut down by the courts.
The vagueness of the undefined term “illegal protests” has sparked uncertainty among Tech students as well. A wildlife and fishery sciences major, N. Brown said, “It’s too vague of a term, and I think it is meant to be vague enough to people to be afraid of protesting, for what they see as right, for what they believe in, because it’s pretty much what happened with the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) in 2020.”
Brown explained, “There is no such thing as an illegal protest; it’s a protected right within the first amendment and threatening to remove federal funding from schools for people expressing that first amendment right is a violation of Title 6 of the Civil Rights Act.” She continued, “The assembly is not illegal but people doing illegal acts, that’s the illegal part.”
While action toward Tech in this endeavor is unlikely, it has still caused some concern about Tech and its federal funding. Witcher mentioned if Tech’s federal funding was taken away, “We’d have to shut down. A much larger percentage of our funding comes from the federal government.” However, he also said, “If it were passed, there’s no way, there’s no way the Supreme Court would allow that to continue.”
The nationwide threat of losing federal funding worries Brown as a student. “Threatening to pull funding from colleges is a huge issue because a lot of colleges operate in, especially people in red or blue states, just in areas that are more low income, they need that federal funding to keep their colleges open, to give people from lower income communities that opportunity to go to a higher education school.”
The post’s effect on protests in America seemed to be the bigger issue students on campus have aside from the threat of pulling federal funding.
Brown said, “We do have the right of protected speech, that’s part of the experience of being at college is being exposed to different viewpoints, different religious views, people who come from completely different backgrounds. That’s kind of the point, is to expose you to what the real world is, which is in and of itself a big melting pot… And taking that right away, it’s demolishing the college experience for one and its honestly kind of ruining your foundation for your real-world experience and your career,” she continued, “That right is so necessary just to kind of make you a more well-rounded person, so the fact that that is being threatened, that’s a huge concern for me.”
