On Nov. 3, faculty members at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law’s Center for Civil Rights and Racial Justice held a panel discussing free speech in universities.
The event, which was held in the Barco Law Building, drew about 100 students, faculty and community members. The panel featured both professor and student voices as part of a larger series exploring executive actions taken by the Trump administration. The discussion comes weeks after Pitt received its lowest ranking in an annual free speech report.
David Cole, a professor of law and public policy at Georgetown University and former national legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union, began the event as a featured speaker by setting up the national landscape regarding freedom of speech on university campuses, especially under the current Trump administration.
“Oct. 7, 2023, spawned a lot of concern around the world, including on many college campuses, leading to a great deal of protest of the way Israel was conducting its assault on Gaza,” Cole said. “What the Trump administration has done is use the concept of discrimination to target universities for their having the temerity to have students who engage in pro-Palestinian speech.”
Cole also made remarks on the legal actions taken against pro-Palestinian groups across college campuses, saying they are “unconstitutional.”
“A central concern of the First Amendment is this notion of academic freedom,” Cole said. “It’s really important in a constitutional democracy to protect universities because that’s where we pursue truth, educate our citizens and instill critical thinking. All of that is essential in a democracy.”
Jules Lobel, a panelist and professor of law at Pitt, offered more perspective on how Pitt students are impacted by a loss of freedom of speech. According to Lobel, the 2024 attacks on Jewish students contributed to Pitt’s rising action against the increase of antisemitism on campus. Lobal said this affected members of Students for Justice in Palestine at Pitt, who faced a six-month suspension that ended in September after legal proceedings.
“The administration of [Pitt], seeing what happened to Columbia and Harvard, says we don’t want that to happen here,” Lobel said. “And how do we decide that it shouldn’t happen here? Well, we prove that we are not tolerating antisemitism and the way to do that is to go against the student organizations. One of the key student organizations is Students for Justice in Palestine.”
Mia Suwaid, a senior double majoring in law, criminal justice and society, and international studies, spoke as a panelist representing SJP. She gave a student perspective on the events leading up to SJP’s suspension, including a sponsored “study-in” at Hillman Library in December 2024.
“Ever since [Oct. 7], we’ve seen that there’s been an immense amount of surveillance, repression and just overall vitriol from the University of Pittsburgh’s administration,” Suwaid said. “The University was so blatantly overstepping what they were allowed to police in terms of our speech, and we were ultimately barred from exercising our First Amendment rights until we were reinstated.”
Suwaid related the suspension of SJP to wider actions taken on the national level that act against the interests of students and their ability to speak freely on college campuses.
“We’re seeing that to protect its profits, universities are criminalizing these students, and the Trump administration is exacerbating that even more,” Suwaid said. “You cannot separate free speech from the Palestinian struggle — they’re inherently intertwined.”
Mohammed Bamyeh, a professor of sociology at Pitt and panelist at the event, explained the importance of a student’s right to protest and its role in administration accountability.
“This war basically has revealed that there’s a need to not only assert the right to protest on campus as one of the fundamental rights of young people in their educational journey, but also our right to democratize the university,” Bamyeh said. “In that, I think that we [would] end up with a kind of a responsive system that currently we do not have.”
Suwaid concluded the panel by emphasizing the role faculty members can play in amplifying student voices.
“The biggest role that faculty can play to be able to support students is to do more to echo what the majority of students are demanding, which is that the University should divest from Israel,” Suwaid said. “If the faculty want to be able to support students in those calls, they should also be pushing administrators using collective bargaining power that they have. That’s really how we can ensure that freedom of speech is protected in communities and on campuses.”