This free speech group at Columbia is taking on Trump when the university won’t – and winning

When he first learned that federal agents had detained Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil in the lobby of his university housing complex, Jameel Jaffer knew he was in for a fight. Jaffer is the director of a Columbia-affiliated institute devoted to the defense of the first amendment, and Khalil, a green card holder, had been a fixture at the pro-Palestinian encampments on campus. Months earlier, Jaffer’s organization had hosted a symposium about the free speech rights of noncitizens. The institute had been established to defend the very constitutional principles the Trump administration was now openly flouting – and that Columbia seemed too scared to defend. “We felt this connection to the case, because we’re at Columbia,” Jaffer said. “And we saw this arrest as a serious infringement of first amendment rights.” Last week, Jaffer’s team of constitutional scholars and lawyers at the Knight First Amendment Institute, along with the law firm Sher Tremonte, scored a landmark victory against the Trump administration when a federal judge in Boston ruled that the detention and attempted deportation of Khalil and other pro-Palestinian students was unconstitutional and intentionally designed to chill free speech. The Trump administration has said it will appeal, with White House spokesperson Liz Huston calling the verdict an “outrageous ruling that hampers the safety and security of our nation”. The ruling raised the profile of the Knight Institute, catapulting it to the frontlines of the battle against Trump over fundamental American values. Yet the win also underscored the widening chasm between the institute and the university that hosts it. The case – described by the judge, Reagan appointee William G Young, as “perhaps the most important ever to fall within the jurisdiction of this district court” – was the first of several challenging Trump’s unprecedented assault on universities to go to trial. It was also the highest-profile first amendment challenge to an administration that has launched a scorched-earth attack against speech that doesn’t adhere to its ideological agenda. During the two-week trial in July, citizen and noncitizen scholars testified about the climate of terror and self-censorship ushered in by the arrests, while immigration officials revealed details about their reliance on dossiers by the rightwing, pro-Israel Canary Mission to pick their targets. Veena Dubal, general counsel of the American Association of University Professors, which brought the case along with some of its chapters and the Middle East Studies Association, called it “the central civil rights case of the Trump administration this time around”. ‘The university and the institute are on different sides’ While the court victory was hailed by advocates and academics across the country, Jaffer heard nothing from Columbia following the ruling – a reflection of the tensions in the positions staked out by the institute and the university. Even before Trump took office, Columbia had come to symbolize the shrinking space for pro-Palestinian speech on US campuses after it called police in to clear its student encampment, suspended dozens of students for their activism and dramatically restricted protests on campus. Following Khalil’s arrest, and Trump’s threats to the university’s funding, it adopted even harsher measures and moved to take over an academic department from faculty control. This summer, the university reached a deal with the Trump administration to pay millions to settle antisemitism claims and submit to major restrictions on its independence in a move widely condemned as “capitulation” to the president’s bullying tactics. A spokesperson for Columbia declined to comment on the Knight Institute, but the university has repeatedly rejected the characterization that it has “capitulated” to Trump. Columbia’s submissive approach was starkly at odds with the Knight Institute’s defiant one. “This is a moment in which the university and the institute are on different sides of some of these critical questions,” Joel Simon, a former fellow at the Knight Institute and founding director of the Journalism Protection Initiative at Cuny’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Simon decried the way “independent institutions that have the firepower to genuinely challenge Trump are falling by the wayside”, referring also to media organizations and major law firms that have cut deals with the administration. But he credited university leadership for allowing Knight to operate according to its mission even at a time when the university won’t. “Tolerance” for the institute’s autonomy is in Columbia’s interest as it seeks to rebuild its image, he added. Aryeh Neier, a former director of the American Civil Liberties Union, agrees. “In some ways, it’s rescued Columbia’s reputation to have an institute connected with it taking such a strong and forthright stand on free speech issues,” he said. The Knight Institute was launched in 2016 and is housed on the Columbia campus. It has received significant funding from the university as part of an agreement that had each contributing $5m in operating funds and $25m in endowment funds to launch it. Closely associated with Columbia law and journalism schools, the institute was the brainchild of Alberto Ibargüen, the former president of the Knight Foundation, and former Columbia president Lee Bollinger, a first amendment scholar. “My hope for the institute in the long-term future is that when there is that moment when the government has gone in the wrong direction and fundamental rights are at stake and no one else is prepared to step forward and to say, enough is enough, it will be the Knight Institute who will have stepped forward,” Bollinger said in a video introducing the institute. Jaffer envisioned Knight as an academic and legal centre dedicated to tackling first amendment questions of the future – from social media to AI – and the institute has litigated landmark cases about surveillance technology and public officials’ use of social media. He didn’t think he’d be helping lead the defense of fundamental values long assumed to be untouchable. “It turns out, even the most seemingly well-settled first amendment principles are now up for grabs,” he said. ‘Columbia should not have agreed to this’ Shortly after 7 October 2023, Columbia and the Knight Institute found themselves on opposing sides, with Knight regularly criticizing the university’s handling of the pro-Palestinian protests both privately and in increasingly unforgiving public statements. In a November 2023 letter to then president Minouche Shafik, Jaffer condemned the decision to suspend two student groups, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, which the university said had violated policies related to holding campus events. The criticism, Jaffer stressed, was made “with deep respect for Columbia’s long history as an incubator and protector of free thought and free speech, and with a particular sense of the Knight Institute’s responsibility to that tradition”. In April 2024, Jaffer again condemned the university’s decision to call New York police onto campus to clear a peaceful, pro-Palestinian encampment – leading to the arrest of more than 100 students. “The university’s decisions and policies have become disconnected from the values that are central to the university’s life and mission – including free speech, academic freedom, and equality,” he wrote this time. During the trial’s closing arguments, Knight Institute senior staff attorney Ramya Krishnan accused the government of having “engaged in a campaign of threats to intimidate noncitizens into silence”. Her remarks – and the case itself – stood in stark contrast to Columbia’s timid response to the arrests of Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian Columbia student detained by the administration over his advocacy. Khalil, in particular, had pleaded with university administrators for protection, and in an op-ed written from detention he wrote that “the logic used by the federal government to target myself and my peers is a direct extension of Columbia’s repression playbook concerning Palestine”. Columbia settled with the Trump administration just days after the case wrapped in court. Shortly after the deal was announced, the Knight Institute published a scathing rebuke, concluding that the settlement sanctions “an astonishing transfer of autonomy and authority to the government”. “Columbia’s leaders should not have agreed to this,” the statement said. Knight doesn’t stand alone – organizations such as the ACLU, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire) and other civil liberties groups have challenged the Trump administration over free speech issues, as have unions and Harvard University. Nor is it exclusively focusing on campus issues – in other challenges to the Trump administration, the institute has sued on behalf of farmers and environmental advocates challenging the Department of Agriculture’s purging of climate-related datasets, and challenged the suppression of the special counsel’s report about Trump’s concealment of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But its defense of student speech at a university now synonymous with compromising on it puts it in a uniquely uneasy position. Jaffer expressed sympathy for the lack of “good options” for Columbia’s leaders even as he described their decision to settle as a “serious mistake”. But he emphasized that despite the institute standing at the opposite end of its host when it comes to dealing with the president, the university has allowed it to operate free of pressure. “Especially right now, I don’t take that freedom for granted,” he said, declining to discuss details of private conversations he has had with university leadership. “If Columbia tried to restrict our work, I wouldn’t be at Columbia any more.”