The College Fix

Student editors criticize Trump’s antisemitism executive order as ‘blatant violation of the First Amendment rights’

Purdue University’s student newspaper is scrubbing the names and photos of pro-Palestinian protesters from its website, a decision its editors announced Monday in response to an executive order from President Donald Trump.

The decision struck one journalism professor as “unusual,” but he told The College Fix that “the newspaper has every right to do it.”

“The effort to protect the pro-Palestinian students could be characterized as sensible to some extent, but the paper might also consider the need to protect the identities of pro-Israel students as well, given that they, too, could be subject to harassment, not necessarily from the government, but from other students,” DePauw University Professor Jeffrey McCall said Tuesday in an email.

In an editorial Monday, editors of the Purdue Exponent said they want to protect international students from deportation when their “only crime has been to raise their voices” in support of Palestine.

The impetus for their decision was an executive order from the Trump administration last week that aims to combat antisemitism on college campuses. It directs the federal government to use “all available and appropriate legal tools, to prosecute, remove, or otherwise hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence.”

A White House fact sheet that accompanied the executive order also suggested the Trump administration would revoke student visas and deport “Hamas sympathizers.”

“To all the resident aliens who joined in the pro-jihadist protests, we put you on notice: come 2025, we will find you, and we will deport you. I will also quickly cancel the student visas of all Hamas sympathizers on college campuses, which have been infested with radicalism like never before,” Trump stated in the fact sheet.

The Exponent editors expressed concerns the order will be used to target students just for participating in pro-Palestinian protests.

The editors said they refuse “to be party to such a blatant violation of the First Amendment rights of potentially hundreds of Purdue students.”

“Our newspaper will never be able to stop such an assault backed by the might of the federal government. But purdueexponent.org will no longer be a place where that government will be able to find the names of its targets.”

Therefore, “to protect the identities of pro-Palestinian students, we are removing the names, images and likenesses of every such student from our website published since Oct. 7, 2023,” the editors wrote.

The newspaper already has begun the task.

An article dated Aug. 20 about pro-Palestinian students being disciplined for, among other things, obstructing university activity now has underlined blank spaces where the students’ names once were.

“This article has been edited to remove the names of pro-Palestinian students,” an editors note states. It is followed by a link to Monday’s editorial.

The same note and blank spaces also appear in another article dated Oct. 11 about a pro-Palestinian march on campus.

MORE: Trump vows to revoke student visas and deport ‘Hamas sympathizers’

The Exponent editors told readers to expect the same in future articles, too.

“Further, in future coverage, no such information or images will be published online or in print by the Exponent — no exceptions — until this autocratic attack on free speech is overturned,” they wrote Monday.

The newspaper will continue to cover pro-Palestinian protests, but student reporters will not publish the protesters’ identities, the editors wrote.

The editors also encouraged readers to contact them to report names or photos that they believe should be removed as part of the decision.

Asked about the campus’s response to the announcement, editor-in-chief Seth Nelson told The Fix via email Tuesday:

“Neither the Exponent nor its staff have any intention of commenting on the protests nor the issue they are protesting. We are only taking the necessary steps that, in our eyes, will help protect our fellow students from violations of the First Amendment. These students have a right to protest any issue they see fit and we will not be party to suppressing that.”

But Professor McCall at DePauw University in Indiana said the newspaper “somewhat mischaracterizes” the president’s executive order.

It “indicates the government wants to ‘hold to account the perpetrators of unlawful anti-Semitic harassment and violence,’” McCall told The Fix. “That’s a different government objective than simply stifling students who have raised their voices.”

He said the editorial decision to delete names and photos is “rather unusual” regarding news stories that already have been published.

“It is largely a symbolic gesture, it would seem, because federal authorities would likely not need to scour a student newspaper website to find the people they might be looking for,” he said.

As to future articles, McCall said the editors’ decision “makes sense on one level,” but he also noted that “stories without named sources will always be subject to questioning.”

MORE: Indiana’s new intellectual diversity law faces legal challenges, criticism

IMAGE: The Purdue Exponent

Like The College Fix on Facebook / Follow us on Twitter