Keller: US Education Secretary McMahon warns colleges about student protests
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
Dozens of colleges and universities nationwide - including a half-dozen in Massachusetts - have received a stern warning from U.S. Education Secretary Linda McMahon.
College protests
The schools are being told they must do more to protect Jewish students on campus or face "enforcement action," part of a Trump administration crackdown that some First Amendment defenders say goes too far.
The arrest of a Columbia University graduate student who had been organizing pro-Palestinian demonstrations has sparked protests in New York. Mahmoud Kahlil has yet to be charged with any crime.
And that has cast a spotlight on the Trump administration's push to punish both student protestors and the schools they attend.
What schools are affected?
"I believe in freedom of speech on campus, open debate, and we should encourage that, but we cannot allow violence," Education Secretary Linda McMahon said at her confirmation hearing last month, seemingly distinguishing between protected speech and unprotected lawlessness. But last weekend, McMahon cancelled $400 million worth of Columbia's federal grants and contracts without specifying what rules they broke.
And in a threatening letter yesterday to 60 colleges nationwide, including Boston University, Emerson College, Harvard University,Tufts University, UMass Amherst and Wellesley College, McMahon upped the ante, claiming "the previous administration failed to....investigate the institutions that tolerated this contemptible antisemitic harassment and violence...either reaching toothless resolution agreements with schools or allowing complaints to accumulate. That state of affairs ended on January 20, 2025."
A chilling effect on campus
"The concern about a chilling effect is enormous," says Tyler Coward, lead government affairs counsel for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. He argues schools can and should punish protestors who violate the law and be subject to sanction if they don't. But: "There's a reason why the First Amendment is first in our Bill of Rights. Allowing the government to slowly trample on or restrict constitutionally-protected expression, these might be slow steps that eventually transform into a stampede."
Lots of legal proceedings lie ahead. A judge has already blocked the feds from deporting the student activist, and we'll see what, if any, actual charges are filed against him.
And there's a legal process that has to be followed before those funds can actually be taken away from Columbia.
But those actions and the threats against all those schools are already achieving their political goals - positioning the administration as the persecutor of some of the least popular groups in our culture - student protestors and university administrators
