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One student news editor in chief said she is willing to take down names and identifying information because “our duty first and foremost is to the students of our campus.”
In the wake of attacks on international students—especially pro-Palestinian protesters—student newspapers are grappling with questions of if and how to protect protesters whom they have featured in articles, activists who have contributed opinion pieces and even their own reporters when they cover topics they fear the Trump administration could take issue with.
The Trump administration has detained and revoked the visas of hundreds of international students in recent weeks as part of a far-reaching campaign to punish universities that they say failed to stop antisemitism on campuses amid pro-Palestinian protests over the past year and a half—though not all who have been impacted were protesters.
Among those detained is a Fulbright Ph.D. student at Tufts University, Rümeysa Öztürk, who co-wrote an op-ed published in the institution’s student newspaper just over a year ago calling for the university to speak out again Israel’s bombardment of Gaza and divest from companies with ties to Israel. That case has sparked a slew of requests from international students to have their names removed from articles about the pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to the Student Press Law Center, a legal nonprofit dedicated to supporting student journalists’ rights. The center is advising student journalists to seriously consider those requests.
The SPLC and five other organizations that advocate for student media released an advisory Friday guiding student journalists through some of the considerations they might make when deciding whether to take down an article or remove a name.
Ultimately, the advisory noted that one of the tenets of ethical journalism is to minimize harm: “We have issued this alert because our organizations believe student media may fail that obligation if they continue to adhere to the traditional guidelines in light of recent developments. [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] has weaponized lawful speech and digital footprints and has forced us all to reconsider long-standing journalism norms.”
Mike Hiestand, senior legal counsel for the SPLC, monitors the organization’s free legal hotline, which both high school and college student journalists can call with questions about their legal rights. The line received 39 percent more calls this March than it had in March 2024; the majority of them focused on how to respond to these requests.
There’s not a one-size-fits-all answer, Hiestand said, but it’s much more acceptable to be permissive with these requests than it would have been just a few months ago.
“Our traditional advice … with takedown requests is that you tread carefully. Go slowly. Student media, just like all news media, is the first draft of history, and we take that responsibility importantly. You don’t want to go back in and start willy-nilly messing with history,” said Hiestand. “But the rules have changed.”
Madeline Douglas, the editor-in-chief of Bwog, an independent student news organization at Columbia University, which has been at the forefront of President Donald Trump’s crusade against higher education, said the publication has received a handful of requests in recent weeks from students who want their names removed from articles. So far, Bwog has agreed to do so, removing both names and identifying information like year and major, and adding an editor’s note to the article to mark the change.
Bwog already had policies in place to protect student privacy, Douglas said, like a policy to blur faces in photographs, something many protesters began requesting in the wake of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, out of fear that the government would use said images to find protesters and charge them with crimes. But few newspapers actually implemented such policies.
Douglas said it might not be best journalistic practice to remove the names of sources from stories, but doing so aligns with her philosophy as Bwog’s top editor.
“Ultimately, the way I’m leading the publication, at least, and the way my board is leading it is, we understand that we are student journalists, and our duty first and foremost is to the students of our campus,” she said.
Some reporters for Bwog have also begun requesting that their bylines be left off of articles covering controversial topics. Those stories instead carry the byline of “Bwog staff.”
“From the people I’ve talked to, it’s been very much, ‘I’m ready to write this, I want to write this, but for my safety, for my family’s safety, I don’t want anything retaliatory,’” she said. “Which, if we’re writing factual news, that shouldn’t be an issue, but with the current political climate right now, I do completely understand why people are nervous and are afraid.”
The Guardian reported that another Columbia publication, Columbia Political Review, has taken down entire articles and paused the publication of others. A student newspaper editor at Stanford University’s Stanford Daily told The Guardian that the newspaper was receiving a slew of takedown requests, and an editor who is an international student quit their job at the paper entirely.
Despite the uncertainty and fear some student journalists are feeling, others say that attacks on campus free speech are making them more enthusiastic about the role student journalism can play in documenting such a historic time at America’s colleges and universities.
“As a Board, we recognize the responsibility The Student bears as the sole newspaper on campus,” the editorial board of The Amherst Student, Amherst College’s student paper, wrote in an editorial last week. “The Trump administration’s blatant ignorance of the law cannot be ignored. We cannot capitulate to tyranny, and we stand in solidarity with those who have been silenced. We recognize how critical it is for us to deliver reliable, accurate information and offer diverse perspectives about issues pertaining to the college.”
Eric Thomas, a journalism professor at the University of Kansas who teaches an introductory journalism course, said the attacks on free speech have even encouraged some students to pursue journalism.
“In this culture of nervousness about free speech, that’s why they’ve come to journalism,” he said. “They want to be the antidotes to that, and they want to say things other students are too nervous to even talk about.”
A handful of student papers have called upon their institutions’ international students to make their voices heard, stressing the importance of sharing their stories amid attacks on immigrants and promising to protect them to the best of their ability if they do publish work in the paper’s pages.
“We are committed to supporting students in expressing their beliefs through Student Life,” the staff of Washington University in St. Louis’s paper, The Student Life, wrote in a recent article. “We acknowledge the very real threat to the safety of immigrant students under the Trump administration, which has prided itself on its no-tolerance immigration policies. We are committed to providing guidance and working with vulnerable students who wish to write for the Forum section, to ensure their well-being and protection as best as we are able.”
