By COCO SMYTH

In 2024, Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, conducted with the unflagging support of the U.S. government, spurred on an unprecedented movement in favor of Palestinian liberation in the United States. The college campuses became an epicenter of this earthquake. Millions turned against Israel’s genocidal apartheid regime and hundreds of thousands entered the Palestine solidarity movement across the country.

Sadly, no good deeds go unpunished in “the freest country” in this Free World. Afraid of this mass discontent with U.S. imperialism, the Democratic-led federal government began an offensive to crush the movement by force. Over 3100 students were arrested in the wave of repression unleashed on the campuses.

The government, in coordination with university administrators, was successful in disorganizing a student movement that was ill-prepared for the scale of repression unleashed. Despite conquering the organized pro-Palestine movement on the campuses, the establishment dealt no serious blow to the new consciousness around imperialism.

To get ahead of the movements of the future, universities across the country quietly changed their rules and regulations regarding free speech and protest rights. Ohio State University has stepped out into the vanguard position of this new approach towards student mobilizations.

The new “Agreement”

On July 30, the American Civil Liberties Union sent a letter to Ohio State University President Ravi V. Bellamkonda demanding that the university withdraw its chalking ban instituted after the repression of the mass Palestine solidarity movement of 2024.

Chalking has been a long tradition for students at OSU and at campuses across the country—using chalk to scrawl messages on the ground to promote protests, events, slogans, or even just fun messages. In 2025, OSU put new rules on the books banning all forms of chalking. Framed neutrally, the administration made it seem the ban was about saving costs on cleaning; even though chalk washes away in the rain.

Given the timing of the ban and the simultaneous imposition of a series of other restrictions on students’ rights to protest after the repression of the Palestine movement, it was clear to activists that the chalking ban was another attempt to stymy Palestine solidarity.

Through a series of public records requests, ACLU proved what we already suspected: the ban on chalking, despite its neutral framing, was actually imposed to suppress pro-Palestine speech. This constitutes the basis of the ACLU’s lawsuit—the targeting of students’ rights to speak out on Palestine is a violation of the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

The ACLU’s lawsuit has been welcomed by students and professors at OSU, who have felt the effects of the crackdown on free speech, with organizations like the American Association of University Professors and Ohio Youth for Climate Justice expressing their support of the case.

Unfortunately, the chalking ban is neither the most odious nor impactful attack on students at OSU. The core of the administration’s offensive against protest rights is encapsulated by its updated “2024 Space Use Agreement (SUA.)” The Agreement is a document enforceable on students and workers as individuals as well as student organizations.

The new SUA throws out the administration’s formerly laissez-faire approach of ignoring student protest or pushing it into powerless committees and meetings in favor of repressive methods. The most notable elements of the new SUA include requiring advance permission for protests or gatherings in buildings like the Ohio Union—a gathering place that has been a central hub for student protest since its construction in 2010—as well as restrictions on amplified sound like megaphones or chanting that can be heard from more than 50 feet away outside of a small window of time between 5:30 p.m. and 10 p.m.

During protests now, groups of five to10 administrators and campus police stand 25 yards away observing—whether there are 500 participants or just five. If a megaphone is taken out or chanting occurs, these observers intervene to inform protesters of the potential of student conduct charges or arrest. The sharp restrictions on protest rights have temporarily tamped down student movements and inculcated a climate of fear and paranoia among the university populace about speaking out.

Government attacks on the university

OSU’s curtailing of the rights to speech and protest, sadly, are not an accident or a momentary policy; it is part of statewide and federal campaigns of repression meant to kill oppositional movements in the country.

At the state level, the far-right Ohio Government-imposed Senate Bill 1 (SB1), which undermines academics’ right to organize and strike as workers, abolishes DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) policies, and subjects professors to politically motivated tenure reviews.

Ohio is at the forefront of a nationwide campaign of repression spearheaded by Trump’s Republican Party. OSU has acted as a laboratory for the political right’s attempts to hollow out and take over the universities, using the same playbook as in other countries, such as India under the BJP-led far-right government. The goal is to destroy the remnants of free thought, debate, and intellectual inquiry, which allows universities to become a recurrent space of worker and student mobilizations, and occasionally, radical political thought and movements. By controlling funding, intervening in curricula, disciplining the workforce, and inserting unqualified pro-government ideologues into positions of authority, the Republicans seek to remake the universities into new transmission belts for their reactionary political project.

One of the key experiments in this model of right-wing takeover in Ohio has been the formation of the Chase Center. The Ohio government dedicated $24 million in 2023 to set up laughably misnamed “intellectual diversity centers” at five public universities in the state. The explicit aim has been to introduce “intellectual diversity” by inserting under-qualified right-wing propagandists to break up the supposed hegemony of liberal and leftist ideas at the university.

The Chase Center is independent both of traditional university governance structures and oversight. The OSU Faculty Senate cast a majority vote against the Center’s formation, but this decision was overturned unilaterally by the administration. Since then, the hacks who comprise the new “department” are hired at significantly higher salaries than their peers, with none of the traditional expectations for their positions.

A new Free Speech Movement

The attacks by the state and university administrators on free speech and protest rights must be combatted. The vision of the university as a space for free inquiry and debate — though always partly hollow under capitalism — faces an existential threat.

At OSU, we’ve seen a variety of attempts to resist these new attacks. One of the first attempts to resist the wave of repression was the campaign to reinstate Central Ohio Revolutionary Socialists (CORS), a socialist student organization affiliated with Workers’ Voice, after they hosted a pro-Palestine event on campus in December, 2023. A Zionist campaign of slander painting pro-Palestine advocacy as anti-Semitic pressured the OSU administration to suspend the group pending investigation under the assertion that the group presented “a significant risk of substantial harm” to the university community.

CORS organizers responded by launching a petition campaign and building a large base of support on campus and in Columbus in defense of the right to advocate for Palestinian liberation. The petition gathered 1000 signatures and the move succeeded in countering the Zionist attacks. The OSU administration then dropped the investigation and charges and reinstated CORS in 2024. Though minor in comparison to the broader erosion of rights, the campaign showed that united action can win at OSU.

Similarly, groups such as the AAUP and Ohio Student Association built a movement against SB 1 in 2025, which though unsuccessful, mobilized 800 in a single demonstration and showed the potential of an orientation towards mass action in defense of our rights.

Students and workers at OSU have shown time and time again over the years that they have the capacity to stand up for their rights and against injustice. It is only a matter of time before the struggle once again rises up.

Today, uniting the activist groups and cultural organizations that bring together thousands of students as well as the unions and faculty groups around a basic program in defense of democratic rights and the autonomy of the university is essential for building up an organizational base and raising the consciousness of the whole university populace. The variety of ongoing campaigns and struggles must find solidarity and common ground and stand together against government intervention and the millionaire administrators who parasitize those who really run the university while prattling on hypocritically about democracy, diversity, and social justice.

With the active layer of students and workers brought together, mass democratic assembles ought to be convoked to reach the 61,500 students and 44,000 faculty and staff who constitute the core of the university. Here, the key issues facing the people at the university can be discussed and how to organize the struggle can be decided on and acted upon.

Mass movements from Occupy Wall Street to Black Lives Matter and the Palestine struggle have shaken up OSU repeatedly over the last decade, but the movements have so far failed to consolidate their organizations and power to win their demands and real influence over the direction of the university. In this period when the university faces dire threats from reactionary attacks by the government, it is vital that the movement dedicates itself to bringing together tens of thousands to displace the rigid control of the government and university administrator collaborators with a university that is run democratically and ethically for the purpose of social progress.

A free and democratic university that is dedicated wholly to knowledge and the collective interests of humanity is possible, but it can only be achieved when the workers and students who make the university run it themselves.

Students and faculty demonstrated at the Ohio State campus in November 2025 to protest the university’s anti-democratic measures, including its chalking ban and its compliance with the repressive Ohio Senate Bill 1. Photo: (Jayden Zhu / The Lantern)