The slide into authoritarianism starts with masked police officers in unmarked cars. These regimes survive by attacking truth, but sustain themselves by dismantling its root: education. In this system, students are not collateral damage; they are the target. As long as truth continues to circulate, all who carry it — students, writers, journalists, professors and increasingly, universities — become enemies of the state.
Rumeysa Ozturk, a graduate student and Fulbright scholar at Tufts, was seven miles from campus when masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents came to take her to a federal detention center in Louisiana. There was no warning and no crime. Yet, days later, her visa was revoked, and she was transferred to a detention center over 1,500 miles from home in less than 27 hours.
Ozturk had co-authored an op-ed, around a year ago, calling on Tufts to engage with student demands to cut ties with Israel. As journalists, we exist to hold institutions accountable and if we do not defend that mission — if we allow opinion writing to become a punishable offense — we don’t just risk the silencing of writers like Ozturk, we risk a future where journalism is reduced to compliance.
Tufts University, notified after the fact, offered what our campuses have come to master: polished and performative concern delivered too late. Their public sympathy now rings hollow — because when warning signs were clearest across campuses, they looked away.
Though deeply unsettling, Ozturk’s arrest is not an isolated incident, but the logical culmination of a slow, deliberate erosion of protection for student voices in American universities. We have seen the warning signs: student journalists being detained at Stanford and Dartmouth without institutional protection and Yunseo Chung — Columbia student and legal U.S. resident since the age of seven — “hunted” by ICE for participating in protests. And just last week, we saw it in our very own backyard when Cornell Ph.D. candidate Momodou Taal was instructed to turn himself in to ICE after filing a lawsuit against the Trump administration.
Each of these cases represents a step down the same path — one in which universities, once protectors of truth, have chosen silence or complicity. That path leads directly to Ozturk, and if we continue to normalize this silence, it leads to every single one of us.
History has shown us where this well-trodden path ends. Authoritarian regimes do not begin by silencing everyone — they start with students. Cast as agitators and threats to order, students are the easiest to isolate. Then the attack widens. In Russia, student journalists from DOXA were sentenced to two years of forced labor for defending protest rights. On Monday, 1,100 Turkish student protesters and journalists were detained in a single week for “inciting hatred,” followed by broadcasting bans on outlets covering the protests.
First, they criminalized students. Now, they criminalize truth, controlling the narrative. The recent defunding of Voice of America and the banning of the Associated Press from White House briefs are symptoms of a calculated campaign to consolidate control over information.
The blueprint our nation’s leaders are following is clear and unoriginal: speak and vanish.
These states did not criminalize dissent overnight. They began — as we are now — by isolating students. Their institutions offered neutrality in place of protection. And each time they gave up a student, it became easier to surrender the next.
Then they came for the rest.
We cannot pretend that this is a foreign problem. The Trump administration has already issued executive orders threatening to revoke visas of “radical activists” and cut funding from disloyal campuses. The language is familiar: “anti-American,” “illegal protests” and “traditional values.” We have heard it before — from regimes we were once taught to fear.
The University is no longer a bubble, a sanctuary of truth. It is a battleground, where students stand at the front line and truth is the loot. Silencing students into a fearful submission paves the way for silencing faculty. Curricula will be rewritten. Research will be censored. And before long, truth itself will be decided not by study, but by decree.
If we do not act now, we will not only lose student voices — we will lose their lives.
This month, both the Student Assembly and Graduate and Professional Student Assembly passed resolutions calling on the University to protect undocumented, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, international, refugee and other immigrant students calling for expanded legal support, investment in clinical law programs and community-wide training. These proposals are thoughtful, urgent and most importantly, possible.
To university leaders: it is far too early for “final policies.” If you abandon your students, there will soon be nothing left to protect. Truth needs institutions that are brave enough to stand for it. Education needs defenders. And students — who carry both — need you to choose a side.
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