This Isn’t Kent State—Yet
What the silencing of student protest says about the state of our democracy
It’s been 55 years since the National Guard opened fire on unarmed student protesters at Kent State University on May 4, 1970. Four were killed, nine injured, most of them teenagers. They were protesting a war. The country was divided. Leaders called them agitators. Schools called in the police. And before the dust had settled, a generation learned just how violently the state could respond to dissent.
This week, that history doesn’t feel so far away.
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Across the country, college campuses are once again sites of mass protest, and once again, of institutional fear and state repression. At Columbia, UCLA, the University of Texas, and dozens of others, students are being arrested, suspended, and met with riot police for organizing sit-ins and encampments. The slogans are different. The war is different. But the response to dissent is eerily familiar.
It would be easy, maybe even tempting, to reduce these protests to a question of what side you’re on in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But that framing misses the deeper issue: Who gets to protest in America without being criminalized? And what happens when institutions are more afraid of discomfort than they are of injustice?
Universities should be bastions of open debate and moral inquiry, not staging grounds for surveillance, militarized police, and political theater. Instead, we’re watching a crackdown driven not by student violence (which is nearly nonexistent), but by donor pressure, media panic, and the political costs of letting young people think too freely.
What’s more alarming is the infrastructure now being used to suppress this dissent. In the years since 9/11, the U.S. government has built a powerful surveillance and enforcement apparatus—justified in the name of fighting terrorism—that is now being turned inward.
Thanks to expanded powers under the PATRIOT Act, federal agencies can demand student records, monitor communications, and revoke visas, all without traditional oversight or due process. For international students, the risk is existential: legal status can be revoked, and deportation can happen based on vague “national security” justifications, sometimes without even being told the evidence.
See some of our reporting on campus protest detentions here:
But these tools don’t stop at the border. Many of the same powers—mass surveillance, data collection, watchlisting—are also used against U.S. citizens. Protesters can be monitored, flagged, and added to federal databases under suspicion of providing “material support” to extremist groups, even when that “support” is nonviolent speech or association.
No one is immune. American citizens can’t be deported, but they can still be harassed, blacklisted, or charged. Some have already been placed on no-fly lists or targeted for prosecution. The chilling effect is real. And it’s working.
We’ve normalized this. And now it’s being used to quietly thin out resistance, particularly among the most vulnerable: international students, Muslim students, and students of color. They’re not just risking arrest; they’re risking their homes, futures, and place in this country. And for all of us, the cost is the same: a democracy that punishes dissent and rewards silence.
You don’t have to agree with the protesters to defend their right to protest. In fact, if we only defend speech we agree with, we’re not defending free speech at all; we’re just protecting our own comfort.
We’ve seen this before. We know what happens when the powerful respond to dissent with force. And we know, painfully, that sometimes the consequences are fatal.
We’re not saying this is Kent State. But we are saying: it could be.
What will we tell the next generation if this ends in violence again?
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