A controversy about an op-ed in the San Diego Union-Tribune by a student at UC San Diego in the wake of violent responses to pro-Palestinian protests has stirred a conversation about free speech, its limits, and who has a right to speak — and about what.
For decades, universities have held themselves out as boundary-pushers at the forefront of societal metamorphosis and have served as conservatories for challenging ideas and conversations.
However, some ideas appear to be more palatable than others.
When “Mia,” a 21-year-old anthropology major at UCSD and a member of Jewish Voice for Peace, was invited to contribute an op-ed to the San Diego Union-Tribune to share the perspectives of Jewish students in support of Palestinians, she was elated.
However, a few days later Mia’s op-ed was removed from the U-T’s website without explanation, sparking a local outcry from educators, activists, and community members.
Several weeks prior, the news organization ran an op-ed from a group called Tritons For Israel, a self-described pro-Israel student organization at UC San Diego that was formed last August, alleging that the university had shown “disregard for Jewish safety” on campus.
In response, U-T deputy editor Laura Castañeda tapped Gary Fields, a professor at UCSD who teaches historical geography with a focus on conflicts over land and a course called Palestinians and the State of Israel, to help find a piece with an opposing point of view for the newspaper.
“The op-ed was filled with just an enormous number of distortions about what went down during the encampment last year,” Fields said. “It was a very crude piece, actually.”
Fields asked other UCSD students involved in the rallies to share their own viewpoints from a different perspective but found that many students were reluctant to attach their names to an opposing piece, citing increasingly hostile political climates and draconian measures many universities have taken to quell pro-Palestine protests.
“I had talked to a number of people about writing an actual rejoinder, but they all didn’t want to get involved for the simple reason that they didn’t want to be doxxed,” said Fields.
Fields was eventually able to find a pseudonymous candidate who called herself Mia, an anthropology major at UCSD and a member of Jewish Voices for Peace, who agreed to write a piece as long as she was able to use a pseudonym due to the heightened safety and privacy concerns.
The U-T’s Opinion department agreed, publishing “Mia’s” piece (‘Jewish students at UCSD support equal rights for all, including Palestinians’) on March 18, which condemned the deaths of more than 60,000 Palestinians in Gaza and decried the stripping of free speech protections for university students critical of the Israeli government.
However, within hours of its publication the piece was removed without explanation from the U-T’s site, sending readers to a dead link.
Mia was informed that her piece had been removed at the direction of Salvador Rodriguez, opinion editor for the U-T’s parent company, who had the piece removed because she had used a pseudonym rather than her real name.
Mia said that she was told beforehand that there was no official policy barring the paper from publishing pseudonymous op-eds, that the move to override the Tribune’s entire editorial department was odd and unprecedented.
“The explanation was because I didn’t use my real name, and they (the opinion staff) were not aware that this was an official policy or anything,” Mia said.
“I was told that it would go up regardless of whether I used a pseudonym or not. I received a lot of assurances from all editors that this would be fine.”
She was told that the decision to spike her article came from the Orange County office, not the local editorial staff.
“It’s not like I want to hide my identity. It’s mainly for safety reasons. A lot of people are getting doxxed, and have been for the past couple of years on things like the Canary Mission,” Mia added.
“Students are losing their place at universities, like Columbia. I just really didn’t want to get expelled because I opposed the genocide, or because I wrote an opinion piece in a new local newspaper.”
Within hours of the piece’s removal, hundreds of people began emailing the newspaper, demanding its reinstatement.
UCSD professor Adam Aron helped organize a response, composing a letter containing more than 120 signatures from UCSD and SDSU university faculty, as well as people from the community outraged over the Tribune’s decision to pull the piece.
After a week of silence, the faculty received an email from Ron Hasse, president and publisher of Southern California News Group, informing them he had authorized the op-ed to be reposted since the U-T opinion board solicited the piece.
Hasse also informed the petitioners that the paper will no longer accept any op-ed that is anonymous or signed with a pseudonym.
“We removed the piece because it did not include the real name of the writer, and we generally do not publish anonymous or pseudonymous op-eds,” said Salvador Rodriguez in an email.
“However, after some internal discussion, we decided to repost it based on the fact that we had solicited the piece in response to a previous op-ed with a different view of the same subject. Going forward, we will not be publishing anonymous op-eds.”
Fields said he believes the fact that this article required a community-wide push speaks to a greater issue of unpopular speech being silenced, particularly, he says, as more draconian measures are being taken by universities and the federal government to induce an environment of fear on campuses.
“I’m not convinced entirely about the story that the piece was pulled because of this pseudonym,” Fields said. “Maybe that was one reason, but I suspect that maybe the real reason was the content in the piece… it said that Jews and Jewish students do not stand for what was in the original op-ed that triggered this whole thing. They stand for equal rights. That’s not a perspective that I think that’s well received at the moment.”
“I think it’s really frustrating,” said Mia.
“Why do you have the ultimate say in what the San Diego community wants to hear about, what they want to read, and what they want to say? Why does somebody two hours away get the final decision? It should be the San Diego community, the people who are participating in our community every day that gets to cultivate a community message and share their thoughts.”
Fears of reprisal and retaliation among the student body are at an all-time high. On Friday, UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla released a campus-wide notice informing the university that five international students had their F-1 visas suddenly terminated. A sixth student was “detained at the border, denied entry, and deported to their home country.”
UCSD, along with UCLA, UCSB, UCD, and UCSC, have all also signed a resolution agreeing to send all complaints and reports of alleged antisemitic discrimination to the United States Department of Education, Office for Civil Rights. The report includes any academic disciplinary actions in regards to Palestinian-related protests at universities.
According to the resolution, all student charges and allegations relating to this will be sent to the federal government by September 2025, and will list any charges dating back to 2023.
Fields spoke to the broader effects such decisions have on students at universities, and how he feels such actions will have a chilling effect on student organizing and free speech.
“There’s real fear, paranoia on the part of students who understandably are worried about getting their degrees,” Fields said. “Students are very, very scared to protest now, and I think justifiably so.
“They have a lot to lose, and they don’t want to protest because they think they’re going to get victimized by the administration for exercising their rights to freedom of expression.”
UCSD’s Aron also believes that universities should push back much harder against outside forces working to quell protests and silence dissenting views.
“We have to stand up for democracy. We have to stand up for speech.” Aron said. “Those kinds of tendencies are part of a totalitarian kind of fascist control.”
Aron and dozens of other faculty members have since signed a letter requesting that the UCSD Senate Council urge the university’s chancellor — along with the other UC campus Chancellors and the UC President — publicly take actions to protect students from an increasingly hostile Trump administration.
“We’re in a situation where we have secret police wearing hoodies and masks, going around detaining students in the United States, like [what] happened at Tufts in Boston, and pulling them off the street in unmarked cars,” said Aron. “It’s really scary, and many of us are pushing for UCSD and the UC system to stand up and make clear statements to defend speech and defend our students.”
Mia said she believes that the fight for free expression both on and off college campuses is far from over.
“I think that in the spirit of my Jewish grandparents, who taught me when to notice when fascism is on the rise, that it’s here. We can see it. It’s been on the rise globally, and we may disagree with how people utilize their free speech, but if you start to repeal it we’re all going to be in trouble, because it’s manufacturing consent to do this to other people. And soon nobody will have the right to dissent against the U.S. regime,” Mia said.
“We are in this moment, and it’s up to everyone else to decide how they push back.”
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