Campus Speech and Civil Liberties

U.S. District Judge Edmund A. Sargus Jr. has granted a preliminary injunction ordering Ohio State University to remove from former student Guy Christensen’s academic record any notation that he was "involuntarily disenrolled" after administrators kicked him out over anti‑Israel TikTok videos. Sargus found the 19‑year‑old, represented by the ACLU of Ohio, is likely to succeed on claims that OSU violated his First and Fourteenth Amendment rights by summarily disenrolling him in May 2025 without a hearing, after he praised the killer of two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, D.C., as a "resistance fighter" and called Rep. Ritchie Torres a "Zionist scumbag" who would face a future "Nuremberg" trial. The university first imposed an interim suspension, then days later disenrolled him under a separate policy, citing his social‑media posts and community concerns that he posed a "significant risk of substantial harm," despite the fact that he had already left campus for summer break and did not identify himself as an OSU student online. Christensen denied inciting violence or making true threats, and the judge’s order does not resolve the underlying case but bars OSU, for now, from stigmatizing him in his transcript with the forced‑withdrawal label. The ruling lands amid a national wave of litigation over how public universities treat pro‑Palestinian and anti‑Israel speech, and will be closely watched as a test of how far officials can go in sanctioning inflammatory but political expression that some Jewish advocates view as threatening or antisemitic.