Threats, harassment, intimidation, and interference with educational programs are all lawful justifications for restricting students’ expressive activities. But can they justify disallowing student groups? While Brandeis and other private schools were taking action, Florida governor Ron DeSantis ordered his state’s public universities to disestablish their SJP chapters. (Around the same time, DeSantis appointed me to the board of Florida Polytechnic University, which has no SJP chapter.)

If DeSantis’s order had been based solely on the group’s pro-Hamas views, it wouldn’t have been defensible—or have gotten far in the courts. But he identified “material support for terrorism” as another reason, reflecting the Florida and U.S. criminal codes. Indeed, the Anti-Defamation League and the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law (unconnected to the college) sent a letter to nearly 200 university presidents describing how SJP “provides vocal and potentially material support to Hamas, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization.” Notably, soon after Hamas’s massacre, national SJP released a Day of Resistance Tool Kit that boasted: “we as Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.”

As the Supreme Court ruled in 2011, the government may prohibit even nonviolent “material support” for terrorist organizations, including legal support and other advice, without violating the First Amendment.