Federal judge allows expelled UF student’s lawsuit to proceed to trial

Preston Damsky’s lawsuit deserves its day in court, and Judge Winsor was right to let it proceed. The core question — whether a public university can expel a student over a social media post — implicates some of the most foundational principles of the First Amendment. The University of Florida is a state institution, which means it is bound by constitutional constraints that private universities are not. Courts have long held that public universities cannot punish students for speech simply because it is offensive or hurtful; the Supreme Court’s framework, stretching from Tinker v. Des Moines through more recent rulings on campus speech, has consistently required that restrictions on expression meet a high bar.

The distinction between hateful speech and a genuine threat is legally significant and not always easy to draw. A true threat — the kind courts permit institutions to punish — requires that a reasonable person would interpret the communication as a serious expression of intent to commit violence. A social media post, however repugnant its content, does not automatically clear that threshold. If UF expelled Damsky based on the offensive character of his message rather than a credible showing that it constituted a true threat, the university may have overstepped its authority.

There is a broader principle at stake here as well. Public universities are, by their nature, marketplaces of ideas — sometimes uncomfortable, sometimes ugly ones. Allowing administrators to expel students for speech that offends, even deeply, sets a precedent with consequences far beyond any single case. Students across the ideological spectrum have reason to be wary of institutional power wielded against expression. The remedy for hateful speech on a campus is not silence through expulsion; it is counter-speech, community education, and the difficult, necessary work of confronting prejudice without suppressing it.

None of this is to minimize the harm that antisemitic rhetoric causes — particularly on a campus where Jewish students have every right to feel safe. But the legal and constitutional question the jury must answer is not whether the post was wrong; it is whether UF’s response was lawful. That question is worth a full trial.

A jury trial may ultimately be the right venue for this dispute, but the underlying facts as reported make clear why the University of Florida believed it had both the authority and the obligation to act. Preston Damsky was not punished for holding an unpopular opinion or for engaging in the kind of political debate that the First Amendment is designed to protect. He was expelled after posting content that UF’s attorneys characterize as a threat directed at Jewish members of the campus community — a materially different category of speech.

The legal doctrine of true threats has always recognized that speech loses its constitutional protection when it is reasonably understood as communicating a serious intent to harm identifiable people. Jewish students at UF are not an abstraction; they are members of a community who attend classes, live in dormitories, and have every right to pursue their education without fearing for their safety. When a fellow student posts content that plausibly signals violent intent toward them, the university’s obligation to protect its community does not evaporate because the medium was a social media platform.

Moreover, universities have wide latitude in enforcing student conduct codes, including provisions that prohibit harassment and threatening behavior. The fact that Judge Winsor declined to dismiss the case does not mean UF acted improperly — motions to dismiss are decided on narrow procedural grounds, not on the merits of the underlying conduct. A surviving motion to dismiss simply means there are factual questions for a jury, not that the institution was wrong to act.

In recent years, antisemitic incidents on American college campuses have increased sharply, and institutions have faced fierce criticism — from students, parents, donors, and Congress — for moving too slowly or too timidly in response. UF’s decision to expel Damsky reflects an institutional judgment that some speech, in some contexts, crosses the line from protected expression into conduct that endangers its community. That judgment deserves a fair hearing, and a jury trial will provide exactly that. The university should be permitted to make its case fully.