Columbia University’s student journalists will return next month to a campus very different from the one I began covering just a few years ago. Student journalists at Columbia are now well aware that their coverage may land them in bureaucratic hot water. It is hard to overstate the climate of fear that now has taken hold among student journalists. It hosts the Pulitzer Prizes, as well as the Knight First Amendment Institute and the Columbia Journalism Review. Columbia’s July 23, 2025, settlement with the Trump administration further unsettled student journalism.