Less than a month after the October 7 attacks, University of Massachusetts Amherst senior Dylan Jacobs attended a Bring Them Home solidarity event sponsored by the campus Hillel in honor of the hostages in Gaza. Following the event, while waving an Israeli flag distributed at the program, he was punched, shoved, and kicked by a student affiliated with Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). His flag was ripped from his hands, and he was called a “Zionist shitbag.” Soon afterward, the university intervened to mete out justice––in an inverted form. Jacobs was handed a “no-contact directive” and told that he “must remain at least twenty (20) yards from and refrain from any method of contact (in person or virtual) with members of the SJP” at the risk of “a conduct proceeding” that could have academic repercussions. The university, according to a filing by his attorneys, “failed to provide him with any information regarding the basis of said no-contact directive.”
The order Jacobs faced is a common campus judicial mechanism. These instructions go by other names on different campuses––including no-contact orders and no-communication orders––and their terms vary slightly, but the core is the same: they prohibit interactions, sometimes physical and sometimes across digital channels.
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Originally designed as tools for a narrow set of cases––sexual assault and stalking—these orders (from here on referred to as NCOs) are increasingly being used to bypass due process on college campuses. The Wall Street Journal in June 2025 detailed some examples: a Tulane student took one out against her former roommate because she found out that the roommate didn’t like her, and a freshman at Clemson University was charged with assault by another student and handed an NCO before any proceedings were held. He was fully exonerated, but the order remained in place anyway. “Schools hand them [NCOs] out like candy,” University of San Diego professor David Karp told the Journal.
Students have caught on that these orders are an administrative shortcut: Why bother with normal channels—where one has to provide evidence, endure long wait times, and risk an unwelcome outcome—when you can just order someone you don’t like to stay away from you and then silence any communication about you or the process?
Within this culture of dispensing with evidence and due process in favor of on-demand retribution, a new subset of NCO abuse has emerged. Over the past few years, these tools have been disproportionately invoked against Jewish and pro‑Israel students—myself included, when I was a student at Princeton. Two students faced similar actions before mine, served with NCOs after interactions with anti-Israel protesters at a campus demonstration.
In February 2022, Danielle Shapiro (now with Manhattan Institute) was dispatched to cover a pro-Palestinian protest as a reporter for the Tory, Princeton’s conservative journal. After the event, she followed up with one of the protest organizers whom she had interviewed. Shortly afterward, that organizer successfully filed for an NCO against her. The university told Shapiro that it was within its right to issue such orders as a result of “interpersonal conflicts.” No due process was applied, just an expression by the protest organizer that Shapiro made her feel “distressed.” Soon campus police and other campus bureaucrats had the order in hand. Shapiro, who had simply done her job as a reporter and violated no university policy, “felt mortified and trapped.”
Myles McKnight received an NCO after an interaction at the same protest. He engaged in what he described as “a slightly heated but generally healthy back-and-forth with the leader of the [pro-Palestinian student] group” running the demonstration, yet the university issued an NCO against him because the organizer expressed “discomfort with our interaction,” he wrote in the Public Discourse at the time.
As Shapiro wrote in the Wall Street Journal later in 2022, “Princeton has transformed a shield against harassment into a sword against the press.” She was prescient. A year later, I—also a Tory journalist—faced an eerily similar case. Weeks after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, SJP held a protest on campus. While I recorded footage of the demonstration, an SJP representative tried to block my camera and then trailed me as I attempted to cover the event. In a manner reminiscent of what happened to Dylan Jacobs, he requested an NCO against me. The order covered not just communication but physical presence: we both had to vacate any closely shared space, and I was banned from his departmental building entirely.
Then came the silencing. I inquired with my Assistant Dean for Student Life whether I could bring the story to the press—the only recourse I had, since I was bounced from one bureaucrat to the next with no answers and the internal investigation against the protester had been dropped without consequence. The dean informed me that the university “cannot determine” if it “would be a violation of the NCO” to publish about my case, because “it is possible that some statements may be interpreted by the other student as an indirect or direct attempt to communicate.” The “safest course of action,” she warned, would be to “refrain from writing or to be interviewed for articles that mention the name of the student with whom you have an NCO (or to retract them if that’s possible).” I had already been interviewed for one piece. Feeling pressured and worried that my academic career was at stake, I had it pulled.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) and the Anti-Defamation League eventually got involved. Only after the two organizations sent a public demand letter calling on the university to put an end to its “improper use of no-contact orders to censor students” and “prevent further abuse of students’ expressive and press freedoms” was my NCO removed—months after Princeton put it in place.
In June 2025, FIRE again intervened, this time at West Virgina University. WVU launched an investigation into Jewish student Eliyahu Itkowitz after a campus dining hall employee issued a complaint against him for handing out a copy of The Ten Big Anti-Israel Lies: And How to Refute Them with Truth by Alan Dershowitz. She accepted the book from Itkowitz and then turned around and reported him to the campus police and WVU’s Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion. In a second encounter, she tried to have him removed from the dining hall on the false claim that he was already barred from entering. Shortly afterward, the university issued an NCO and opened an investigation into Itkowitz for religious discrimination and harassment. The employee alleged that Dershowitz’s book was “anti-Muslim” and claimed that Itkowitz called the employee “anti-Jewish” and referred to her as a “terrorist”—claims no witnesses report seeing or hearing. Even if true, as FIRE argued in a letter to WVU’s president, such claims “fall far short of the applicable legal standard for discriminatory harassment.”
NCOs were designed as shields, meant to protect the most vulnerable after genuine cases of abuse. On campus after campus, however, they continue to be wielded as swords—and those swords are increasingly pointed at Jewish students holding Zionist views. Universities must raise their evidentiary standards. Feeling “distressed” is no justification for stripping other students of their right to move freely and speak openly.