A UF law student who previously won a top academic honor for an essay promoting white supremacy was banned from campus this month after publicly indicating support for a Jewish genocide.
Preston Terry Damsky, a 29-year-old student at UF’s Levin College of Law, was issued a trespass order on April 3, making it a second-degree misdemeanor for him to set foot on university property for three years. The order came weeks after Damsky began posting racist and antisemitic content on social media, including a message calling for the elimination of Jews “by any means necessary.”
UF, home to the largest Jewish student population of any public university in the U.S., has since increased security around the law school with added police patrols, stricter event protocols and restricted building access.
The trespass order followed months of internal concern within the law school over Damsky’s rhetoric, which sharply escalated in late March over his social media accounts. From February to April, Damsky made dozens of X posts, where he described Jewish people as “parasitizing the West,” labeling immigrants as “invaders” and advocating for a white ethnostate.
Details about Damsky’s conduct and the university’s internal response come from a review of his social media accounts and faculty emails, as well as interviews with seven faculty and students, some of whom spoke under conditions of anonymity because they were concerned about their job security and personal safety.
Despite growing internal pressure from within the law school, administrators haven’t publicly commented on what led to Damsky’s trespass order. UF spokesperson Cynthia Roldan, citing federal privacy laws protecting confidential student information, declined to answer questions about the incident. According to Roldan, Damsky is still enrolled at UF as of April 18.
Trespass warnings can be issued to anybody — including students — who “may pose a threat” to the community, according to UFPD. Court records show Terry has no criminal history and no charges have been filed as of April 20.
The law school’s interim dean, Merritt McAlister, addressed backlash against the law school’s response to the controversy during an April 9 town hall meeting with students and faculty. McAlister, who asked an Alligator reporter attending the meeting to leave, defended the law school’s commitment to upholding the First Amendment and maintaining institutional neutrality.
According to a recording of the meeting obtained by The Alligator, the dean said the law school’s reputation was a “foremost concern,” adding that law school leaders worked with “main campus” to address Damsky’s case.
“The college isn't going to express a viewpoint on any particular student speech,” she said. “Our job as a community is to have dialogue and discussion and debate on these issues and let the marketplace of ideas drown out a particularly odious idea.”
McAlister said in an emailed statement to The Alligator that she stood by her previous communications about the situation.
UF Police Department Mjr. Latrell Simmons said during the town hall that although components of the threat assessment are confidential, law enforcement is monitoring the situation.
Controversial class assignments
Damsky’s social media comments weren’t the only points of contention. Earlier in the 2024-25 school year, one of Damsky’s class assignments, an essay titled “American Restoration,” ignited controversy after it circulated among law school students.
The backlash escalated after Damsky received an honor given by a law school professor to the highest-performing student in a class for another essay. That paper, titled “National Constitutionalism,” similarly argued the Constitution should be interpreted to preserve the political dominance of white Americans.
It called on courts to uphold the “second-class” status of immigrants and questioned the legitimacy of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments — which enshrine rights related to citizenship, equal protection and voting.
Responding to backlash against Damsky and the law school for awarding the essay, McAlister wrote in a Feb. 10 email to the UF law community that grading doesn’t “involve an ideological litmus test” and defended Damsky’s First Amendment rights.
Damsky, reached by email three times between April 4 and April 18, didn’t respond to The Alligator’s requests for comment following his trespass. However, during a prior interview in February, Damsky defended his views.
“I'm not a social imbecile,” he said. “I know that what I argued is somewhat controversial, but that's not going to stop me from saying it. I think it's an important issue.”
Anyone is entitled to criticize his views, he added.
“That’s fine if people don’t like me,” Damsky said. “The attempt to get me punished or silenced is what I object to, because I have a right to write whatever I want so long as it is within the balance of the First Amendment.”
Around that time, Damsky’s rhetoric was extending beyond his classroom assignments.
He criticized Trump for aligning with Black politicians like U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds, the president’s pick to be Florida’s next governor, and inviting rapper Kodak Black to the White House, arguing it would “normalize and glorify the mongrelized stupidity that is modern Jewish-produced ‘popular’ ‘culture.’”
One of Damsky’s posts, directed at a UF law professor, prompted a flurry of concern from colleagues and students. In a March 21 exchange on X, the professor, in a now-deleted reply to Damsky’s call for the elimination of Jewish people, asked if he would murder her and her family.
In his response, Damsky didn’t directly answer, instead responding that “surely a genocide of all whites should be an even greater outrage than a genocide of all Jews, given the far greater number of whites.”
The professor declined The Alligator’s request for comment on the interaction.
In an April 1 email obtained by The Alligator, the professor alerted colleagues of the exchange and said multiple students and faculty had already raised concerns about other “hateful statements” made by Damsky and an apparent “pattern of escalation” in his rhetoric.
Mixed reactions from law school community
Chad Fuselier, a former president of the Black Law Student Association and a third-year UF law student, said the law school administration handled the situation appropriately and understood its need to contain the issue to avoid “making a big ruckus.” Still, he condemned Damsky’s rhetoric.
“Any form of bigotry isn’t tolerable. We’re at school,” he said. “I hope we start making Nazis and racism lame again.”
Others were dissatisfied.
A law professor, granted anonymity for fear of jeopardizing his job, said the issue with Damsky is part of a broader pattern of inaction among law school professors against instances of discrimination. He called the law school’s handling of Damsky’s case “fundamentally opaque” and a “failure of leadership.”
“We've known about the student. We've known about his problematic statements…over the course of years,” he said. “The administration did nothing… they hid behind student privacy and this supposed principle of corporate neutrality.”
The professor said rankings — a hot topic during the town hall — also shaped the law school’s response. Administrators avoided addressing the situation, he said, to preserve the school’s reputation — a key factor in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. UF’s Levin College of Law was 38th among the nation’s best law schools for 2025, a steep drop from 22nd in 2023.
Daniel, a 24-year-old third-year law student who is Jewish, said he wanted the law school to denounce Damsky’s views and draw a line between offensive speech and calls for violence. Daniel, whose last name was kept anonymous to maintain personal safety, said he’s upset it took so long for Damsky to face repercussions.
“From my perspective, it just looks like he got away with it for two years until he threatened a faculty member,” he said. “It's been very concerning. It felt like the administration just thought that they could close their eyes and wait for it to go away.”
Contact Grace McClung at gmcclung@alligator.org. Follow her on X @gracenmclung
Grace McClung is a third-year journalism major and the university administration reporter for The Alligator. In her free time, Grace can be found running, going to the beach and writing poetry.
