River Sepinuck, far left, 20, a junior studying robotics and mechanical engineering and communications chair of the CMU College Democrats, talks with Alexander Werth, center, 19, mechanical engineering and robotics student, as he paints a fence that they and other student activists installed outside of Carnegie Mellon University’s Warner Hall in the early hours of Monday, July 21, 2025, in Squirrel Hill. Behind them at top are Chaco Iwase, 22, an art and psychology major, and Danya Kogan, top right, 19, a mechanical engineering and robotics major. (Photo by Stephanie Strasburg/Pittsburgh’s Public Source)
After Carnegie Mellon paused customary student control over The Fence, members of the campus community wheeled in a new one to highlight the importance of free expression in the wake of a contentious summit. CMU leaders then reopened the iconic message board.
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As midnight struck on Monday, a group of about 10 students rolled a wooden fence across Forbes Avenue in the glow of a red stoplight in front of Carnegie Mellon University’s campus. The students from the robotics, engineering, chemistry, art, psychology and theater schools pushed the fence on wheels up in front of Warner Hall, positioned it to face the CMU president’s office, and rammed the separate pieces together with the butt of a pickaxe.
As the wee hours ticked on, students unfurled paper to catch the drips, and painted a curated list of historical messages that had adorned “The Fence” — an iconic piece of the campus landscape and community that last week was suddenly off limits to students.
On Tuesday, CMU hosted Sen. Dave McCormick’s inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, with President Donald Trump in attendance, sparking widespread local pushback. Prior to the event, CMU’s Fence — a mainstay for campus free expression that students regularly repaint — was marked with messages asking the school administration to stop the summit.
One pre-summit message reading “No rapists on our campus” led to a whitewashing of The Fence and its closure on Wednesday afternoon. CMU President Farnam Jahanian said that message “crossed a line — not because of its viewpoint, but because of its personal, unaccountable nature, which undermined the spirit of civil discourse.”
This was the first time student access had been limited in its century of existence.
Early Monday, students came armed with a spreadsheet of prior Fence messages — gleaned from Instagram by CMU College Democrats Activism Chair Ryan Tosh — and debated which to recreate as they painted their new fence white.
Would they include fence references by the CMU College Republicans? Would they include the controversial “No rapists on our campus” slogan?
By 3 a.m., an approach was set: “Free speech is CMU history / We shall overcome” facing Warner Hall, and a series of slogans from The Fence’s recent history, including a nod to Black Lives Matter, a marriage proposal and the College Republicans’ “Republican is not a bad word” takeover from October 2021. In between the slogans, the phrase “This is the speech we’re protecting” was painted in capital letters.
As students claimed and painted different sections of the new fence, they discussed politics, relationships and the dig they’d done into the university archives. They traded notes on the history of activism on campus, including the 1986 emergence of “Biko Hall,” a structure built during students’ successful 1986 push to divest the university from apartheid South Africa.
As students painted, two workers came out of Warner and stood hands on hips to look at the new fence, then questioned how administrators would feel upon seeing it in the morning. River Sepinuck, a CMU junior studying robotics and mechanical engineering and communications chair of the College Democrats, explained the students’ perspective: “For the first time in 100 years, The Fence is shut down.”
A minute before 8 a.m., the students’ phones lit up with an email alert. Jahanian announced the reopening of The Fence. In the message, the president said he believed the structure held importance beyond “an individual or group’s right to speak their mind.”
He apologized for his Wednesday message not “unequivocally” acknowledging the pain of sexual assault. “There are no excuses,” he said. “I am deeply sorry.”
He also promised the legacy of The Fence wouldn’t be undermined, while committing to providing a space for “complex” conversations like that of how the university engages with the federal government.
Jahanian closed by noting there were no new rules or changes to how The Fence operates, but he asked for people to “consider the impact of their words on others, and the collateral damage of dialogue that takes place through slogans.”
In the hours prior to that announcement, though, students said they weren’t waiting for permission to express themselves.
“The old fence has been offline so we were like, we’ll just make our own,” said Chaco Iwase, 22, an art and psychology major. Iwase said the group is looking to get the new fence officially approved as a temporary structure.
Tosh said the group planned to operate the new fence independently for a week or so, with repaintings by other students and groups. “Our campus traditions are *ours*, and we can continue them without their support if it comes to it,” wrote Tosh in a message this morning. Tosh said the university likes to use The Fence in its marketing, but it was created and run by students.
“On July 15, this piece of public art was sort of our only way of expressing ourselves,” Iwase said of the original Fence. “The university didn’t reference any piece of policy,” when it shut down The Fence, he said, as he scrolled through the university’s freedom of expression guidance on his phone.
Aster Lufkin, a junior studying costume design, agreed. “I think it’s important to note that though The Fence is re-opened, free speech is still not guaranteed,” Lufkin wrote to Public Source. “By painting over The Fence on the 15th, [Jahanian] broke a century of precedent and I’m no longer confident in our university’s support of free expression.”
“I think we’re going to call for a town hall meeting for the whole student body to express their grievances and to call to reform the free speech policy,” said Iwase.
Iwase referenced several rollbacks of expression on campus within the past year, first with a new encampment policy responding to pro-Palestinian protests, and then with restrictions around The Fence.
“This stranglehold on our speech has been increasing steadily. This is the first time in 100 years it’s been censored fully,” he said.
The Fence was first established in 1923 as a way to commemorate seniors, and transitioned into a way for all students to — among many other things — react to world events over the next few decades.
In recent years, it’s been painted to reflect the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Tree of Life synagogue shooting and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
“Though this is political, it is almost beyond a political issue, in a sense, in that if one group is silenced all groups are silenced,” said Lufkin. “People should be angry that the administration is censoring students out of fear of retaliation. What does that say about who we are?”
Stephanie Strasburg is a photojournalist with Pittsburgh’s Public Source who can be reached at stephanie@publicsource.org, on Instagram @stephaniestrasburg or on Twitter @stephstrasburg.
Maddy Franklin reports on higher ed for Pittsburgh’s Public Source, in partnership with Open Campus, and can be reached at madison@publicsource.org.
This article first appeared on Pittsburgh’s Public Source and is republished here under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
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