College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life

So this unnamed person goes to the authorities and claims they've been receiving the Report against their wishes and feels offended.

Sadly for them, I found out their place of residence and where they work. They're now a completely satisfied reader.

College Students Are Using ‘No Contact Orders’ to Block Each Other in Real Life

Originally meant to protect victims of sexual harassment or assault on campus, NCOs have become the go-to solution for a generation uncomfortable with face-to-face conflict.

By Pamela Paul, WSJ

June 6, 2025 7:55 pm ET

The “Notice of No Contact” order landed in May’s inbox on Feb. 15, 2022. It was stern and lawyerly and contained a bulleted list of prohibited behaviors between May, then a Tulane freshman, and her former roommate: No approaching each other at any time. No communicating through third parties. No social media interactions whatsoever.

The directive, which came from Tulane’s division of student affairs, was “based on the right of every Tulane community member to avoid contact with another community member if such contact may be harmful or detrimental.” Though the measure was purportedly “nondisciplinary,” it ended on an ominous note: “A violation of this Order could result in an immediate interim suspension and against [sic] conduct charges to you.”

May, who agreed to be identified only by her middle name, was alarmed. She thought a no contact order, the campus version of a restraining order, was for cases of sexual misconduct. Could she be in serious trouble?

Like plenty of students slotted into a dorm together, May and her roommate, who requested the order, had had their disagreements. May found her roommate manipulative and unkind. At one point, May said, her roommate confided that it was her “life goal to sabotage someone.” After hearing through a mutual friend that May didn’t like her, the roommate posted a curt note on May’s door telling her to change rooms immediately.

Several days after May moved out, May received the no contact order; her roommate had told the administration she feared for her safety. For the next four years, May steered clear whenever their paths accidentally crossed.

“It was like a bad breakup,” May recalled.

“This person used a system that is supposed to do good in the world and used it against me,” May said. A Tulane spokesman said no contact orders are “most often used in cases where there is interpersonal conflict that has escalated to the point of disrupting one or both students’ studies.”

No contact orders, or NCOs, are considered a valuable, if hard to implement, tool in enforcing Title IX regulations on campus. Intended as a supportive measure, they became widely available in 2011 after the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights mandated that colleges take action to protect victims of sexual harassment or assault. Under the first Trump administration, these orders became mutual or two-way, which meant that both parties were responsible for avoiding contact, so as to preserve a presumption of innocence and to ensure both parties’ rights. For the most part, that’s how they work.

Two miniature desks and chairs under separate glass domes.

“No contact orders can be very useful in giving survivors of sexual violence immediate safety without having to navigate a campus or legal system,” says Jo-Ann Finkelstein, a clinical psychologist and author of “Sexism & Sensibility: Raising Empowered, Resilient Girls in the Modern World.” That sense of validation and agency can be critical for the process of recovery.

Over the past 10 years, however, the circumstances under which a student might request an NCO have expanded considerably. Their quiet use for other purposes—roommate disputes, ruptures between friends, relationship issues that don’t rise to the level of sexual harassment—is so secretive, traumatizing and potentially damaging that most students and administrators interviewed for this story would only speak anonymously.

“At least at Duke, it wasn’t hard for a student to request a no contact order and to get one,” Howard Kallem, a former attorney at the DOE’s Office for Civil Rights and administrator at both Duke University and UNC Chapel Hill, said. “They were considered nondisciplinary, and the standards weren’t particularly high.” Duke did not respond to requests for comment.

At some schools, policies are so broadly phrased as to allow students to request NCOs for a wide range of behaviors: to minimize “psychological harm” (Bentley University), “unwanted contact or fear of unwanted contact” (University of New Mexico) and “problematic interactions” (Carnegie Mellon).

At Carnegie Mellon, for example, an NCO can be obtained by anyone who claims to be “the recipient of persistent unwanted or harassing contact by another student” and includes “indirect contact through third parties.” At Boston College, a temporary NCO may be issued “in instances where it has been determined by a University administrator that contact between a student and one or more individuals is likely to negatively affect the safety or well-being of the community or individuals involved.” And at Missouri State, NCOs can result “when there exists a reasonable concern that physical or psychological harm may result from such contact.”

A spokesperson from UC Berkeley described their policy in a statement: “At UC Berkeley, the use of no contact directives is determined on a case-by-case basis and may be used in response to escalated interpersonal conflicts between students.” Most other schools declined to comment on their policies, but student conduct administrators had plenty of stories to share: NCOs requested by one student after her roommate allegedly stole her bagels, by participants in a group project gone awry, by members of rival student organizations caught up in a dispute and by aggrieved parties in a social-media skirmish.

“Schools hand them out like candy,” says David R. Karp, a professor of sociology who specializes in restorative justice and conflict resolution at the University of San Diego. “We generally know that students are increasingly fragile and conflict-averse, which leads to an increased desire to request a no contact order.” Karp and others suggest that pressure from aggressive helicopter parents encourages what can feel to administrators like a quick and straightforward response.

“Once you get parents involved and they say, ‘You’re making my child unsafe,’ it becomes very difficult for administrators not to cave,” he said.

Karp recalled an instance when he was a dean of student affairs at Skidmore College in which a drunken student lost his key and climbed through the open dorm window of a female student, mistaking it for a friend’s room. She screamed, and he immediately retreated, but he was nonetheless served a no contact order.

One mother described an incident in which her son, then a freshman at Clemson University, found himself charged with assault by another student in his dorm. Before even investigating the situation, the dean issued a no contact order against her son, which remained in effect even after he was fully exonerated by the administration. The onus was on him to avoid any run-ins with his accuser. He transferred the following year.

His mother was furious over what she viewed as a student fabricating serious charges to handle what was simply a bad fit between roommates. Rather than go through what she would have considered a reasonable process for handling an interpersonal conflict, the university, in her view, went straight to “Def Con 10.”

A spokesperson for Clemson said no contact directives are issued “if one student files an incident report alleging violative, inappropriate or unwanted contact by another student—usually repetitive” and that such directives are typically mutual. In this student’s case, it was not.

Administrators, adolescent psychologists and sociologists describe Gen Z students as fundamentally different from earlier generations. Many have difficulty with confrontation and little experience working through interpersonal conflicts, which was only exacerbated by the pandemic. They have mastered the terminology of “harassment” and “discrimination,” sometimes with just cause and other times to brand a run-of-the-mill disagreement.

Graduation cap covered in "No Contact" tape.

Young people today have a hard enough time interacting face-to-face with their peers, let alone handling conflict, according to one administrator at a large Midwestern public university. Students today, he explained, tend to view other people as either hurtful or helpful with very little gray area in between. Negotiating differences and handling conflict, he said, often leads to real anxiety on their part. This mindset is facilitated by online behaviors that enable kids, from an early age, to shut out people they dislike or disapprove of.

“This generation of college students grew up in an echo-chamber world where they could block or filter out voices they disagree with,” says Caroline Mehl, co-founder and executive director of Constructive Dialogue Institute, a nonprofit organization that works with universities to forge dialogue across differences. “They’re bringing online communication norms to the real world.”

If only life were like the internet may not be a fantasy for most, but for young adults whose social lives evolved in the digital age, the idea clearly has some appeal. It’s far easier to swipe right to show romantic interest than to approach another student after class. Much cleaner to ghost or block people you can’t stand than to physically dodge them at every party, especially when sharing the same small college campus.

“There’s a kind of platform logic that’s bleeding into campus life,” says Ioana Literat, an associate professor of communications, media and learning technologies design at Teachers College at Columbia University. “Students are increasingly fluent in digital tools for managing boundaries like blocking, muting, curating their spaces, and no contact orders are sometimes seen as an offline extension of that: a way to formalize emotional or interpersonal boundaries through institutional means.”

Few bureaucratic institutions are immune to concept creep, the process by which a policy’s scope expands over time. Academic settings, with their vast administrations, fear of litigation, student-as-consumer mindset and heightened political sensitivities, may be especially susceptible. In most cases, administrators say, students are coming from a good place, and schools are simply trying to attend to their concerns.

On the one hand, explained a student conduct administrator at a midsize public university in the Northeast, schools make clear to students that they must adhere to institutional policies. Yet at the same time, schools tell them, “This is your home” and let them know they should always feel welcome, safe and comfortable. Several administrators said they worry that hypervigilance combined with a lack of social skills can lead students to misread situations, especially with neurodivergent kids who may be naturally awkward.

One recent graduate of a prestigious private Midwestern university recounted an incident during finals week his sophomore year when the Office of Student Conduct reached out to him for a meeting. He was then told by an administrator that a classmate had claimed he was stalking her and he would need to sign a no contact order.

The student, who has ADHD and other neuropsychiatric conditions that make social cues challenging, had no idea who this classmate was. After searching for her photo online, he could recall speaking to her once in a group, but he’d never had a full conversation with her. Her request for an NCO was based on seeing him lurk outside the dining hall and stare at her for long periods of time, behaviors that to him were normal: taking breaks from studying in the dining hall to pace outside and periodically zoning out and staring into space.

Already prone to anxiety, his stress levels spiked, and he began to have panic attacks. From that point on, he went into the dining hall wearing headphones and left as soon as he finished eating.

Most administrators date the increased use of no contact orders to the past eight to 10 years, the same period in which political polarization, numerous social justice movements, the Covid pandemic and the Israel/Gaza war turned up the heat on many campuses.

Several schools acknowledge issuing no contact orders in recent years in response to Title VI complaints, which relate to race, ethnicity and national origin, and include discrimination based on religion. According to James Pasch, an attorney for the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), among the 900-plus complaints they handled from students after Oct. 7, 2023, “It became clear relatively quickly that some of those incidents involved misuse or abuse of no contact orders being directed at either pro-Israeli or Jewish students.”

One of those students, Dylan Jacobs, a recent graduate of UMass Amherst, where he was an outspoken member of Hillel, received a no contact directive in March 2024 prohibiting him from contacting any member of the campus Students for Justice in Palestine. According to Jacobs and the ADL, which filed a letter on his behalf, the order put Jacobs at risk for disciplinary action since he couldn’t possibly know who all the members were. UMass would not comment on the case, citing student confidentiality, but said its policies ensure that “all students can complete their studies free of harassment.”

Some attorneys who handle these cases argue that no contact orders can leave students vulnerable and violate due process. Last year, FIRE, a free speech organization, sent Princeton a joint letter with the ADL, warning about the “weaponization” of Title IX policies after two separate instances in which no contact or no communication orders were imposed on student journalists covering pro-Palestinian protests. Shortly after, the university revised its policy. A university spokesperson declined to comment on the reasons behind the change but earlier told the student newspaper that it was in response to “community concerns.”

“I’ve been in this field for 20 years, and the desire for administrative intervention has increased just as the number of students saying, ‘I am feeling unsafe’ has increased,” says Brian Glick, the president-elect of the Association of Student Conduct Administration. In inevitable tandem, universities are still struggling to keep up.