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 conduct charges against 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.
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 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).
“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.
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.
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.
“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.
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