“I’m definitely discouraged by the way that my law school has handled this situation, but I’m not at all going to back down from the things I believe in,” said Ms. Gesiotto. “These are my beliefs, and this is a wonderful platform on which I can express them,” she said. “My column reaches thousands of millennials across the country every single week. I feel like by standing up for what I believe in I may be inspiring others who have been pushed down to stand up for what they believe in. And never back down.”

All Madison Gesiotto wanted to do when she met with the dean of her law school was report a threat prompted by a newspaper column she wrote pointing out the high abortion rate in the black community.

She assumed the meeting would last 10 minutes. Instead, she said, she was there for about an hour as three deans at the Ohio State University Moritz College of Law critiqued her on what they saw as problems with her Oct. 23 column in The Washington Times, “The number one killer of black Americans.”

“This is my freedom of speech, but they kept going on and on about how, ‘This is a flawed article, it’s not a good legal piece, it’s not a good journalistic piece, either,’” Ms. Gesiotto recalled. “They asked me to explain to them why I would put that [line] in, what that means, and how I should have followed that up by saying other things to support these black women.”

A second-year law student who writes the Millennial Mindset column for The Washington Times online opinion pages, Ms. Gesiotto said she tried repeatedly to steer the conversation back to the threat made against her, but that the deans appeared to “blow it off.”

“I’m a very tough person. I very rarely get upset or sensitive about things,” said Ms. Gesiotto. “But I was crying in that meeting for about 30 minutes, I was so shocked. I’ve never been in a situation with people I respected and looked up to and felt so violated.”

Ms. Gesiotto knew that many of her peers at the law school would disagree with the column. She expected to take some flak. What she didn’t expect, she said, was having administrators show less interest in her safety than in tearing apart a column entirely unrelated to her coursework.

Dean Alan C. Michaels said in a statement to The Times that the university “takes any alleged threat against its students very seriously,” while noting that the federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act prohibits the university from discussing specific disciplinary or conduct cases.

“The university and the college of law each have procedures for assessing alleged threats and for responding appropriately,” Mr. Michaels said. “These procedures are used for each such allegation received.”

He added, “An inclusive learning environment that provides a forum for a wide range of viewpoints is crucial for a law school. We try to foster a culture of respectful dialogue when addressing tough, emotional topics as they arise in discussions of law and policy.”

Ms. Gesiotto said she heard nothing from the dean after the Oct. 27 meeting even as her article stirred controversy on campus. She did receive a response the next day from Kathy Seward Northern, associate dean for admissions, who assured her that she had investigated the threat by speaking to students from the Black Law Students Association.

“I am satisfied from those discussions that there was not an intent to threaten you with physical harm,” Ms. Northern wrote in an Oct. 28 email.

Even so, Ms. Gesiotto wasn’t reassured because the student who made the threat is white and doesn’t belong to the black students association, she said.

“I never complained about the BLSA,” Ms. Gesiotto said.

Threat over ‘racist article’

The threat arrived on Ms. Gesiotto’s Facebook page as part of a heated back-and-forth shortly after the appearance of her column, which cited figures by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention showing that black women received 36 percent of reported abortions in 2011.

The Facebook message said, “The government cannot take action against you for your offensive and racist article. But your colleagues can.”

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