Preston Damsky is a law student at the University of Florida. He is also a white nationalist and antisemite. Last fall, he took a seminar taught by a federal judge on “originalism,” the legal theory favored by many conservatives that seeks to interpret the Constitution based on its meaning when it was adopted.

In his capstone paper for the class, Mr. Damsky argued that the framers had intended for the phrase “We the People,” in the Constitution’s preamble, to refer exclusively to white people. From there, he argued for the removal of voting rights protections for nonwhites, and for the issuance of shoot-to-kill orders against “criminal infiltrators at the border.”

Turning over the country to “a nonwhite majority,” Mr. Damsky wrote, would constitute a “terrible crime.” White people, he warned, “cannot be expected to meekly swallow this demographic assault on their sovereignty.”

At the end of the semester, Mr. Damsky, 29, was given the “book award,” which designated him as the best student in the class. According to the syllabus, the capstone counted the most toward final grades.

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The granting of the award set off months of turmoil on the law school campus. Its interim dean, Merritt McAlister, defended the decision earlier this year, citing Mr. Damsky’s free speech rights and arguing that professors must not engage in “viewpoint discrimination.”

Ms. McAlister, in an email to the law school community, also invoked “institutional neutrality,” an increasingly popular policy among college administrators. It instructs schools not to take public positions on hot-button issues.

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Mr. Damsky’s paper includes arguments similar to those recently adopted by the Trump administration, including a call to “reconsider” birthright citizenship, and an assertion that “aliens remain second-class persons under the Constitution.”

It also argues that courts should challenge the constitutionality of the 14th Amendment, which ensures birthright citizenship, due process and equal protection under the law, and the 15th Amendment, which protects the right to vote for nonwhite citizens.

It was then, in February, that Mr. Damsky opened an account on X and began posting racist and antisemitic messages. After he wrote in late March that Jews must be “abolished by any means necessary,” the university suspended him, barred him from campus and stepped up police patrols around the law school. He is now challenging the punishment, which could result in his expulsion.