Since 2014, the Egyptian state has significantly expanded the intellectual and physical “borders” of criminalized behavior by university students and faculty. This paper will focus on three such examples of the expanding borders of the forbidden. The first is the criminalization not just of alleged membership in the now-forbidden Muslim Brotherhood; the second is the criminalization of students’ right to peacefully criticize Sisi and his decisions, even when this criticism is not framed as in support of the Brotherhood; the third is crossing not only intellectual but even physical boundaries with the government’s attempt to revoke students’ permissions to pursue university-approved study abroad, as in the case of Kholoud Saber.