Throughout six decades of internal armed conflict in Colombia, radical protest took multiple forms. Some of them undermined the civil sphere through the exercise of violence and intimidation. Others contributed to expanding the civil sphere and strengthening its vibrancy. Since the 2016 peace accord, Colombian society has faced the challenge of transitioning from uncivil to civil radical protest within multiple institutional scenarios. Here, I will focus on this transition as it occurred within Colombian public universities. During many decades of internal armed conflict, these universities constituted one of the many theaters of the war. There, insurgent and counterinsurgent forces, together with their support networks, confronted each other for the purpose of establishing control over their respective communities. The spread of violence on university campuses and the practices of pressure and intimidation that came along with it critically affected their internal public spheres. It spread various degrees of self-censorship among the members of these communities, and all too often it resulted in the breakdown of open public conversation regarding the experience of campus violence and involvement or participation in the war. Within such contexts the transition from forms of radical protest that undermine civil life to new forms that contribute to its vibrancy serves to undermine the regime of justifications that sustains violent radical protests. Through free discussion, cracks in the wall of silence and fatalistic indifference are developed, cracks that weaken the wall that has served to shield violent radicalism from challenge by a growing segment of their respective communities. In what follows, I will explore three interventions between the early 1990s and 2016 that sought to achieve precisely this sort of transition within the National University of Colombia, the country’s largest public university.