How colleges are changing their rules on protesting
At Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, students now must receive approval from the administration before they can protest. Rutgers University students will need to acquire a permit from the school. And at Indiana University, students may no longer engage in what school leaders call “expressive activity” between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Across the country, some universities have enacted a wave of new rules and tightened restrictions around protest and speech in an effort to avoid a repeat of the spring semester, when thousands of people were arrested at protests and encampments prompted by the Israel-Hamas war. The rules vary from campus to campus, but they generally set limits on when and where protests can occur, and clearly prohibit encampments.
In many cases, universities say the policy changes are minimal or simply clarify existing rules. Some attorneys said many of the new restrictions were written to fall within acceptable limits on speech, and would not raise constitutional issues if enforced equally.
Opponents of the rules say they are designed to stifle protest.
Lauren Lassabe Shepherd, a professor at the University of New Orleans, said that more detailed rules would make it easier for university administrators to say that student protesters have broken them.
“To me it seems very clear that they’re setting up a case to point to where students have violated something,” she said.
Here are several ways universities have shifted their guidelines around protest and expression on campus:
Limiting ‘expressive activity’ to specific times
Many universities have adopted rules that limit protests to specific times and prohibiting them overnight.
At Ohio State, all campus events must end by 10 p.m. Northwestern has prohibited protests before 3 p.m. on weekdays on a part of campus surrounded by classroom buildings. Rutgers now allows demonstrations only between 9 a.m. and 4 p.m. And at Franklin & Marshall College in southeastern Pennsylvania, a new interim policy requires demonstrations, rallies and vigils to wrap up within two hours.
At Indiana University, students and faculty recently held vigils with an 11 p.m. start time meant to violate the new rules. At least nine people have been referred for disciplinary proceedings for their participation, including Ben Robinson, a professor of Germanic studies who helped organize the vigil. Robinson was also among the 57 people arrested during a pro-Palestinian protest in the spring before the local prosecutor dropped charges.
The university has posted signs about its new policy around campus and passed out badges that identify members of the “Expressive Activity Support Team” and include printed warnings to be read aloud to people engaged in such behavior.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana is suing the university over the time restrictions, arguing that they effectively prohibit people from talking to a friend about politics or standing silently with a sign during that time.
In a news release, the university said the policy “continues to encourage freedom of expression for all.”
Requiring applications
Another common new measure requires protest organizers to seek university approval at least a few days ahead of time.
A new policy at Carnegie Mellon specifies that unregistered demonstrations that draw more than 25 people may be broken up at the university’s discretion.
At the end of August, students and faculty protested the policy by gathering with signs numbered 1 through 29, to indicate they had violated the new requirement intentionally.
At Rutgers, if seeking a permit for a protest three business days in advance is impossible because the demonstration is spontaneous, community members must still fill out a notification form and speak with a staff member.
Dory Devlin, a spokesperson for the university, said the form was not new but that requiring organizers to obtain a permit for planned demonstrations was “closing the loop.”
Banning Encampments
Encampments were the most visible and dramatic aspect of pro-Palestinian activism last semester. Many schools already prohibited camping, and some of those that didn’t have since instated explicit bans.
Emory, Rutgers and the systems of California State and the University of California are among those institutions with new bans on encampments on campus. The University of California Los Angeles adopted the ban after experiencing one of the most violent incidents of the spring, when a group of pro-Israel counterprotesters attacked the pro-Palestinian encampment for hours as police did little to intervene.
The University of Virginia, where last semester police in riot gear broke up an encampment with chemical irritants and arrested 27 people, also adopted a new ban on camping.
“The University of Virginia is an institution of higher education, not a campground,” said Brian Coy, a spokesperson for the university.
Prohibiting protest in certain areas
A number of schools’ updated policies require demonstrations to take place in specific areas on campus, and explicitly ban activity in areas where students protested in the spring.
Princeton has prohibited protests on Cannon Green, where students established an encampment last semester. The student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, reported last week that during a protest after the first day of classes, attendees marched around the green but never stepped onto the lawn itself.
Last semester, James Madison University students protested on the Quad. “Due to its historic, academic, and residential nature,” the Quad may now only be used for registered, university-sponsored events, according to the school’s updated public expression policy.
Limits on certain speech
At a number of campuses during the spring, some students said protesters used language that was antisemitic and called for violence. In response, New York University updated its guidance on student conduct to specify that language targeting Zionists or Zionism could violate its nondiscrimination policy.
The word “Zionist” refers to a person who believes Jews have a right to a state in their ancestral homeland. Many Palestinians and those who support them associate the word with mass displacement during the 1948 war that broke out after the creation of Israel.
The guidance says that “Zionist” can be code for Jewish or Israeli, and that excluding them from an event or spreading stereotypes about them, could violate school policy.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
