On April 17, a group of students at Columbia University established an encampment of tents on the campus’s East Butler Lawn, calling for the university to divest from companies with business ties to the Israeli government, including Microsoft, Google, and Amazon. Self-styled as the Gaza Solidarity Encampment, the occupation at Columbia has sparked protests and counter-protests on university campuses across the nation, from small private liberal arts colleges like Pomona College to large public universities like UMass Amherst.
There is no doubt that Americans, college students included, have the right to assemble, but such protests must be within reasonable limits and subject to appropriate consequences.
The right to protest was written explicitly into the First Amendment by James Madison; protests are the lifeblood and exclusive privilege of a free, democratic society. Of course, however, that is only freedom from government obstruction. On private property, subject to the rules and regulations of a private entity or individual, protests may be legally forbidden.
Regardless, the reasoning that underpins free assembly rings true. Especially in an institution of higher education, a whetstone for the youth to hone their minds, protests are indispensable, both for intellectual vitality and community engagement. Surely, there is value in freedom. Universities, public or private, do have the legal right to repress or impede assembly, but, within similarly reasonable limits, they have a vested interest in not exercising it.
College campuses have a rich history of movements that have sought to create change. UC Berkeley, for example, saw the first major US campus protest in 1964 as students rallied for the Free Speech Movement. Sixty years later, hundreds of Berkeley students have come together again under calls for divestment, academic boycott of Israeli universities, and ceasefire.
What separates the protests of today, though in many ways less extreme than their predecessors, lies largely within the way they are structured. Whereas peaceful protest should always be tolerated, the perpetual occupation of central campus grounds in encampments comes at the detriment of all students.
Free assembly has always been governed by time, place, and manner restrictions. For the common good, gatherings may not be completely unrestrained in noise, size, and duration. Just as campus protesters are not, of course, entitled to be as loud as they wish, so too do they not enjoy an exclusive right to campus greens.
Communal spaces are, by definition, for the common use. No student or group of students can claim indefinite, 24/7 privilege over them. After all, there are other students attending those universities. There are other activities for which a central campus ground may be needed. There are other worthy causes to fight for.
Schools like NYU and Columbia have faced heightened scrutiny for inviting law enforcement to clear pro-Palestinian encampments. Hundreds of arrests have been made, with students facing academic penalties of varying degrees.
Even expulsion, while harsh and justified only in the most extreme cases, is not without precedent. For decades, New York City has set explicit limitations around homeless encampments and shelters, deeming them obstructive. In preparation for the 2023 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum, San Francisco cleared out many of its infamous homeless encampments, long the subject of ridicule and denunciation. Just last October, Boston banned tent cities, expelling the unhoused who lived in the encampment at the Mass. and Cass intersection.
Fundamentally, these two forms of encampment are not so different. Declaring a particular gathering as a “protest” does not grant any special legal exemption — assembly is assembly. Freedom does not, or at least should not, discriminate.
The same safety hazards that compelled Boston and New York to drive apart their homeless encampments apply equally to student encampments. As in the case of San Francisco, unsightliness alone may even be sufficient cause for dispersion. The legality of clearing out encampments, particularly for those at city universities, has thus been legally established and culturally accepted.
Similar considerations inform university policy. If those same college greens were occupied by encampments of the destitute, chances are that students would regard it as an unwanted disturbance rather than a sacrosanct exercise in free assembly.
And, in such a case, the homeless’ claim against removal must be far more sympathetic. For the student, camping out is a matter of volition — all those tens of thousands of dollars surely cover room and board. Perhaps participating in such an encampment can even provide a rejuvenating respite from the rigor of academic life. For the unhoused, however, there is no such privilege; camping out is a matter of survival.
Thus, cities and schools have every legal right to repress encampments, protests or not.
Litigating the minutiae of such wide-ranging protests is fruitless; evidently, not all protestors agree on methodology or ideology. The pious fundamentalist may stand beside a steadfast secularist, or the rabid antisemite beside a proud Jew, or the dogged militant beside an earnest pacifist. The breadth and complexity of these protests cannot be watered down into anecdotes, but anecdotes have always driven public perception, which ultimately determines protests’ success.
A broad critique that can be reasonably argued is this: protestors should be fully cognizant of their actions.
Foremost, students’ demands should be intentional and targeted. Divestment may be a worthy goal, but it is also opaque. It may be possible to divest from arms suppliers and Israeli corporations, but what of the endless list of American companies with ties to Israel?
If, for example, investment in Big Tech or the S&P 500 constitutes support for Israeli military actions in Gaza, that is an offense of which every American with a retirement account would be guilty. Such ill-defined demands for divestment belie a complete ignorance of the American economy and, on a practical level, will be received poorly by the broader public.
Consequences, too, should receive due consideration, Protestors should neither expect nor desire impunity. Civil disobedience, after all, cannot be so disobedient if there is nothing to be disobeyed. State laws, city ordinances, university policies should be violated deliberately, not carelessly. All these have their appropriate penalties, which, for any protestor, ought to be a noble sacrifice for their cause. If one is willing to disrupt the lives of others in protest, surely they are willing to disrupt their own.
In King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” he writes, “One who breaks an unjust law must do so openly, lovingly, and with a willingness to accept the penalty.”
Student protests like those at Columbia and beyond are essential for democratic expression and intellectual development. Few would deny that America’s role in the crisis in Gaza is not a discussion worth having. However, students must balance the right to assembly with the practical realities and responsibilities of their actions.