Dissent is thriving this fall at American colleges, and not just among student activists.
American universities pride themselves as being places of open discourse where students can engage across their differences. Yet finding the line where protected speech ends is complicated and often tense.
That tension burst wide open last year amid emotional demonstrations in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023 attack. Last spring, a wave of pro-Palestinian tent encampments led to some 3,200 arrests nationwide.
The new protest rules on many campuses raise the risk of suspension or expulsion. Some students now say they are reluctant to speak out because it could pit them against their peers, professors, or even potential employers.
Now, some campuses are adding still more policies that clamp down on protests, often banning encampments and limiting demonstrations to certain hours or locations.
At Indiana University, an “expressive activity policy” rolled out in August prohibits protests after 11 p.m., bans camping on campus, and requires pre-approval for signs. In defiance, each Sunday a group of faculty members, students and community members gather on campus for candlelight vigils that extend past the 11 p.m. deadline.
Russ Skiba, a professor emeritus who has attended the vigils, said the new restrictions are part of a larger movement to limit academic freedom on campuses.
Indiana’s Republican governor signed a law in March increasing state oversight of public universities. The law, sponsored by a lawmaker who said colleges suffer from “monolithic thinking,” subjects faculty to post-tenure reviews over whether they are fostering diversity of thought and keeping their political views out of the classroom.
Skiba and other Indiana professors widely opposed the bill, which they criticized as vague and subject to interpretation.
“Universities are bastions of free speech, but when you have a movement that is anti-democratic, one of the places that is most attacked is freedom of speech,” Skiba said.
Faculty members at colleges have pushed back on the new rules with protests, vigils, and demands for explanation.
A group of about 25 Harvard University professors held a “study-in” at a campus library on Oct. 16 in support of pro-Palestinian students who were temporarily banned from the library for holding a similar demonstration.
And in September, a group representing University of California faculty filed a complaint alleging the system sought to chill their academic freedom and keep from teaching about the Israel-Hamas war “in a way that does not align with the University’s own position.”
But the crackdowns are magnifying social divisions. Compared with the much larger campus protests of the Vietnam war era, campuses today appear more divided, said Mark Yudof, a former president of the University of California system. For many, the issues are much more personal.
“The faculty are at odds with each other. The student body is at odds with each other. There’s a war of ideologies going on,” he said.
Some universities are trying to bridge the divide with campus events on civil discourse, sometimes inviting Palestinian and Jewish speakers to share the stage.
But in San Diego, where Jewish-Palestinian dialogues were a part of the discussion for years, the tensions have spilled out off campus and into local politics, as well.
“My feeling is that we’re being bullied, and our community has been cast aside,” said Doris Bittar, an artist and writer of Palestinian and Lebanese descent who is also an organizer for the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
“Our community needed resources,” she said. “The mayor has refused to meet with us… there’s just been a litany of silence, ghosting, ignoring our community.”
“No matter what we say, we’re ‘Hamas lovers’… how can we have a conversation in this setting?”
Bittar’s husband, Jonathan Rauch, said that there has been no room for dissenting voices — even within the local Jewish communities. Bittar and Rauch — who is Jewish — had for years run “living-room dialogues” in San Diego to open up discussions between Jewish people and Palestinians.
“There were plenty of emotional debates and some felt they were not being heard,” Bittar told the San Diego Union-Tribune last June. “But people also became friends.”
“It was the personal stories, rather than pontificating, that were important and helped us bond,” Rauch said at the time. “They helped humanize us and dissolve fear.
“Everyone was allowed to speak their truth — no silencing.”
Now, however, they say that there would be no support for such efforts.
“I’m sorry to say that the common ground has slipped away,” Rauch said, adding that peoples’ views have hardened in the last year. “They feel now that it’s an existential thing.”
Jewish Voice for Peace, a left-of-center organization that gained national visibility during the Trump administration for its outspoken stances against the Muslim ban and family separation policies, says that disagreements and conflicts have gone from difficult to impenetrable.
“Nationwide, we have seen people being silenced at work and fired for standing up for Palestinian human rights to a shocking degree,” said Lily Ostrer, a member of JVP San Diego.
Ostrer said that they work closely with Palestinian-American, Arab-American, and Muslim San Diegans and build off each other’s work locally.
“We have also seen unprecedented numbers of Jews seeking out JVP in the past year,” she said.
Fellow JVP member Marilynn Mika Spencer, an attorney who has worked on multiple cases brought by students and faculty at UC San Diego following the university’s crackdown on a pro-Palestinian protest campsite, says that free speech and free expression is a major concern.
“Speech has been curtailed and restricted in many institutions, particularly on campuses,” Spencer said. “San Diego officials and administrators have been as aggressive as the rest of the state and country in limiting student free speech.”
Spencer cited the police crackdown on the UCSD campsite as an example of how campuses in particular are interfering with free expression.
“I have personal knowledge that UCSD threatened scores of students with expulsion and suspension, and denied many students the right to graduate even though these students had completed all graduation requirements,” Spencer said.
“These actions by UCSD have had and continue to have the potential for life-long consequences for the students by delaying their graduation, disrupting their financial aid, destroying their housing, damaging their records and future employment, and more.”
The protest backlash and restrictions also represent a labor issue for professors.
Colleges have been granting tenure to fewer professors, and facing pressure in some areas to do away with it altogether. Legislatures in several states have taken an interest in how topics around race, gender and history are taught. Protest guidelines handed down by administrators are another way the faculty’s say in university affairs is being diminished, some professors say.
“We have to, as faculty, organize and demand the sort of shared governance that gives us a right to review and challenge these policies,” said Todd Wolfson, a journalism and media studies professor at Rutgers University and the president of the American Association of University Professors.
“They’re not made by people coming out of the academic arm of our institutions.”
Tensions on campuses nationwide have been high since the war began over a year ago, when Hamas-led militants stormed into southern Israel, killing some 1,200 people, mostly civilians, and abducting around 250. Israel’s offensive has killed over 42,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry, which does not say how many were fighters.
Colleges have been under tremendous pressure, including from Republicans in Congress, to protect students from discrimination while upholding free speech. Demonstrations last spring blocked foot traffic in parts of some campuses and included instances of antisemitic imagery and rhetoric. Some Jewish faculty members and students have said the protests made them feel unsafe.
In a message announcing new guidelines at the start of the semester, Northwestern University President Michael Schill said it needs to make sure everyone on campus feels safe and supported.
“Activities that lead to intimidation and impede an environment where dialogue and education can flourish cannot occur again,” he said.
Shirin Vossoughi, a Northwestern professor, was among 52 faculty members who signed an open letter opposing the school’s new demonstration policy as caving to political pressure to silence certain types of activism. She said the rules crack down not just on free speech, but pro-Palestinian voices in particular.
During the protests last spring, some faculty members joined ranks with demonstrators. Others acted as mediators for students they see as under their care and protection. Faculty voted no confidence against leaders of schools including Columbia University, the University of Massachusetts, Brandeis University, and Cal Poly Humboldt over their handling of the protests.
At Northwestern University, Steven Thrasher was among three faculty members charged by university police for obstructing law enforcement during last spring’s protests. He was suspended and removed from teaching this fall while under investigation by the university.
“The way that I saw my role was as a protector of the students’ safety and of their ability to express themselves,” Thrasher said this fall.
“I knew as soon as I started seeing violence happening towards students that I would do what I could.”
While schools say the rules are meant to limit disruptions, faculty members say they have the effect of neutralizing dissent.
“The whole point of a protest is to be seen and heard,” said Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia University, where new rules require advance notice and prevent demonstrations that “substantially inhibit the primary purposes” of an area of campus.
“Free speech rights aren’t served if you can only speak into the void and not have anybody hear you, and that includes the right to be seen and heard by people who don’t like what you have to say.”
Professors also drew a connection to the growing percentage of lecturers, adjuncts and professors who do not have tenure protections. Professors increasingly see the issue of speech and academic freedom as a labor issue as a result of the crackdowns, said Risa Lieberwitz, the American Association of University Professors‘ general counsel.
“We’re seeing unionization growing and increasing,” she said. “I think to some extent it’s because it’s so important to organize, to claim democratic rights.”
Wolfson said professors must stand up for students’ rights to demonstrate and speak freely.
“Their freedom of speech rights are the lifeblood of the university,” Wolfson said.
“We cannot have a university based on critical thinking and exploring questions if we’re going to clamp down on students’ rights to protest something they think is a massive problem, and if they see a way for the university to actually engage in it productively.”
Associated Press contributed to this report.
