New training, stricter rules: How colleges are trying to curb Gaza protests
Less than 10 minutes had passed before Vanderbilt University President Daniel Diermeier told hundreds of new students what the school would not do.
The university would not withdraw its activities in Israel.
It would not exclude provocative speakers.
No statements would be made in support of or condemnation of Israeli or Palestinian causes.
On Monday, before the hour was up, he added that Vanderbilt would not tolerate threats, intimidation or protests that “disrupt the learning environment.”
This month, Vanderbilt required all freshmen to attend mandatory meetings about the university’s approach to free speech. The hope was that clear expectations—and explanations of them—would help administrators maintain order after protests rocked American campuses at the end of the past academic year.
“The chaos on campuses is because there is a lack of clarity about these principles,” Dr. Diermeier said in an interview.
There’s no guarantee that the preemptive, open-minded rallies will work. Many student activists and professors at Vanderbilt have decried the university’s rules for stifling their speech, and even universities with a history of heavy-handed tactics have struggled with protests.
But university officials across the country are turning to new approaches as they brace for renewed protests over the war between Israel and Hamas, along with a hotly contested presidential election. Many administrators are still reeling from the final weeks of the spring semester, when encampments, building occupations and clashes with police led to thousands of arrests across the country.
The strategies now emerging suggest that some administrators at schools large and small have concluded that permissiveness is dangerous and that a harder line may be the best option — or perhaps the option least likely to provoke a backlash from elected officials and donors who have demanded that universities take stronger action against protesters.
University presidents used the summer break to meet with police chiefs, lawyers, administrators and other officials to rewrite rules, tighten protest zones and weigh possible concessions to maintain or restore order. Many have studied universities that temporarily eased tensions by making deals with protesters.
So far, however, universities have shown little open interest in negotiations.
On Monday, University of California President Michael V. Drake told campus chancellors to ensure that their policies include bans on unsanctioned encampments and “masking to conceal identity.” Columbia University, where controversial protests helped oust Nemat Shafik from her 13-month-old presidency on Aug. 14, is restricting access to campus. Northwestern University said students would receive “mandatory training on anti-Semitism and other forms of hate,” with more policy changes on the horizon.
“The question is how do we get more consistent in how we respond to these issues — and clearer about what the rules are and what the multi-layered responses are going to be,” said Richard K. Lyons, the new chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, a campus with one of the nation’s most robust protest records. Dr. Lyons estimated that planning for protests had consumed up to 15 percent of the summer for Berkeley’s top administrators.
Some universities are still keeping quiet about their response plans. The University of Texas at Austin, where authorities made more than 100 arrests in the spring, did not respond to questions. And a spokeswoman for Emory University, where administrators sparked outrage in April by quickly ordering the removal of an encampment, said the Atlanta school had no “updates to share.”
A series of recent court rulings, as well as investigations by Capitol Hill and the Department of Education, have put pressure on universities. A federal judge this month issued a preliminary injunction that said the University of California, Los Angeles, cannot allow protesters to deny Jewish students access to campus facilities. (UCLA objected to the court telling it how to manage demonstrations. The injunction, the university said, could “impede our ability to respond to events on the ground.”)
And university officials in Texas have rushed in recent months to comply with Gov. Greg Abbott’s executive order to “review and update free speech policies to address the sharp increase in anti-Semitic speech and acts on college campuses.” A federal lawsuit challenging the order, which Mr. Abbott issued in March, is pending.
Even as some universities have instituted stricter policies and procedures, it remains to be seen how rigorously or consistently they will be enforced. The lasting effects of resistance are also unclear. Officials across the country eventually dropped many of the criminal charges that protesters faced after the spring demonstrations, and school discipline is still pending for many students. Suspensions have often been lifted in the meantime.
Vanderbilt, located in Nashville, hasn’t seen the scale of pandemonium that some other universities have. But with about 13,000 students, there have been tensions, including a sit-in that led to a handful of arrests.
In March, university administrators, citing a potential risk to Vanderbilt’s government contracts, blocked a vote to align student government spending with the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel. Students and administrators have also squabbled over the distribution of flyers and a reservation of a meeting room by the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The SJP chapter did not respond to an interview request, but the chapter and its allies have been warning for months about university tactics they saw as stifling. Last semester, a group of Vanderbilt theology students cited the university’s 1960 expulsion of civil rights leader James M. Lawson Jr., declaring that “protest is yet another instance of Vanderbilt’s repressive and unjust responses, all in the name of a ‘principled neutrality’ that places the concerns and needs of some students above those of others.”
Separately, Palestine Legal, a civil rights organization, directed the university a termination letter in March, accusing the school of arbitrarily restricting students’ freedom of speech and protest, which the school said was “violent of Vanderbilt’s commitment to freedom of expression.”
Even without the protests that have drawn national attention, Dr. Diermeier said in the interview that he had concluded over the summer that Vanderbilt needed to strengthen and explain its longstanding ethos of open inquiry and institutional neutrality. That means not taking positions on debates that don’t directly affect the conduct of the university.
“People don’t always know what the principles are, and they don’t always know what the reasons are,” said Dr. Diermeier, a former provost at the University of Chicago, where incoming students are told that free speech is “an essential part of the culture of the university.”
The University of Chicago’s own experience this year suggests that even those deeply held principles don’t always prevent unrest. In May, the university called in police to remove an encampment that violated its policy of banning unapproved tents.
Dr. Diermeier presented the sessions at Vanderbilt as gatherings designed to develop a common understanding.
“When you join a community that is governed by a certain set of rules, you want to know what they are, you want to discuss them, you want to be clear about them,” he said. “We don’t force anyone to be a member of this community.”
Bruce Barry, a professor of management who has been on the Vanderbilt faculty since 1991, said he could see the value in orienting new students to the university’s principles. But Dr. Barry, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union of Tennessee who is married to a Democratic candidate for Congress, said he would worry if university leaders were deliberately “sending a message that your protest activities are on a very thin edge of compliance.”
He noted that Dr. Diermeier’s management did not shy away from disciplining a number of students in the spring.
Some new campus residents indicated they welcomed the mandatory gatherings.
Shayna Mehta, a freshman from New Jersey, said she thinks the university’s initial efforts to specify policy will “make people more aware of protests and the decisions they make.”
On Monday, as new students filled Langford Auditorium, there were subtle signs of discomfort with the university’s policies, particularly around its $10 billion endowment. Barrie Barto, the editor in chief of the campus newspaper, The Vanderbilt Hustler, moderated two onstage discussions with the chancellor and estimated afterward that about a quarter of the questions submitted concerned divestment. Others asked Dr. Diermeier how to draw the line between permissible protests and disruptions that could lead to disciplinary action.
But as the chancellor answered questions, he saw more sleeping students (a handful, including one in the front row) than noisy protesters (none).
Anemone Hartocollis contributed reporting from New York.
