Colleges Are Supposed to Make Citizens

That's why protecting the right to protest is essential.

Mario Savio on top of a police car in front of Sproul Hall, Berkeley, October 1, 1964 Online Archive of California

“What upsets me about all the protesting…It's making it really hard for people to learn.” So said Georgetown professor Jacques Berlinerblau on a recent Inside Higher Ed podcast. “What we do on a college campus,” Berlinerblau continued:

It's not quite free speech. It's expert speech. That's what presidents have to defend, right? A college campus is a place where people are credentialed, they train, they receive doctorates, they are certified by their universities…The job of a college president is to defend the speech of those professors so that they can convey their knowledge to their students.

Berlinerblau is just one among a chorus of voices criticizing campus protests as a distraction from the core university mission of truth-seeking and the dissemination of knowledge. 

In the now infamous December 5th Congressional hearing with the presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn, Republican Congressman Brandon Williams told Claudine Gay that “your mission is to educate” but all he sees is “hateful and threatening anti-Semitic demonstrations.” Writing in Forbes, American Enterprise Institute Senior Fellow Frederick Hess said, “the historic purpose of campus free speech is not to provide banner-waving protesters with a bucolic backdrop, but to facilitate the unfettered pursuit of truth and understanding in teaching, learning, and research,” adding that “there’s nothing particularly educational about the protests, letters, and rallies” (italics in original.)

The shut-up-and-study crowd ignores the fact that virtually every college and university in the United States has a dual mission: the development of students’ critical thinking skills (via knowledge production and dissemination) and the preparation of students to be informed, engaged citizens. Federal Judge Kevin Newsom got it right when he wrote in a 2022 decision that the “chief mission” of colleges and universities is “to equip students to examine arguments critically and, perhaps even more importantly, to prepare young citizens to participate in the civic and political life of our democratic republic.”

Citizenship, in terms of civic engagement, leadership and public service, has been central to the mission of higher education for more than a century. Today, you would be hard pressed to find a college or university, across the extraordinarily diverse institutional landscape of higher education, that does not foreground citizenship in its mission statement. The University of Michigan, for example, seeks to develop “leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.” Teaching students “to be responsible and active participants in civic life” is key to a Georgetown education. At Wellesley, the mission is “to provide an excellent liberal arts education to women who will make a difference in the world.” And in the City University of New York system, Bronx Community College aims to instill in students “the value of informed and engaged citizenship and service to their communities.”

If campuses are meant to be training grounds for citizenship, the crackdowns on student expression by many colleges and universities in the wake of the October 7th terrorist attack are serious missteps. American University banned all indoor protests for this spring semester, justifying the sweeping policy change in the name of “inclusivity,” citing events that had made “Jewish students feel unsafe and unwelcome.” In February Barnard outlawed all dorm room door decorations, lest students with “different views and beliefs” feel isolated. A college spokesperson said the policy change was made in the interest of “supporting a safe, inclusive community” where all students “feel welcome.”

Appealing to safety concerns and community belonging, a number of universities, including Columbia, Cornell and Lehigh, have tightened their rules governing student demonstrations. At least three schools--Columbia, Brandeis and George Washington University--have suspended their chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). PEN America’s Jonathan Friedman noted that the failure of these universities to offer detailed justifications for the suspensions has “left the impression that they may be engaging in viewpoint-based censorship, and attempting to deliberately silence pro-Palestinian voices critical of Israel.” 

That certainly appears to be the case in Texas where, just this past week, Governor Greg Abbot signed an Executive Order that singled out SJP for allegedly fomenting antisemitism on the campuses of Texas’s public universities. “[T]o address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech,” the order directs all Texas higher education institutions to update their free speech policies to include the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. According to Kenneth Stern, one of the lead authors of the IHRA definition, “it was designed primarily for European data collectors to be able to craft reports over borders and time to measure the level of antisemitism.” In a recent Chronicle interview, Stern said he was “alarmed” by its adoption on college campuses because the definition could be invoked to “censor anyone who criticizes or says something controversial about Israel.” 

Risk-averse college leaders seem to have forgotten that political protests are designed to ruffle feathers. To paraphrase the late Harry Belafonte, the whole point of a demonstration is to make a lot of noise and snap people out of their indifference.

The administrative impulse to avoid controversy at all costs is making a mockery of higher education’s avowed commitment to preparing students for citizenship. When student free expression rights are trampled on, they are deprived of the opportunity to practice the hard work of living in community with people who hold diverse views. We are reminded here of Jacob Mchangama’s astute observation that “To impose silence and call it tolerance does not make it so.” How will students learn to navigate the sometimes rough-and-tumble world of life in a pluralistic, multicultural democracy? When their future neighbors put up lawn signs with messages they oppose or find offensive, there will be no dean on call to remove them. 

To those who say that demonstrations and activism have no educational value, engaging in political protest is an essential part of having your voice heard in a democratic society. It teaches students how to advocate for positions dear to their hearts, when and how to make alliances and compromises and which strategies and tactics work for effective negotiation. Even those sitting on the sidelines learn something about the issues at hand, while also absorbing the important lessons that public advocacy is complex and contentious, and that living in a free society requires tolerating different points of view. 

Since the 1960s, student activism and protest have been a regular feature of campus life. Student activists “contributed mightily” to the civil rights movement, starting with the sit-in campaigns launched by four Black North Carolina A&T students at a Woolworths’ lunch counter in downtown Greensboro in February, 1960. The 1964 Berkeley Free Speech Movement successfully overturned university restrictions on campus political activity and advocacy, “setting the stage,” in historian Robert Cohen’s words, “for mass student protests against the Vietnam War.” 

On May 17, 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. delivered an address on the steps of Berkeley’s Sproul Hall, site of Mario Savio’s famous 1964 “bodies upon the gears” speech. Thanking the students for their involvement in the civil rights and anti-war movements, King said, “You, in a real sense, have been the conscience of the academic community and our nation.” 

Between 1984 and 1986, tens of thousands of students participated in the anti-apartheid divestment movement, dotting campus greens across the country with shanties to draw attention to the “poverty and oppression” of Black South Africans. By the close of the 1985/86 academic-year, some 120 colleges and universities had partially or completely divested from companies doing business in South Africa, including a $3.1 billion withdrawal by the University of California system. 

Students, of course, haven’t just protested for peace and racial justice. They have been at the forefront of many social movements, advocating for causes on and off-campus, ranging from disability rights to climate change. 

To be clear, while colleges and universities should have a high level of tolerance for confrontational and disruptive student protests, there are some basic ground rules that must be followed. The targeted harassment of individual campus community members is, of course, verboten. So too is the heckler’s veto--that is, shouting down campus events--as happened last month at the University of Michigan when pro-Palestine student protesters derailed the university’s annual Honors Convocation. It’s also important for students to keep in mind that exercising their free expression rights does not extend to violating reasonable time, place and manner restrictions such as keeping clear of fire exits or prohibiting the use of megaphones in the library.   

No matter the college or university, there is no single, unifying set of rules that governs campus speech. Different regulations and norms apply in different campus contexts. The discourse surrounding campus free speech has been deeply impoverished by a failure to recognize this basic fact. 

Inside the classroom, where the main objective is the pursuit of knowledge and the development of critical thinking skills, civil discourse should prevail. Yelling, ad hominem attacks and political sloganeering have no place in a college classroom. Classrooms are educational spaces where the principles of academic freedom--particularly evidence-based argumentation and inquiry guided by a professor’s professional expertise--take precedence over no-holds-barred, devil-may-care free speech. 

In contrast, the campus quad is more like a public forum. (It really is a public forum at public universities where the First Amendment pertains). In public spaces on campus, respectful discourse should be encouraged but top-down “civility” mandates should be roundly rejected. When students are protesting, we shouldn’t expect their speech to be unfailingly courteous, measured and polite. There must be room for passion and provocation.

According to Frederick Hess, “The point [of campus free speech] is the freedom to inquire in classrooms, not the freedom to wave banners on the quad.” We reject this notion that the only worthwhile demonstrations on campus are those that take place in science labs. If colleges and universities are genuinely committed to preparing students for citizenship, they must protect their right to protest. Otherwise, how are students going to find their voice? 

A version of this piece was originally published on April 2, 2024 in The Chronicle Review.