Actions Ought to Have Consequences

The Only Unreasonable Part of the Administration’s Response Was Its Leniency

The original draft of this article began with a triumphant proclamation that it seemed actions once more have consequences at Harvard, but as those who kept up with the administration’s waffling over the summer know, I nearly spoke too soon. When we left campus in the spring, Harvard Out of Occupied Palestine, one of the unrecognized student groups behind the so-called “Liberated Zone” that plagued the Yard, was doing its best to stoke anger over the probation or suspension of thirty-five or so student participants. About a dozen of these students were seniors prevented from graduating after the Corporation overruled a faculty effort to confer their degrees anyway. In July, however, eleven of those seniors were granted their degrees, and the Administrative Board undid the suspensions of some other students. For those of us who, by May, were tired of seeing our university publicly embarrassed, the Corporation had it right the first time. Without wading into the details of particular cases (which are not accessible to the public), Harvard should have the institutional self-respect to ensure its rules are followed and to shape a genuine intellectual community.

While we don’t know why exactly the Corporation changed its mind, some of the affected protesters seem to think they do: Asmer Safi ‘24, whose degree was conferred in July, claims that the reversal was a result of “relentless student and faculty pressure.” Indeed, before this about-face, groups involved with the protest—and a wide swath of other primarily ethnocentric student organizations—condemned the penalties for allegedly breaking the agreement President Garber made to end the encampment and for violating the university’s principles regarding free speech. In an op-ed dated May 21, the Crimson Editorial Board called the move “deceptive, disastrous, and downright draconian.” The Editorial Board concedes that the university has the right to maintain time, place, and manner (TPM) restrictions on protests, but then immediately vitiates this claim by reciting a history where “participants in similarly, if not more, disruptive demonstrations faced far less severe disciplinary consequences.” Many of these arguments had already been made by the Institute of Politics’ student leadership team in a statement released on May 19. According to that statement, the Administrative Board’s decision “call[ed] into question the University’s commitment to freedom of speech, intellectual vitality, and the right to protest – bedrock principles of the Institute of Politics.” The statement also criticized the decision as a “disproportionate response” to an act of “civil disobedience.”

Despite these harsh condemnations, neither group proves that the Administrative Board was particularly harsh in dealing with these protesters because of the nature of their cause. Neither provides any evidence for this claim except for the apparent deviation from precedent that was previously mentioned. While President Garber promised to encourage the Administrative Board to consider that precedent, he does not formally control the body, and the Board was well within its rights to ignore his advice. A reason for doing so is easily explained: the Administrative Board and Corporation may have decided (initially, at least) that this precedent had created an untenable incentive for students to disrupt university life. The nominal penalties applied in those older cases were not binding; they were merciful and perhaps naive. We should not concede that the University has irrevocably conceded its right to enforce its own rules. Acknowledging the university’s formal right to set TPM restrictions is meaningless if it cannot punish students who ignore them, and it seems the only lesson of the “precedent” was to teach students that they could safely do so. The Corporation’s decision to largely reverse itself will give us an opportunity to test this theory, as if another opportunity was needed. Rather than worrying about an unproven “Palestine exception,” interested parties should advocate against the creation of a “protest exception” wherein groups become so disruptive that they can negotiate their way out of rules that everyone else has to follow. We can and should do this even when we have good-faith disagreements with the nature of some of those rules.

In an op-ed titled “Probation Will Not Stop Our Fight Against Genocide,” two graduate students under probation hint at such a disagreement by claiming that “it remains totally unclear what specific policies the encampment, or we as individuals, violated.” There were plenty of actions taken by the encampment, however, that both had nothing to do with the message of the protest and violated University policy. The tents erected by the encampment were explicitly prohibited by a policy that was posted on most of the gates in the Yard well before the encampment began. Furthermore, as Dean Tom Dunne’s email of April 27 pointed out, the encampment was violating Yard quiet hours designed to allow freshmen to study for finals in peace. For his part, President Garber’s message of May 6 made no mention of the encampment’s slogans or even its cause, despite the fact that it regularly made the absurd accusation that he and other university leaders are complicit in genocide. Instead, his stated concerns were regarding the encampment’s effects on broader university life, like participants’ refusal to comply with ID checks and other safety measures, as well as their alleged harassment of passers-by. He also referenced the disruption caused by the need to close the Yard to non-Harvard affiliates, which seems to have been done both to prevent outside agitators from joining the encampment and for the safety of students sleeping there. As such, it is far from clear that students would have been punished merely for expressing their ideas if they were presented by different means. While the secrecy of Administrative Board proceedings makes it difficult to say for sure, the relatively low number of students (thirty-seven) who were punished suggests that only the leaders and other students especially involved in planning the encampment were punished. The fact is that the vast majority of protesters have not been punished, lending credence to the idea that the Administrative Board was concerned not with student speech but student action—in this case, encouraging other students to violate University policy en masse. 

In focusing so intently on process and precedent, these defenders of the pro-Palestine mob have deprived themselves of what should have been their best argument: protest is inherently distracting. It must be so that it can draw attention to its message. If the administration’s power to prevent disruptions to the campus environment is unlimited, then students actually do not have a right to protest. So what justifies this kind of power in the first place? Of course, as a private institution, the University legally maintains that power whether it should exercise it or not. More to the point, the Claremont Institute’s Arthur Milikh offered another answer at a debate co-sponsored by the Salient last semester. Universities, Milikh argued, have a particular purpose, that being the creation of “a kind of character that fits republican citizenship” through the cultivation of our rational faculties. While intellectual freedom should be expansive within the classroom, so that professors and students can explore the bounds of knowledge together, universities should not permit outside distractions to impinge on academic life. I don’t go as far as Milikh, in part because I think one element of republican citizenship is learning when and how to petition our leaders—and one another—for a redress of grievances. Protest can be a legitimate way of pursuing the truth together, by showing the rest of our campus community that one part of it believes the rest of us have made a serious error. 

But if the purpose Milikh identifies doesn’t preclude protest, it does limit it. If protest can help fulfill the university’s purposes of truth-seeking and character formation, it can also (perhaps more easily) impede them. Protest movements are divisible in two kinds: those seeking to inform and persuade about an issue, and those seeking to force change by making it less troublesome to simply concede their demands. Whatever the intentions of individual protesters, it is clear that the encampment operated according to the latter logic. Before the encampment began, the organizations behind it planned class walk-outs and walked through libraries and classrooms chanting loudly. As part of one such protest, participants harassed Senator Dan Sullivan during a visit to Widener Library. Additionally, last November, Harvard Jews for Palestine, which participated in the encampment, held a short-lived occupation of University Hall. Activists also occupied part of Tercentenary Theater, where commencement is held every year, and threatened to disrupt commencement if their demands were not met. Not only did the protesters continually employ tactics obviously unsuited to winning over those with whom they disagree, at times they actively refused to engage in outside discussion, refusing to speak with reporters from the Salient, and even boycotting the Crimson for a time. Convincing the rest of us of the virtues of their cause was clearly a secondary goal at best to bullying the administration into meeting their demands.

Harvard shouldn’t become overzealous in its punishment of student dissent. In this case, however, Harvard’s only fault was in not responding to the encampment sooner. The university cannot stand by quietly when activists begin to treat the rest of us as adversaries to be overcome and forget those ancient words: “come now, and let us reason together.”

MARCUS TULLIUS CICERO

A version of this article originally appeared in Harvard Eternal, the September 2024 print issue of the Salient.