Free speech and freedom of assembly are foundational rights in the United States. Our college campuses must be places where young people can express themselves and gain exposure to ideas and ideologies that might conflict with their worldviews. Yet they must also be a place where students can walk on campus without the threat of violence and hatred.
In the past three weeks, we have watched what began as peaceful demonstrations turn ugly, with Jewish students and faculty targeted with threatening language, blocked from campus and, worse, assaulted.
In recent days, protesters even barricaded themselves in university buildings, damaging property and sowing chaos. The University of Texas Austin said police confiscated guns and other weapons.
President Biden on Thursday condemned the violent protests while reiterating the rights to speech and protest.
Protesters, including here at Emory University and the University of Georgia, are demanding an end to the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in which at least 34,000 people, many of them civilians, have died, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. The war was Israel’s response to the Oct. 7 Hamas terrorist attack inside Israel in which more than 1,100 innocent people were killed and more than 250 kidnapped.
Protesters originally called for universities to support a cease-fire and to divest from companies that the protesters believe are promoting or prolonging the war. University administration support of a cease-fire won’t impress Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu or Hamas leaders. And divestment would be nearly impossible; today’s global markets are much more complicated than even 40 years ago when anti-apartheid activists won divestments from South Africa. But protesters’ demands don’t have to be reasonable or actionable to be constitutionally protected.
Many colleges failed in their responses to the initial protests. Protest itself is not a crime and should not be treated as one.
Students who are peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights should not be ordered to leave or threatened with arrest for failing to heed a dispersal order. Colleges should have clear plans for spontaneous protests, and many do. They must also have clear and articulated plans for protests that go sideways.
Law enforcement was brought in too early in some cases, including at Emory University on April 25. Heartfelt apologies after the fact, such as the one delivered by Emory President Gregory L. Fenves, don’t mitigate the damage to students forcibly removed and arrested for failing to heed a dispersal order.
Where protests became violent or when property is destroyed, such as at Columbia Tuesday night and UCLA Wednesday, law enforcement response is proper. Those who break the law should be arrested.
Though abhorrent, antisemitism by itself is not illegal. Antisemitic signs and chants alone are not enough to order protesters to leave. But Jewish students – all students – must feel safe on campus. The frightening situation for Jewish students and faculty at Columbia and UCLA, among other places, cannot be tolerated.
There is a tremendous irony to calling for peace while also calling for a global intifada and death to Jews.
Colleges should not use peaceful protests as excuses to cancel classes or commencement ceremonies. The vast majority of a school’s students are not involved in the protests and should not have their learning compromised or their graduations ruined. Many in this class of graduating seniors had their high school graduation ceremonies canceled at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
The protests and sit-ins in the 1960s and 1970s didn’t lead to widespread class or graduation cancellations. About a month after National Guard troops killed four people at a protest at Ohio’s Kent State University on May 4, 1970, students walked the stage. Even an armed 36-hour takeover of a campus building at Cornell University in 1969 didn’t lead to mass class cancellations.
But the responsibility to do the right thing doesn’t fall solely on the shoulders of university administrators. Protesters have responsibilities, too. They should ensure their protests remain safe and they should prevent the infiltration of outsiders with different agendas.
Though it’s still unclear how involved the activists opposing the public safety training center in southeast Atlanta were with the protest at Emory, more than a few people arrested in connection with these protests were people not affiliated with the schools. Just as the Students for a Democratic Society endeavored to protect its message in the 1960s and policed its own rallies, it is in the protesters’ best interest to ensure that their cause is not appropriated by bad actors. Yet, some of those arrested on campuses across the country have been found to have no affiliation with the universities.
Especially in and around Atlanta, anti-war protests are susceptible to being co-opted by the activists seeking to prevent the construction of the public safety training facility. Regardless of their ideology, the violence and destruction unleashed by those protesting the training center is unacceptable.
Peaceful protests on college campus have a long and treasured history in the United States and especially here in Atlanta, the “cradle of the Civil Rights movement.” The Southern Christian Leadership Conference was born here in 1957 to teach nonviolent civil disobedience. It was here in Atlanta that Morehouse students Julian Bond, Lonnie King and Joseph Pierce led lunch-counter sit-ins to protest segregation. The “Atlanta Way” became shorthand for people working together across race and class divides to advance the common interest.
Young minds searching for meaning and order in a volatile world yearn to mold the world into a better place. Some, perhaps many, have been successful, especially when the protests seek changes at the universities or shine a national spotlight on a human rights issue. The anti-Vietnam War protests in the late 1960s and early 1970s brought the war from polite conversations and into the streets.
We stand firmly behind the rights of speech and protest. And we encourage protesters to follow the Atlanta Way.
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