How to Handle the Next Campus Protest

Opinion|How to Handle the Next Campus Protest

As college students return to campus, this is what I hope a university president might say to them about how their school intends to handle future protests.

Dear students,

Welcome back. As you all know, last year our campus, like many others, was racked by protests that began right after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and intensified as the war in Gaza unfolded. We are not going to allow those protests to happen again, at least not in the aggressive, disruptive and sometimes lawless ways in which they were conducted last year.

I’m here to tell you why.

Some of you may suspect the reason is pressure from big donors and angry alumni, or fear of lawsuits, judicial rulings, congressional subpoenas and Title VI investigations. I won’t pretend these things don’t matter to us, above all when it comes to our responsibility to follow the law and protect our students from discrimination and harassment. Jewish students who believe in the Jewish state’s right to exist are as entitled to that protection as everyone else.

But I don’t want to leave it at that, because the reason we intend to strictly enforce restrictions on campus protests has less to do with pressure from the outside and more to do with what we owe to ourselves as an institution dedicated to discovery, scholarship, teaching and learning. Our central concern is not with reputation — how others see us. It’s with integrity — how we remain faithful to our foundational purpose.

What is that purpose? The main clue comes from the word “university,” derived from the Latin “universitas”: the whole, everything, the universe.

We are a university not merely in the sense of being a type of corporation that brings together many programs and departments. We are also a university in that each of us is part of the same truth-seeking enterprise — an enterprise that believes in the universality and interconnectedness of knowledge itself. Here at this school, a historian can learn from a geologist, a neurologist can collaborate with a musicologist, and a freshman student can question and challenge the most senior member of the faculty. Here, students with different backgrounds and perspectives can, with a bit of effort, discuss and debate ideas without descending to name-calling, intimidation or ostracism.