The Palestine solidarity encampment on the quad represents a significant trial for the University of Chicago’s frequently emphasized commitments to academic freedom and free expression. This challenge arises from internal tensions within the policies of the University, connected to the questions of what constitutes disruption, and what constitutes institutional ideological neutrality. It is of great importance for our academic community going forward that we as an institution face this challenge with integrity despite the difficulties that may be involved.

The conflict within university policy occurs between the prohibition on erecting unauthorized structures and the University’s commitment to students’ rights to free expression, unless the exercise of those rights is disruptive to the larger University community. It is true that the encampment is in violation of the former policy. At the same time, there is no sense in which the encampment can be described as disruptive in any fair way. In University President Paul Alivisatos’s Monday email on the subject, he characterized the possible disruption in terms of the cost to the University of maintaining a police presence. This is a stretch. By this logic, for example, legally protected strike activity by instructors in the College would be a violation of University policy, since it is—by design—costly to the University.

Under the University’s own policies, disruption sufficient to warrant the suppression of free expression must be something more than inconvenient, annoying, offensive, or costly. It must actually prevent some members of the University from carrying out their functions or making use of the institution’s facilities. Making a small portion of the quad unavailable to pedestrians does not remotely qualify.

We should be vigilant that our institution not join the stampede of others rewriting policies on the fly, explicitly or implicitly. Northwestern University and Indiana University, for example, both recently inserted new ad hoc justifications for clearing their encampments into their policies when their leaderships realized that they did not actually have sufficient warrant for doing so. Attempting to buttress their case, Indiana went so far as to argue that the encampment “coincides with” rising antisemitism, and that “antisemitic episodes have been linked to this national encampment campaign.” While antisemitism must be confronted whenever it appears, ominous and vague implications and guilt by association written in the passive voice to create the false appearance of intimidation will not do. As a Jew and a descendant of refugees from Nazism, I have appreciated that our institution has not joined others in recent months in systematically conflating Zionism, a modern political idea, with my religion and ethnicity, and thus has not treated anti-Zionist speech as intrinsically discriminatory and intimidating. 

In fact, there has been precious little demonstrable anti-semitism at any of the encampments around the country, which frequently involve significant Jewish participation. (Much of the concern coming from Columbia University arose in response to a handful of incidents occurring not on campus, but outside it, independent of student protest activity.) This is presumably the reason that hostile provocateurs now regularly attempt to instigate anti-semitic chanting, or seek to stimulate confrontation and then claim baselessly to be in danger. Indeed, even protesters’ disciplined non-engagement with provocateurs has now, more than once, been presented as intimidating in itself. Such escalatory tactics all require vigilance too. Nor is it acceptable to argue that slogans such as “from the river to the sea” imply violence. After all, the same language is in the founding charter of Israel’s ruling Likud party, whose express policy is that Palestinians will never have a state, and which actually has implemented this single-state vision in the present. It would thus be impossible to prohibit the organizations, images, rhetoric, and symbols of the Palestine solidarity movement evenhandedly without also taking steps against the organizations, images, rhetoric, and symbols of Israel—steps that we have never seen at the University of Chicago or in any major institutions of American life.

In his email, Alivisatos described an encampment as a vaguely coercive undertaking, drawing a contrast to rational persuasion. This is a troubling idea for several reasons. First of all, all effective protest contains an element of coercion. It always has. For the past three years I taught America in World Civilization II, in which Henry David Thoreau’s classic essay on civil disobedience is a fixture of the syllabus. “Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one already,” Thoreau famously writes. “A single man can bend [the government] to his will.” If this idea is objectionable to you, then women’s suffrage, African American civil rights, and the abolition of slavery must be equally objectionable, for Thoreau’s principle was absolutely central to how these victories were won. Onlookers did not experience sudden persuasion by these movements. Rather, as even cursory familiarity with the writings of Fredrick Douglass, Alice Paul, or Martin Luther King Jr. will tell you, these movements deliberately sought to coerce their opponents by creating unresolvable political dilemmas for them. “Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue,” wrote King in “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” Note the word “forced,” like Thoreau’s “bend.” 

The secular sainthood of such individuals is always a retrospective phenomenon, arising after their challenges have passed and they can be safely canonized. In their own time, they were more widely hated than loved, and it was common for opponents to represent them as apostles of violence and intimidation. “The old violence parades today in a new uniform,” said Richard Nixon in a 1968 campaign speech critical of the civil rights movement. “At home, it may masquerade as ‘civil disobedience,’ or ‘freedom,’ and it sometimes marches under the banner of legitimate dissent.” In contrast, Nixon argued that Americans “have the means to correct [injustice] in a peaceful and orderly fashion. America was born in revolution. But the architects of the new nation saw clearly that if the society was to be secure, the means of peaceful change had to be provided. They built into our structure what the colonies had rebelled for lack of: a system by which the people of America could be masters of their own destinies, in which all could be heard, and the power of persuasion substituted for the power of arms as a means of bringing about progress and change.” 

To point toward rational persuasion over Thoreau’s style of principled nonviolent coercion would be more reasonable if any means of persuasion appeared available. They are evidently not. The College Council, for example, has voted twice over the past decade to affirm its support for the movement to boycott, divest, and sanction Israel—despite tremendous pressure to retract this position. If the administration is committed to rational deliberation, then it ought to give members of its community a genuine opportunity to persuade it: insisting on this course without actual openness to persuasion is senseless and beneath our traditions of reasoned engagement. And if the University community has no means to make itself heard democratically, then nonviolent action is to be expected.

If we do see repression of the protest by violent means or those of administrative punishment—an eventual possibility implied in official emails on Monday—it will naturally raise a question about what was so disruptive about the encampment. What happened last night at Columbia University and City College of New York, with unarmed and nonviolent students beaten and possibly gassed, is a shame that will hang over that institution for decades; a police officer was observed texting “thought we fucking shot someone.” It cannot be repeated here. Any such attempt inevitably will lead to another question about the University’s insistence that it is simply an ideologically neutral actor. After all, a former Israeli general taught a class on “counterterrorism” at our university, and Alivisatos recently met with Israeli consul general Yinam Cohen; the same cannot be said for Palestinian voices. Hillel has a well-established presence on our campus, which it uses to advocate on campus for its preferred policies in relation to Israel and Palestine; Palestinians have no similar such institutional presence. 

For many years, there have been critiques of the Kalven Report and the Chicago Principles from the political left, arguing that these regulations are only formally neutral, but de facto slanted against the causes of social justice to which many of us on campus are ethically committed. While I still believe there is truth in that critique, since October 7 and the national environment of ideological repression that has resulted from it, I gladly admit I have felt grateful for the protection of the Chicago Principles and correspondingly humbled. Now, however, we will see the commitment put to a stringent test. The encampment embodies only free expression and modest inconvenience: what is most disruptive about it is not the form of its presence, but the content of its ideas. Clearing it by force or punishment would make a mockery of the Chicago Principles.

Gabriel Winant is assistant professor of History at the College.