Activism on Campus

When tents sprang up on college quadrangles amid heated protests against Israel for its retaliatory war in Gaza against the Hamas terrorists who staged the October 7, 2023, massacre, the tumult was unlike anything seen since campuses were the front line for antiwar protests against the war in Vietnam more than a half century ago.

Columbia University and the University of Southern California cancelled classes and more than 3,100 demonstrators were arrested at 70 schools as police were summoned to clear encampments. Subsequently, regardless of whether they experienced disruptions, numerous colleges changed their time, place, and manner rules and other restrictions on expressivity. Hood College in Frederick, Maryland, made its Pergola, a tree-canopied spot for peaceful community gatherings and romantic trysts, off-limits for protests “even when it is a call for peace.”

This fall remained a fraught time for presidents and boards as civilian casualties mounted in Gaza and Israel launched an offensive against Hezbollah in Lebanon. The strife posed a dilemma for higher education leaders facing demands that institutions forsake neutrality, disinvest from companies doing business in Israel and meet other demands of the pro-Palestinian protesters. At the same time, college leaders faced pressure from politicians and alumni for not adequately addressing Jewish students’ fears for their safety and antisemitism.

Inevitably, boards are asking themselves what their role is in helping steady the ship and strike the delicate balance between protecting free speech and the right to protest and carrying out their educational mission.

Trusteeship spoke with presidents and board leaders about what they see as the most proper and helpful role boards can play in turbulent times. The country’s political polarization and approaching presidential election compounded the difficulty of striking the right balance.

But there was unanimity among those who responded to Trusteeship that the most important thing boards can do is ask good questions and lend resolute support to their presidents and the steps they are taking to quell disruptions and return teaching and learning to normalcy.

The alterations made during the summer lull to time, manner, and place policies put students and faculty supporters on notice of what behavior goes beyond accepted protest boundaries and what the consequences are for breaching them. Lee Tyner, general counsel of Texas Christian University and an authority on the First Amendment stressed the importance of good relations and clear communications with the leaders of protests beforehand.

“To me, if any student is ever arrested, it’s because they have chosen to be arrested. You have laid the choices and consequences before them, and they’re choosing to be arrested. It should never be a surprise,” he said.

Presidents were under intense outside pressures last spring to crack down on protests and dislodge student encampments. House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., stood on the steps of Columbia’s Law Library and demanded the resignation of President Nemat “Minouche” Shafik if she didn’t “immediately bring order to this chaos.” Days later, more than a score of House Democrats sent a letter to Columbia’s Board of Trustees calling on them to resign if they didn’t end the encampment. (Shafik summoned police after students occupied a building; more than 100 were arrested. She did step down four months later, the third Ivy president to quit under fire in the last calendar year.)

The First Amendment does not protect students’ pitching tents on college greens or blocking or occupying buildings, said Tyner. “It protects less conduct than most people think.”

But at the same time, “the First Amendment protects more hateful speech than most people think—even speech that advocates violence and lawlessness,” he said. What is beyond the pale, the Supreme Court ruled in a 1969 free speech case, is speech that is likely to incite or produce “imminent lawless action.”

Tyner believes that protesters’ chants of “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which defenders of Israel interpret as a call for genocide of Jews and destruction of the state of Israel, does not meet that threshold. “Trustees ought to make sure their understanding of the First Amendment is accurate, because most people’s understanding is not,” Tyner said in an interview echoing a column he wrote for Trusteeship.¹

David Maxwell, president emeritus of Drake University, drew another distinction about offensive words. “If you’re saying ‘From the river to the sea’ at a rally of 200 people and you’re up at a podium with a microphone, I think your speech is protected. But if you walk up to a Jewish student and yell it in her face, that’s verbal assault. That’s different,” said Maxwell.

What is a governing board’s role in shaping and defending college and university policies for dealing with protests and disruptions?

Larry Ladd, a former university dean and budget director said, “No one anticipated that Hamas would do what it did, and that some students would react the way they did. Universities were caught flat-footed. They didn’t have policies and protocols for this particular moment. They were making it up as they went along.”

“It’s hard to imagine that you could have come up with a plan for exactly these circumstances, but you want a president, administration, and board that have become facile and agile dealing with unexpected circumstances,” said Ladd.

The most important thing is for boards to ask penetrating questions of the CEO they hired and their leadership team. “You ask, ‘Do you have a crisis management plan? Could you give us a briefing on what you’ve done? Who was involved in developing it?’ You’re not telling them what to do, you’re asking them questions. You’re not asking to vote to approve it. Essentially, you’re kicking the tires,” Ladd said. “If the answers you get don’t sound right, you keep probing.”

Maxwell knows the board-president dynamic from the other side as well as a trustee and former chair of the board at his alma mater, Grinnell College. It is typically the responsibility of the administration and faculty to set ground rules for protests and disciplinary policies for those who break the rules, he said, but boards “have the responsibility to formally approve all major policies of the institution because boards are ultimately accountable for everything. If somebody sues the institution for what they claim is a violation of policy, it’s the board that’s getting sued.”

During Maxwell’s 16 years at Drake, when the university was revising the mission statement or changing other policies, “we created task forces that (always) included a couple of board members because they really were partners,” said Maxwell. But “they really knew how to stay on the governance side and stay away from the management side.”

Boards needn’t look back far to a crisis that required them to collaborate more closely than usual with the CEO they hired. The COVID-19 crisis that erupted in early 2020 created financial, logistical, and technological challenges that demanded an all-hands-on-deck response.

At Grinnell that spring, outgoing President Raynard S. Kington and his successor, Anne F. Harris, enlisted Maxwell and three other board leaders to join weekly meetings with the leadership team to wrestle with pressing financial decisions and other matters. A few months later, when Harris became president, “I made it clear to Anne that, ‘It was great that we’re a part of this, but let us know when we you want us to leave,’” recalled Maxwell. “Then I got a call from her in August, saying, ‘You know, I think it’s time for you guys to get back on your side of the line.’” But those five months of closer-than-ever shared governance had served its purpose.

The wave of disruptive college protests last spring also required boards to step up and help presidents reconsider and rewrite ground rules for student conduct and protests. At dozens of campuses, encampments were proscribed. The University of Wisconsin put an 11 p.m. lid on demonstrations.

“I think the most important role (for the board) is to ask good questions about what policies are in place at the institution when the inevitable circumstances arise where these policies will be needed,” said Leo Lambert, president emeritus of Elon University. Boards need to “recognize what a complicated situation the president is trying to manage and to support the president, not try to manage it (themselves).”

Eileen B. Wilson-Oyelaran, president emerita of Kalamazoo College, said the stridency of student protests has been building for years and the divisions have only gotten sharper. Wilson-Oyelaran, who led Kalamazoo from 2005 to 2016, also spent 16 years on the board of trustees of Pomona College, her undergraduate alma mater. Even after moving to emeritus status on that board, she took an active part in discussions as Pomona grappled with protests over the past year.

What is her advice to boards weighing their role in shaping institutions’ response to this new era of activism?

“I think that boards have to look at this from two perspectives: their fiduciary duty and the whole issue of reputational risk, but more importantly that of fidelity to free expression as a critical part of the mission of the institution… Obviously there’s a tension there,” she said.

“My sense is that institutions are better served if boards allow leadership to provide the strategy and response to these issues, rather than getting over involved,” she said. “It’s critically important that leadership has an effective strategy for keeping the board informed, but there’s a difference between being informed and being a decision-maker.”

Public or private boards alike must grapple with the reality that regardless of how their institutions handle protests, higher education institutions are “a target now for political purposes. There’s a ‘gotcha’ mentality in Congress,” she said.

“This is a time when boards need to think very deeply about how they support presidents and their leadership teams because this is really wrenching stuff,” said Wilson-Oyelaran.

Lambert, the former Elon president, said, “boards need to understand there are going to be protests and issues. You don’t know on any given day what monster is out there in the waiting room. It’s not if it’s going to happen, it’s when it’s going to happen.” Boards also have a responsibility to ensure “that the welfare of all students on campus is being looked out for” regardless of their views on the conflict in the Middle East.

“College campuses will be places of debate and spirited exchange of views, and occasionally this will result in acrimony,” he said. “Institutions simply need to be prepared to handle it. If they don’t have policies in place, and haven’t done tabletop exercises beforehand, they’re going to be behind the eight ball.”

No institution is more closely associated in the American mind with campus protests that end in tragedy than Kent State University, where four students were shot and killed by Ohio National Guardsmen during an anti-Vietnam war protest on May 4, 1970. Over the decades Kent State has honored their memory—Kent State opened a Center for Peaceful Change that is now the School of Peace and Conflict Studies—while also serving as a cautionary reminder of the dangers of using deadly force against peaceful protesters. (Two students were also killed by police that month at Jackson State University in Mississippi.)

Carol A. Cartwright, president of Kent State from 1991 to 2006, said that tragic legacy left administrators and trustees alike keenly aware of the constant need for crisis planning.

“It’s not a good time when you’re in the middle of it to try to figure out how to manage it,” said Cartwright, former ambassador to the AGB Council of Presidents. Cartwright wrote “Be Prepared” for the AGB blog after a session at a council meeting last December on board-president relationships.

“Several council presidents suggested ways to become better prepared, such as engaging institutional leaders, including board members, in scenario planning exercises in which they imagine ‘what if’ situations and discuss ways to manage them,” she wrote.²

Thinking ahead and having documented policies in place becomes paramount. “Presidents felt strongly that boards must also be educated about bedrock concepts of higher education, such as board independence and academic freedom,” Cartwright said. “Even when boards are well versed in these core ideas, they need fresh perspectives as the environment changes.”

“Board members do not always understand that presidents cannot and do not control what the people on their campuses say and do. Council members generally agreed that most board members do not fully understand the legal aspects of content-neutral time, place, and manner policies. Board education on this topic is vital,” Cartwright said.

In a discussion of whether presidents should make public statements on behalf of their institution about national or global issues unrelated to higher education, the answer “was a resounding no,” she said.

“What many council members agreed that presidents should do, however, is speak out forcefully on issues that directly impact their institution in particular and higher education in general,” she added.

Constant communication with the board in times of turmoil is essential, Cartwright said in an interview. “You want to try to communicate as quickly as possible: ‘We have this issue. Here’s how we’re dealing with it. Remember you as a board talked about these kinds of things several months ago. We’re now seeing it play out on our campus. The board chair and I are in close communication. If you have questions, call me or call the chair,’” Cartwright said. “But it’s not the board’s call on deciding whether to call in the police.”

“I know from my 15-plus years as president that Kent State was always ready. If there was a sense that a student group might invite a controversial speaker, there was immediately a discussion about, ‘How will we manage it? What are the alternatives? How can we organize programming on the other side of that issue?’” she said.

Some institutions have pledged or renewed their commitment to the principles a University of Chicago faculty committee laid out in 1967 as antiwar protests began to shake campuses nationwide. The Kalven Committee’s report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action made a compelling case for institutional neutrality. “To perform its mission in the society, a university must sustain an extraordinary environment of freedom of inquiry and maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures,” it said.

“The neutrality of the university as an institution arises then not from a lack of courage nor out of indifference and insensitivity. It arises out of respect for free inquiry and the obligation to cherish a diversity of viewpoints. And this neutrality as an institution has its complement in the fullest freedom for its faculty and students as individuals to participate in political action and social protest,” it said.³

But even an exemplar of free speech such as the University of Chicago faced uncomfortable moments in dealing with protests last spring. After a week-long encampment and vigil on its quad, campus police in riot gear moved in before dawn to dismantle the tents and move students off the lawn. None were arrested. The university said it acted amid rising safety concerns.

Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier has been outspoken in defending institutional neutrality and fostering open discussions of divergent, controversial views. He flatly rejected student demands for divestiture from companies associated with Israel. In an opening convocation for the new academic year, Diermeier put first-year students on notice that Vanderbilt would not tolerate protests “disrupting the learning environment.” He told the New York Times, “The chaos on campuses is because there’s lack of clarity on these principles.”⁴

In a Forbes magazine column, Diermeier noted that Vanderbilt had rejected petitions from two alumni groups with opposite views on the Israel-Gaza conflict. “One wanted the school to adopt tactics advocated by the Boycott, Divest and Sanction movement, and condemn Israel for genocide. The other wanted the university to voice strong support for Israel and adopt the definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance,” he wrote. The first would have violated its commitment to neutrality and the second “would have severely limited our faculty’s freedom to research and teach what they want, how they want.”⁵

With strong support from boards, many colleges and universities took pains to turn the anger over the Israel-Hamas conflict into teachable moments. Diermeier, a former provost at the University of Chicago, took pride in noting that both the Israeli ambassador to the United States and the former prime minister of the Palestinian Authority spoke to an international relations class one day apart last March.

The University of San Diego (USD) held almost weekly teach-ins on the Middle East conflict. In May students, faculty, and staff held a “requiem” and “die-in” that included prayers for all victims. It culminated with Palestinian supporters’ marching to President James T. Harris III’s office and presenting Harris with a petition to divest from supporting Israel’s economy in any way and to end a study abroad program in Israel.

Harris, who had attended the requiem at the protesters’ invitation, said, “I think our students have set a positive standard of how to have civil conversations and dialogue.”

His board chair agreed. “We have been able to maintain a very peaceful and calm campus,” said Thomas Mulvaney, a graduate of USD’s law school.

“What we are about is providing an education so that after the students leave the institution, they can lead productive and meaningful lives. We want to make sure the classes keep going and that are our students are feeling safe,” said Mulvaney, who enlisted in the Marines after high school and served in Vietnam and later in college sided with the war protesters.

“We’re not a Columbia or a UC Berkeley. Jim has the complete, 100 percent backing of the board. Our job is to support the President and his team to make sure we can maintain a peaceful and orderly situation,” he said.

“The world seems to be a more polarized place than it has been in recent times. We’re very cognizant of what’s going on and we will take immediate steps if something seems to be going awry,” Mulvaney said. “But it’s Jim’s job to maintain the order on campus and make sure that people can speak freely.”

“You don’t have to allow your institution to be used as a battlefield,” said Elon’s Lambert. “You have to establish ground rules and have policies in place. It’s not necessarily the board’s job to set those policies, but to ask how good and how strong those policies are.”

The American Association of University Professors has condemned what it calls a “crack down on peaceful campus protest,” which it contends is an assault on academic freedom. Without singling out institutions, it said that “college and university administrations have hastily enacted overly restrictive policies dealing with the rights to assemble and protest on campus. These policies, which go beyond reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression.”⁶

Assumption University President Gregory S. Weiner wrote a blunt op-ed for the Wall Street Journal last December that argued non-elite colleges such as his are doing a better job of teaching students to be open-minded and “grapple with difficult moral and political questions that can’t be reduced to slogans.” His column was headlined, “A Haven from the Ivy League’s Madness.”⁷

“If we drop students into the middle of the most boiling, hot, contentious events and say, ‘Now you need to figure out how to how to disagree constructively,’ we’re setting them and ourselves up for failure,” said Weiner, a politics professor who in 2022 became the first Jewish president of a Catholic college in the United States.

“I think one of the things our board has done well is having a good, clear sense of the institution’s mission,” he said. While the fiduciary responsibility of trustees “is certainly significantly financial, it’s ultimately about holding the mission of the institution in trust. And when institutions of higher education drift away from education, I think they’re just not prepared for controversy.”

Christopher Connell is a veteran higher education writer based in Washington, D.C.

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