Campus Protest Encampments Are Unethical

This semester, student protesters opposed to Israel’s war in Gaza have already defaced a statue at Columbia, vandalized an administration building at Cornell, and blocked access to a convocation at Pomona College. Whether they will return to the tactic of erecting protest encampments, as happened on nearly 100 campuses last spring, is uncertain.

Proponents of the encampments felt that their cause was urgent, that occupying space to protest is a time-honored tactic in the tradition of the civil-rights movement, and that calling police to clear encampments was violent authoritarianism. Critics of encampments countered that, when deployed last semester, they disrupted teaching and learning, violated the rights of many students to traverse their own campuses, caused some to fear for their physical safety, sparked violence, and imposed those costs and others without ending the war in Gaza or having any realistic chance of doing so.

The practical, legal, and moral arguments against occupying the quad add up to a protest tactic with costs that far outweigh any benefits. Some of the problems with encampments are obvious, others subtle; taken together, they show that academic communities cannot thrive when any group uses coercion to try to force others to adopt its ideas––an approach that usually fails anyway. Activists should reject encampments as both unethical and ineffective.

UCLA offers a case study in what’s wrong with encampments. Royce Quad is a space many students crisscross to access central parts of campus. On April 25, pro-Palestine protesters formed an encampment with barricades. Entrances were guarded by activists, many of them masked. They barred entry to students who support Israel’s existence. On April 30, an angry crowd gathered to protest the barricades and encampment. Counterprotesters “hid their faces behind masks and scarves,” CNN reported. “Some attackers sprayed protesters with chemical irritants, hit them with wooden boards, punched and kicked them and shot fireworks into the crowd of students and supporters huddled behind umbrellas and wooden planks, attempting to stay safe.” Authorities, who had failed to stop protesters from unlawfully occupying the quad, similarly did not intervene as counterprotesters unlawfully assaulted some of its occupiers.

[Jerusalem Demsas: The problem with America’s protest feedback loop]

Three Jewish students who were denied the ability to cross the quad filed a federal lawsuit against UCLA, arguing that they have a religious obligation to support a Jewish state in Israel, that their religious belief caused them to be denied equal access to their college education, and that UCLA nevertheless allowed the encampment to remain in place for a week. UCLA countered that it lawfully exercised the discretion that it needs when trying to avoid the escalation of conflicts.

The group Faculty for Justice in Palestine at UCLA submitted an amicus brief in the case, arguing that their allies are the ones who were mistreated. “Students and faculty of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment have been subjected to police brutality and mob attacks by self-proclaimed Zionists and white Supremacists, representing an almost total failure of UCLA to provide timely intervention or protection,” their brief asserts. In its telling, “Entrance to the encampment is contingent on principles, politics, and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, and not on identity.”

Federal Judge Mark C. Scarsi disagreed. Earlier this month, he issued a preliminary injunction siding with the Jewish students, writing that they “were excluded from portions of the UCLA campus because they refused to denounce their faith.” He called this “abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.” UCLA appealed the ruling, then dropped that appeal. The school is obligated to clear future encampments, or else to shut down any educational program––a class, lecture series, and so on—that is inaccessible to anyone due membership in a protected class.

Other jurists may reach different conclusions about whether the activists at the UCLA barricades were engaged in discrimination on the basis of religion, as opposed to ideology. But surely colleges should ensure that no student is blocked from crossing campus for holding any belief, and especially for beliefs that are actively contested as part of academic life. Imagine being blocked from crossing a campus due to support for abortion rights, gun rights, trans rights, or property rights, or indeed, for failing to affirm Israel’s right to self-defense. Idea barricades should be anathema at any institution of higher education. To engage in or support any such blockade is unethical.

Granted, it is possible to set up a peaceful encampment that is intended not to intimidate, but to raise awareness or show ongoing commitment to a cause. When visiting UC Berkeley one day last spring, I found the tents pitched in front of Sproul Plaza to be minimally disruptive, in a lively part of campus where free-speech activities are constant. The encampment was far from academic buildings, did not block pedestrian traffic, was easy to avoid by using other routes onto campus, and seemed easily monitored by UC police officers stationed nearby.

But nondisruptive encampments are the exception, not the rule, partly because crowds of young people behave unpredictably, and partly because disruption is often the point. Many student activists seem to feel justified not only in trying to persuade their college administrators and peers to adopt particular beliefs about the war in Gaza, but to intentionally disrupt their lives and educations to coerce agreement. “We as students will reclaim our power on campus––there will be no classes or compliance with our institutions so long as their shameless profiteering off of our genocide persists,” Students for Justice in Palestine declared in an open letter. While I found no survey data asking specifically about campus encampments, a recent national survey of current college students found that 41 percent believe “students have a right to occupy buildings or stage ‘die-ins’ to prevent normal activities from occurring on campus” to raise awareness about the war. And 27 percent said they have a right to disrupt classes.

A standard defense of disruptive tactics is to invoke the civil-rights movement. Its leaders repeatedly engaged in civil disobedience––the knowing, willful violation of laws and rules to disrupt the status quo. If such “good trouble” played an integral part in a cause as righteous as the U.S. civil-rights movement, why are today’s encampments any different or less defensible? It’s a fair question to pose, but not a hard one to answer.

[Tyler Austin Harper: America’s colleges are reaping what they sowed]

In the civil-rights-era victories, protesters were violating unjust laws, such as the ones that forced lunch counters to segregate. Today’s students are violating perfectly reasonable rules, such as the ones that forbid anyone, regardless of viewpoint, from erecting barricades to prevent fellow students from traversing the quad. Ending those illegitimate laws against segregated lunch counters made almost everyone better off. Ending legitimate rules against occupying the quad would make almost everyone worse off.

In addition, when “occupying” was a tactic in civil-rights-era civil disobedience, it was aimed at cogent targets. To protest segregation in a given jurisdiction, activists targeted segregated spaces in that jurisdiction.

That is unlike occupying a quad and harassing undergraduates in Westwood to protest a war waged by a foreign government 7,500 miles away. Activists argue that UCLA is complicit in the war in Gaza. UC Chief Investment Officer Jagdeep Singh Bachher told the Associated Press that the activists want the university to divest “$3.3 billion in holdings from groups with ties to weapons manufacturers; $12 billion in U.S. treasuries; $163 million in the investment firm BlackRock and $2.1 billion in bonds that BlackRock manages; $8.6 billion from Blackstone and $3.2 billion from the other 24 companies.” I find it silly to think that colleges’ spurning those entities will do any good for Palestinians. Regardless, near UCLA’s campus, one can find a federal building, an Israeli consulate, offices of multiple members of Congress, and weapons manufacturers. So the justification for targeting fellow UCLA undergraduates suspected of Zionism is … what, exactly?

I share the dismay of student activists at innocent lives lost in Gaza. Even when disagreeing with some of their positions—such as their desire for an academic boycott of Israel, and their refusal to acknowledge the ongoing culpability of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran in fueling violence in the region—I happily and repeatedly defend their First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly. Perhaps they are even correct that the best way forward today is an immediate cease-fire.

But they are failed by sympathetic adults and peers who defer to their tactics as if “there’s no wrong way to protest”––a talking point that cannot withstand scrutiny. Even if it were possible to prove definitively that an undergraduate were on the wrong side of an ongoing war, that would not justify protesting the wrongheaded student by, for example, shouting ethnic slurs at her, walking behind her with a bullhorn mocking her physical appearance, or sneaking into her dorm room and urinating on her possessions, even though all of those tactics would disrupt the status quo and attract attention. There are plenty of wrong ways to protest––and plenty of right ways to protest, too.

The University of Chicago has a model that allows for robust protest without the disruptive elements of encampments and the incentives that they create for violent clashes. In May, Paul Alivisatos, the university’s president, sent a message clarifying that institution’s position on creating encampments as a protest tactic. He said the school wanted to “provide the greatest leeway possible for free expression, even expression of viewpoints that some find deeply offensive,” and it would intervene only if a protest “blocks the learning or expression of others or that meaningfully disrupts the functioning or safety of the University.”

To illustrate that principle, he compared two demonstrations by anti-Israel activists. In the first, a student group got permission to cover a large portion of the main quad with a Palestinian flag for several weeks. A sign urged Honor the Martyrs, which many passersby found offensive, perhaps thinking, as I did, of terrorists who had murdered innocents. During certain hours, a table was staffed with students who explained their intent by saying that the group regards every Palestinian who has died at Israel’s hands since October 7—not merely killers in Hamas—to be a martyr, a distinction that helped me better understand their views.

In the second demonstration, a group of students and faculty occupied a campus building with classrooms and offices, “a clear disruption of the learning of others and of the normal functioning of the University,” Alivisatos wrote. “After repeated warnings, the protesters were arrested.”

[David A. Graham: Trump has a new plan to deal with campus protests]

Alivisatos chose those contrasting examples to underscore that the university would not punish viewpoints, even viewpoints many find odious, but would punish tactics, including encampments, that disrupt the institution. There are an almost unlimited number of ways to express a viewpoint, seek to persuade others, and protest without violating any rules or policies, he stated, but students should consider that “encampment, with all the etymological connections of the word to military origins, is a way of using force of a kind rather than reason to persuade others.”

Students who worry that authority figures are biased in favor of the status quo should be most supportive of the viewpoint-neutral approach that Chicago takes: It guarantees broad free-speech rights to all students, regardless of their identities or beliefs. All can speak their mind, even if their views are at odds with what authorities believe. And the ethos that students are free to expose their classmates to a viewpoint or to argue for a policy, but not to force disruptions upon others unless they get their way, protects everyone in a world where disruptive tactics are as easily adopted by one movement in a dispute as another. Universities cannot flourish as places where diverse students can express themselves if value differences are seen as justifying coercive actions.

Last spring’s encampments disrupted academic life, sometimes by design; broke practical, principled, legitimate rules; violated the civil rights of some fellow students; prompted many to fear for their physical safety; sparked violent altercations on some campuses; and failed to stop the war. They largely failed to advance divestment, too, and in isolated cases where progress was made toward that goal, there’s little reason to believe that Palestinians will thereby benefit. Alternative ways to advocate for Palestinians are less ethically fraught, more constructive, and no less effective, albeit less fun than camping on the quad. Should the tactic return, I fear that it will again end in senseless violence of one sort or another. Everyone involved deserves better than that.