O n April 27, more than 100 members of Princeton’s faculty published an open letter condemning the university’s decision to arrest and discipline two graduate students who defied police warnings and refused to dismantle their tents as part of Princeton’s “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” In arresting and disciplining the protesters — who had violated Princeton’s long-standing rules prohibiting the erection of tents in outdoor campus spaces — the university had, according to the professors, undertaken a “repressive action” that constituted “a grave threat to freedom of speech, dissent, and assembly on the Princeton campus.” Characterizing the arrests and discipline — which have since been followed by eleven more arrests — as an “outrageous overreach,” the professors demanded the rescission of any criminal and disciplinary charges and called for the “immediate and full reinstatement” of the rule-breaking students, who were banned from campus shortly after their arrests.
The sentiment expressed by these Princeton faculty is not unique to them, as faculty elsewhere have voiced similar objections to the actions of their institutions. At public universities like Arizona State and Indiana University and private institutions like Northeastern University and Washington University in St. Louis, university leaders have disciplined students who violate protest rules and have called in police to make arrests. Predictably, many faculty, students, and other observers (nearly all of whom are ideologically aligned with the goals of the anti-Israel campus encampments across the nation) have decried such moves by universities as infringements on protesters’ rights to freedom of speech and protest.
Set aside for now the obvious hypocrisy of many leftist supporters of anti-Israel encampments on the matter of free speech. After years of turning a blind eye to — or, in the case of many, actively contributing to — the metastasizing of campus speech restrictionism, they now miraculously seem to have discovered the value of free speech. Here, our immediate concern is to debunk the lies being peddled by those who claim that arresting and punishing rule-breaking protesters constitutes a grievous offense against free speech, and to explain why universities are right to take action against these agitators.
U.S. courts have long interpreted the First Amendment’s robust and wide-ranging protections of speech and protest to admit of certain time, place, and manner restrictions. In other words, the Constitution permits the government (including the administrations of public universities) to impose rules governing the time, place, and manner of expressive activity so long as these regulations are content-neutral and narrowly tailored to serve compelling interests. This means that public universities like Arizona State can, for instance, enact rules prohibiting protesters from using amplified sound devices during times when classes are in session or restricting the pitching of tents in outdoor campus spaces. Such regulations do not violate anyone’s rights.
Of course, private institutions like Princeton and Columbia are not bound by the First Amendment, which makes it all the more embarrassing that nearly 50 Princeton professors seem to think that students at Columbia and other private institutions are having their “constitutionally recognized right[s]” violated. True, in Princeton’s case, the university has adopted legally binding free-speech commitments that closely mirror the First Amendment’s guarantees. But many private universities have adopted speech and protest policies that are more restrictive.
Take Columbia, which recently banned from its campus a student anti-Israel encampment leader who declared that Zionists “don’t deserve to live” and told Columbia administrators to be grateful that he is “not just going out and murdering Zionists.” This person’s speech — vile, hateful, and flagrantly antisemitic — appears nevertheless to be speech that would be protected at Princeton. But as a private institution, Columbia has the right to craft and enforce its own rules. We can debate whether speech policies should be more or less restrictive (we ourselves have long encouraged private universities to follow Princeton in adopting First Amendment–aligned speech policies), but there is nothing inherently illegitimate or unlawful about private institutions choosing more restrictive policies.
Similarly legitimate — and not at all violative of its free-speech commitments — was Princeton’s decision to punish two students who, after repeated warnings to stop, continued to violate its rules against unauthorized tent-pitching. Princeton did not enforce its rules arbitrarily or with the intent of targeting anti-Israel protesters on the basis of their views. Instead, the university sought merely to enforce a long-standing regulation against out-of-control activists who conspired (already a crime in New Jersey) to commit actions they knew would violate university rules and the New Jersey criminal code.
It is not a “grave threat” to free speech when Princeton, or any other university, declines to exempt anti-Israel agitators from preexisting rules governing the time, place, and manner of demonstrations. To claim otherwise is nothing short of absurd. As Keith Whittington, perhaps our nation’s foremost free-speech scholar, has observed, “there is no free-speech right to have such rules waived or the violation of such rules ignored.”
Indeed, it is commendable when universities like Princeton follow through with the faithful enforcement of their rules and refuse to yield to intense lobbying efforts and public campaigns demanding, for plainly ideological reasons, amnesty for delinquent students. Universities, like governments, have a broad interest in seeing their policies heeded and enforced.
Granted, executive discretion is a fundamental principle in our law: It is in the interest of justice that prosecutors can choose not to prosecute every instance of criminal misconduct. And similarly, university administrations needn’t discipline every instance of student misconduct (sometimes, for example, immunity is granted to those who cooperate during hazing investigations). But what we are witnessing on our campuses cries out urgently for discipline. Students and faculty have conspired, en masse, to violate university policies and the law. Now is not the time to set a precedent of lawlessness or fecklessness in the face of sophomoric bullies. Once that precedent is set, the game is over. Forget about order and credibility.
Unfortunately, some university administrations have shown themselves excruciatingly weak in the face of agitators. Barnard College, for example, timidly walked back the suspensions it imposed on dozens of arrested students after a campaign of coordinated leftist backlash (including from the extremist, Israel-hating Ilhan Omar, Democratic representative from Minnesota, whose daughter was among those suspended).
Princeton and other universities must stand their ground against the extraordinary tide of pressure demanding amnesty for encampment activists. Now is not the time to allow these radical agitators to poison our public discourse and our national understanding of free speech with lies, distortions, or plain ignorance about the nature of free expression. Much less is it the time to surrender to lawlessness and disorder.
Matthew Wilson is a senior at Princeton studying political theory. Myles McKnight graduated from Princeton in 2023 and is an incoming 1L at Harvard Law School.