Last December, approximately 100 pro-Palestine students filed into Widener Library’s Loker Reading Room, taped flyers to the back of their laptops, and read for an hour. This “study-in,” billed as “silent” and “non-disruptive” by the student organizers, was not the largest or highest-profile protest of the year. But that event set the scene for this semester’s most significant challenge to the University’s efforts to curtail disruptive student protests.
Throughout this fall, groups of students and faculty members have again taken to libraries with taped signs and coordinated reading lists. These demonstrations—direct challenges to Harvard’s protest restrictions—have ignited campus discussions on what defines a protest, when free expression obstructs learning, and how to introduce new regulations meant to sustain both academic operations and speech.
On January 19, 2024, just after Alan M. Garber assumed the interim presidency, he and the deans released a statement clarifying University policy regarding “the guarantees and limitations” of campus protest and dissent. That January policy states that “demonstrations and protests are ordinarily not permitted in classrooms…libraries or other spaces designated for study, quiet reflection, and small group discussion.” But it did not define what constitutes a protest.
That ambiguity was put to the test on September 21, when approximately 30 pro-Palestine students sat in Loker wearing keffiyehs and displaying signs protesting Israeli strikes in Lebanon. A day before the event, a Harvard administrator warned students that such an action would violate Harvard policies, The Crimson reported. During the protest, library staff informed the students that they could not protest in the library and recorded their Harvard ID numbers. (Students are allowed to protest outside of the library—the Widener steps are a popular location. This semester, both students and faculty held pro-Palestine protests there and were not punished by the University.)
In response to the study-in, Widener Library banned participating students from the building for two weeks. “Demonstrations and protests are not permitted in libraries,” Widener Library administration wrote in an email to punished students that was obtained by The Crimson. The email specified that the recipient had “a laptop bearing one of the demonstration’s flyers.” During the students’ two-week Widener suspensions, they could pick up library materials from other locations, but not enter Widener itself.
The University response angered some faculty members. What made this study-in a protest? Why did a silent action merit punishment? Three weeks after the initial student action, approximately 30 faculty members followed suit. The participants read texts about dissent (ranging from Martin Luther King Jr. and Henry David Thoreau to materials published by Harvard itself) and displayed placards quoting the Harvard Library Statement of Values (“embrace diverse perspectives”) as well as the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (“reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [our] existence”).
These faculty members, too, were banned from Widener for two weeks following their study-in. Participating professors were especially upset to be punished for speech that was not controversial—in some cases, for displaying quotes from sources published by the University itself. “There is a legitimate line to be drawn at something like hate speech,” said Ogunlesi Family associate professor of business administration Reshmaan Hussam, who participated in that first faculty study-in. “The ideas that we were considering in our study-in don’t come close to that,” adding that the student study-in did not constitute hate speech, either.
Some professors went further, arguing that the sanctions contradicted the University’s educational mandate. “When you’re punishing scholars and students for reading or for silently displaying ideas,” said professor of government Ryan Enos, who also participated in the first faculty study-in, “you’re doing something that seems out of step with the mission of the University.”
Following those initial confrontations, library actions become more numerous on campus. In the month following the October 16 faculty study-in, there have been two such events at the Law Library, one at the Graduate School of Design, another at the Divinity School (a “pray-in”), and two more in Widener (one faculty-led and another student-led). A November 8 Widener faculty study-in pushed the University’s punishment calculus to its logical extreme, with professors displaying blank papers.
Faculty frustration with punishments for protests goes beyond the library study-ins. In August, following a disruptive spring semester, where pro-Palestine protesters encamped in Harvard Yard for 20 days, executive vice president Meredith Weenick shared an updated slate of rules governing shared campus spaces. Some professors have complained that new (or rearticulated) University regulations on speech are both too broad and too vague. They have also expressed frustration that these rules went into place without faculty consultation. Enos felt that the University framing these rules as “issues of operations rather than rules about the fundamental aspects of scholarly life like free expression” served as a way for administrators to “circumvent…faculty governance,” as he put it.
In August, Enos and four other professors protested the new University restriction on chalking. After a contentious October Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) meeting, at which Dean Hopi Hoekstra said she was not consulted in drafting the rules, the chalking ban was effectively rolled back by FAS in early November for facilities under that faculty’s control.
But Harvard’s decentralized structure has made faculty feedback on these University rules difficult. The January statement on protests came from the president, the August rules from the executive vice president, and early-November “frequently asked questions” guidance about the library protests from the library administration (though it was initially posted on the provost’s website; see below). “The reality of the complex administrative structure,” said Graustein professor of mathematics Melanie Matchett Wood, co-president of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, “means that for people who have concerns about what's happening, it is harder to navigate whom to have a conversation with.”
The administrative response to the library protests has, if anything, prompted more faculty members to express concerns. Since the fall wave of demonstrations began, the library has twice articulated why the study-ins merit punishment. On October 24, University librarian Martha Whitehead published an essay titled “Libraries are places for inquiry and learning” in which she argued that the study-ins—which she firmly classified as protests—disrupt academic life:
While a reading room is intended for study, it is not intended to be used as a venue for a group action, quiet or otherwise, to capture people’s attention. In the study-ins in our spaces, we heard from students who saw them publicized and chose not to come to the library. During the events, large numbers of people filed in at once, and several moved around the room taking photos or filming. Seeking attention is in itself disruptive.
On November 4, the library posted a “frequently asked questions” page about the study-ins. There, the library described the study-ins as worthy of punishment because “a group activity…—even a silent one—that is explicitly using a space to make a point is engaging in a demonstration or protest.” It added that the “very point of these group actions was to draw attention—to express a point of view to others.”
These explanations struck some faculty members as “impossibly broad,” in the words of Melanie Matchett Wood. She argued that there is no “clear institutional need” to prevent a group from silently expressing a point of view, even in the library. “It is hard for me to imagine that a rule so broadly worded can possibly be enforced in a content-neutral way.”
Wasserstein public interest professor of law Andrew Crespo, who participated in the first faculty study-in, has already noticed that the new guidance has not been uniformly enforced. “Two weeks ago, my entire 1L section came into class all wearing blue shirts and blue bandanas,” he said. “It was spirit week and they were going to go compete in the section cup….I’m thinking to myself, ‘Are all of these students going to be Ad-Boarded for engaging in a group activity in a classroom with the purpose of making a point and taking a picture of it?’”
The continuous rollout and clarification of these restrictions has led some professors to believe that Harvard is in fact restricting speech that it finds undesirable—perhaps in response to outside pressure. Enos pointed to a “not unfounded belief” from some faculty members that the University, fearing a continuing congressional investigation (and the possibility of more such investigations) and pressure from alumni objecting to pro-Palestine speech, is “going to interpret these ambiguous rules in a way that is going to allow [Harvard] to clamp down on this speech.”
Faculty opinion about punishments for the library sit-ins is not totally uniform. Scalia professor of law Stephen Sachs has defended the sanctions, arguing that the protests are meant to draw attention and therefore disrupt an academic space. “For Harvard’s libraries to be commandeered as protest spaces would be a shame,” he wrote on X. “Libraries are places for confrontation on the page, in the realm of ideas, something that’s compromised when you move the confrontation into the physical space.”
The library study-ins show no sign of abating. Frankfurter professor of law Noah Feldman suggested a quick fix in Bloomberg, writing, “My strong hunch is that a rule allowing silent protests in the library would immediately end the protests taking place there.”
But these protests have seemingly begun to engage issues larger than the actions themselves. Some faculty members warn that the institutional response to the study-ins represents a shift in how Harvard will treat free speech on campus for the foreseeable future.
Andrew Crespo pointed to the University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which places “special emphasis” on “freedom of speech and academic freedom.” Adopted in 1970 following the violent Vietnam War-era protests that severely disrupted academic life on campus, the faculty-written statement protected expression during a moment when the University could have completely shut protests down. This document was “a way to help Harvard remember the essential role of dissent and of protest in the University’s mission,” he said. “Now it is the thing that gets cited most often on campus in letters that are punishing people for engaging in the stuff that the original statement was designed to protect.”
University spokesperson Jason Newton provided the following comment on these issues:
The University-wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities (USRR) aligns the right to free expression, including protest and dissent, alongside the commitment to the rights of every member of our community to carry out their academic and professional work without obstruction. There are spaces available for protests and demonstrations across campus. However, through reasonable time, place and manner expectations for our community, the January 19 statement from University leadership makes clear that protests and demonstrations are not permitted in Harvard’s libraries, as well as other areas of campus that are used for study and academic activities.
The recent protest activities within libraries on campus have been organized and have included actions and signage aimed at drawing attention to a cause or position. Participants in these protests have been alerted repeatedly that their actions violate University policies. As laid out in the Harvard Library Patron Agreement, users of library spaces are required to comply with University rules and policies. That Agreement warns that if patrons don’t, they may lose library privileges.
Participants in protests that occurred inside libraries this semester have lost, for two weeks, access to the particular library building in which they demonstrated. They retained all other library access, including all collections, services, and physical access to all other libraries. If the revocation interfered with their ability to perform their academic responsibilities or barred them from completing academic work, they were instructed to contact the respective library to make arrangements to address the particular access matter. The same process for identifying participants was followed with regard to each protest action, regardless of the message of the protestors.
Now, as last year, the core question remains how the University will balance the need to preserve its academic environment with its commitment to free expression.
