Last week, we read in the library. We read Martin Luther King Jr. We read Toni Morrison. We read Henry David Thoreau. We read Hannah Arendt.
We read the Statement on Rights and Responsibilities of Harvard University, where we teach, which declares that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in [Harvard’s] existence.” We read the Harvard Library statement of values, which exhorts our students to “embrace diverse perspectives,” a message that, as it happens, is printed on a banner outside of the reading room where we sat down to read.
We printed that same three-word phrase in large type on a reading list we brought with us into the library. We entered when the bells in Harvard Yard rang noon. We sat together reading quietly alongside two dozen of our faculty colleagues, both tenured and untenured across five Harvard schools and multiple departments. When the bells rang one, we left.
Why did we read in the library? Admittedly, it’s an absurd question. Reading, after all, is what libraries are for. Or so we thought. But a few weeks ago, at least 12 of our students were suspended from the same library for two weeks for doing the same thing: reading quietly, with small signs taped to their laptops. The signs, reflecting on Israel’s pager attacks in Lebanon, read: “Imagine It Happened Here.”
We strongly disagree with Harvard’s decision to ban our students from the library over this conduct. A university should never deny access to scholarly resources as a mode of punishment. In fact, we believe these sanctions violate the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights.
More fundamentally, there was no reason to punish these students at all. A university has an interest in avoiding disruptive behavior in its libraries — things like shouting, marching, or blocking access. But sitting quietly and reading simply cannot be classified as disruption. This is true regardless of the clothing people wear or the stickers, reading materials, or printed sheets of paper they independently or collectively display. Indeed, punishing quiet readers for such things would invite discrimination based on the content of the nondisruptive expression.
In making these observations, we disagree with Harvard University’s president, Alan Garber, who recently said the university can and should punish people quietly reading in the library if their “intention” is “to deliver a common message.” Respectfully, President Garber has it precisely backwards. A university should not punish community members engaging in nondisruptive behavior simply because those individuals hope to communicate ideas to other community members. The reason, echoed by Harvard’s own core-values statement, is simple: Sharing ideas is why universities exist.
The day before we read in the library, we sent a letter to our colleagues in the administration who banned the students. In it, we made clear that we don’t see any meaningful distinction between our study session and the one the students held. They, like us, did not say they were conducting a protest. Rather, like us, they said they were holding a study session, with hopes that others might engage with the ideas they set out to study.
If there is one noteworthy difference between our study session and theirs, it is that the students all wore traditional Palestinian keffiyehs around their necks, while we and our colleagues wore black scarves. We did this with the intention of underscoring the unequal and repeated imposition of disciplinary threats and actions upon students expressing a particular point of view over this last year. Our students’ suspensions from the library come amidst a wave of new, excessive, speech-restrictive rules that have been codified and enforced in direct response to student protests about the devastation in Gaza.
As Melanie Matchett Wood, a math professor, recently wrote on behalf of the leadership of the Council on Academic Freedom here at Harvard, “the students who sat quietly and studied” in the library “did not interfere with normal campus activity, and Harvard thus has no compelling reason to prohibit their speech.” Wood went on to observe that current campus policies have “no definition of ‘protest.’” Even President Garber has noted that “gray areas” exist in the rules adjudicating whether a reading exercise of the sort we engaged in last week is permitted.
On this score, we agree. The library rules, like so many other new speech-restrictive rules announced on university campuses of late, are chillingly unclear and dangerously broad. As we told the security guards who demanded our IDs while we sat quietly reading our texts, we do not believe we violated any university rules or values. We do not understand why a university would punish people for reading in a library, even if they are reading in hopes that others will engage with the ideas they are exploring.
But then again, our university punished our students for doing precisely that. Will it punish us, too?
A version of this essay first appeared in The Harvard Crimson.
