On June 1, a small group of faculty members gathered in a circle under the Gothic arches that mark the entrance to Indiana University’s Bloomington campus. They held candles and signs, made speeches, and used noisemakers as they waited for the clock to strike 11 p.m.
If their protest had taken place on any other night since August 2024, that hour could have meant trouble.
Under a policy passed in response to a monthslong pro-Palestinian encampment at Indiana, certain forms of “expressive activity” — including holding protests, making speeches, and circulating petitions — were banned on campus between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. Administrators argued that the changes were necessary to ensure safety after the encampment got out of hand.
Students and staff sued over the policy. In late May, a federal judge temporarily blocked the nighttime restrictions.
At Indiana, the drawn-out fight over protest protocols reflects a deeper feud between the faculty and the administration. After the new policy took effect last August, professors participated in weekly vigils — essentially a protest of what they saw as antiprotest measures — for three months, said Heather Akou, a professor of fashion design at Indiana.
Twenty-four faculty members, including Akou, were reprimanded by the university for participating, Akou said. And despite the fact that part of the policy is on hold for now, she added, Indiana administrators are defending the reprimand letters.
Indiana spokespeople did not respond to requests to make campus leaders available for an interview for this article, and did not respond to a detailed list of questions.
Meanwhile, the political climate surrounding the university remains contentious. Last week, Gov. Mike Braun, a Republican, removed the three alumni-elected trustees from Indiana’s board — including two who voted against the expressive-activity policy — and replaced them with conservatives, including a prominent lawyer and a former ESPN anchor.
What’s happened at Indiana over the past year also underscores the challenge of striking the right balance on speech, training a fresh spotlight on the tightened demonstration protocols that have cropped up on campuses nationwide.
Texas lawmakers just approved legislation broadly banning “any speech or expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment” between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. at public universities. The measure now awaits the governor’s signature.
The Dunn Meadow Encampment
On April 25, 2024, protesters started an encampment in Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow, a grassy area behind the student union. The move followed months of tension in Bloomington: Faculty had voted no confidence in several campus leaders for calling off planned events related to the Israel-Hamas war.
Acting on a last-minute policy change by administrators requiring prior approval for tents, the Indiana State Police cleared the encampment, arresting scores of people. The tents reappeared shortly after that, and some stayed up until the first form of the expressive-activity policy went into effect in early August.
The policy banned protests between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m., required 10-day prior approval for installing “structures and/or mass physical objects,” and pushed protests 25 feet away from building entrances.
The board’s vote touched off more unrest. Faculty began to defy the rules with their weekly vigils, and the American Civil Liberties Union of Indiana filed a lawsuit arguing the restrictions were overly broad and violated the First Amendment.
In November, the board loosened the policy, clarifying that some “expressive activities” would be allowed at night. Included were university events, events that had gotten prior approval, “distributing literature,” and “spontaneously and contemporaneously assembling.” Protests, speeches, and petitions were still banned.
More recently, the university has doubled down on its reprimands of several professors for flouting the policy.
On May 28, one day before the judge blocked the overnight restrictions, Indiana’s provost, Rahul Shrivastav, sent a letter to 13 faculty who had been cited for participating in the vigils.
Some months earlier, the faculty members had received written letters in their personnel files. Akou’s letter described the policy violation and warned that punishments for future violations could be more severe — listing termination as a possible consequence.
The professors then appealed their reprimands, arguing the policy was unconstitutional. A few had been cited for breaking the first version of the expressive-activity policy, which they argued was unfair since it was later altered.
But the policy’s legality is a separate issue to be resolved by the courts, not the university, Shrivastav wrote in his May 28 follow-up letter. Since faculty openly admitted to violating the policy, Shrivastav denied the appeal, but requested that a second letter be placed in the faculty members’ personnel files clarifying that the original expressive-activity policy had been amended.
“You are absolutely entitled to express your disagreement with this or any other policy or public matter,” Shrivastav wrote. “Yet in expressing your views, you are still responsible either for following applicable university policies or being prepared to accept the consequences for not doing so.”
Indiana’s reprimands of professors, though less severe than the now-repealed trespass bans issued after the Dunn Meadow arrests a year ago, stand out when compared to other institutions. Some tenured faculty members who intentionally broke Northwestern University’s demonstration policies in November 2024 said they were not disciplined, The Daily Northwestern, the university’s student newspaper, reported.
‘Over the Line’
The new protest rules colleges added last year typically restricted encampments, banned masks, increased consequences for protesters, and narrowed where and when protests could take place. Some policies, like Bloomington’s, went “over the line” and unfairly targeted pro-Palestinian speech, said Ross Marchand, program counsel at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
Indiana was one of the few colleges that faced a lawsuit over its policies. The ACLU also sued the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor in February, in part challenging its ban on “disruptive activities.”
Indiana administrators have said the university’s campus police department doesn’t have the resources to manage overnight protests. The long-running Dunn Meadow encampment presented significant challenges, according to court documents: IU received reports of protesters “defecating in buckets,” bathing in the river, a drug overdose and “unaffiliated individuals with violent criminal histories occupying the encampment.”
Ensuring both campus safety and the right to protest is difficult terrain for colleges to navigate, First Amendment experts told The Chronicle.
“The university is really, over many years now, has become much more sensitive to liability concerns about students and safety concerns about students,” said Keith Whittington, a professor at Yale Law School. “They feel a much greater need than they once did to closely monitor what students are doing and try to restrict activities that might create some safety issues.”
But Indiana’s expressive-activity policy never specified how many nighttime protesters were too many. That meant even a protest involving two people — unlikely to be a threat to public safety — would require prior approval, the judge said in her order granting the preliminary injunction.
While the decision was far from “novel or surprising,” it will hopefully send a message to universities imposing similar policies that “the courts are not going to put up with this kind of similarly open violation of the First Amendment and so they probably shouldn’t try it,” said Mary Anne Franks, a professor at the George Washington University Law School.
The university can challenge the preliminary injunction in court, said Kenneth Falk, legal director of the ACLU of Indiana.
At least one Indiana professor said university decision-making and rising political influence on campus have pushed up her retirement plans.
Barbara Dennis, a professor in Indiana’s School of Education who teaches research methodology courses, said she was arrested at the Dunn Meadow encampment last year after acting as a human shield between police officers and students.
In addition to the handling of campus protests, Dennis cited the university’s move to shutter its diversity office, as well as an Indiana law passed last year that required public colleges to accept complaints over professors who fail to “foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity.”
“I think they’re creating a climate of fear at the university, and I’m not going to work in that climate,” Dennis said.
