Students Protested the Police. The University Called the Cops. Faculty Members Want Answers.

When Emory University students started protesting on a Monday afternoon last April, the scene was calm. Their activism targeted a police-training facility planned for construction in an urban forest a few miles outside of downtown Atlanta. On Emory’s quad, a couple hundred students filtered in and out throughout the day; they sat in the grass, sang songs, and dyed shirts. Several faculty members who stopped by described it as “kumbaya.”

Then some of the students decided to camp out overnight. Tensions between students and administrators escalated. In the early morning hours, nearly a dozen Atlanta police officers showed up, and the students were threatened with arrest.

Administrators said they shut down the event over concerns about campus safety. Students said calling in Atlanta police officers made them feel unsafe — especially because the protest was about the Atlanta police.

In the months since, Emory faculty members have gotten involved, saying the incident exposed flaws in the university’s protocol for handling protests. They weren’t satisfied with the progress of the official investigation into administrators’ actions. So this fall, they started their own.

The professors’ investigation — conducted by the Faculty Senate for Emory’s College of Arts and Sciences — has led to a proposed motion of no confidence in the dean of campus life, and demands that administrators apologize and vow never again to call the Atlanta police to a nonviolent demonstration. Faculty members also want an overhaul of the university’s open-expression policy, saying it’s focused more on restricting speech than on protecting it.

Emory’s leaders have told the faculty to stand down and let the university inquiry run its course. That review will be done soon, according to the professor leading it.

“Our community knows that Emory is committed to open expression and that we welcome peaceful protests and the vast range of ideas and perspectives that they bring. A few members of our community have expressed concerns about the policy and have asked for it to be reviewed,” an Emory spokesperson said in a written statement to The Chronicle. “These requests reinforce the importance of protecting and preserving open expression on our campuses.”

The long tail of the Emory demonstration reflects the contentious nature of campus conversations about speech and protests, particularly at a moment of heightened student activism over the Israel-Hamas war. Dozens of students at Brown University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst were arrested last fall during pro-Palestinian rallies that campus officials say crossed a line.

Recent debates at Emory also demonstrate how difficult it is to determine the right role for police in campus environments, where students, faculty members, and administrators often have markedly different visions of what safety should look like.

The students who protested in April wanted Emory to denounce the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, derided by opponents as “Cop City.” Protesters across Atlanta had been rallying for months against the planned training center, citing concerns about militarization of the police and environmental harm to the South River Forest, where construction was soon to begin.

The Emory event “was just a really, really lovely community space,” said Jaanaki Radhakrishnan, a sophomore at Emory and one of the organizers. The students never thought getting arrested was in the cards, she said.

Off campus, previous “Cop City” protests had led to clashes with police: Three months earlier, Atlanta police officers shot and killed Manuel Esteban Páez Terán during an attempt to evict the environmental activists who were camped out in the South River Forest.

Emory’s protest started off smoothly, according to Radhakrishnan. The students didn’t reserve the quad or register their protest, but they were allowed to continue. (University policy encourages reserving spaces in advance but states that allowing “impromptu” protests is “pivotal” to protecting free speech.)

An administrator monitored the event from the sidelines: Courtnay Oddman, then the associate director of operations for Emory’s residence-life department, who was representing the university’s open-expression committee. Open-expression observers are faculty and staff members trained by Emory’s campus-life department to “protect the rights of the community members to express their opinions in non-disruptive ways.” Observers act on behalf of the dean of campus life.

Around 5 p.m., Oddman told the protesters it was time to leave, but they didn’t budge, Radhakrishnan said. Later in the evening, Oddman told the students they could face disciplinary charges, according to Radhakrishnan. (When Oddman, who’s now the director of open-expression programs, was asked for comment, an Emory representative referred The Chronicle to the university’s written statement about the event.)

Around 11 p.m., a group of about 20 students decided they wanted to camp out on the quad overnight. They had built a vigil for Páez Terán, the protester who was killed by Atlanta police in January, and wanted to make sure it wasn’t disassembled, Radhakrishnan said.

The students began putting up tents. According to Radhakrishnan, Oddman warned the students that if they didn’t leave, she would hand over control to Emory’s campus police, who’d been observing the protest from afar, and the students could receive code-of-conduct violations and be forcibly removed.

Oddman eventually tapped Emory’s campus police. Around 1 a.m., the students were still on the quad, and the campus police called the Atlanta Police Department.

Radhakrishnan remembers a campus-police officer telling her, “You need to get all of these kids out of here. Because when APD moves in, it’s out of my control and I don’t know what they’re going to do.”

Radhakrishnan counted 11 Atlanta police cars that pulled up to the quad. “They put their floodlights on. They got out of their cars and lined up. And were just, like, standing there with their guns being very scary,” she said.

An Emory spokesperson said that “Atlanta officers were present only to support Emory police, if needed.”

Campus police approached the students and told them that they were going to be arrested and could face criminal charges, Radhakrishnan said, unless they left immediately. The students grabbed their tents and other belongings and ran away.

In the following days, the faculty listserv was abuzz. Concerned professors were questioning why the Atlanta Police Department had been called on students during a nonviolent protest.

A similar incident had rocked the campus a dozen years earlier. In April 2011, four Emory students and three students from other local colleges were arrested on trespass charges after camping on the quad for five days as a protest against the labor practices of Emory’s food-services vendor.

A task force convened, and its work resulted in a revamped policy and the creation of the open-expression committee, the group that now observes protests.

“Here we are 10 years later, and we see that Emory administration is even quicker to shut down student protest than they were 10 years ago,” said Sean Meighoo, associate professor of comparative literature. “So that is, I think, very disturbing.”

Open expression falls under the jurisdiction of Enku Gelaye, senior vice president and dean of campus life. Students, faculty, and staff on the open-expression committee interpret the policy and investigate alleged violations. As part of that investigation, the committee issues a written opinion, which includes a determination of whether anyone’s rights were violated.

According to the policy, the dean of campus life’s authority — and the authority of observers acting on the dean’s behalf — should be delegated to campus police only in an emergency, which includes situations involving “imminent serious bodily harm; serious threat; imminent life-threatening behavior; reckless disregard for human life; or threat to life, limb, or property.”

The policy also states that if a protest “is forcibly terminated, a full statement of the circumstances leading to the incident” should be written by the dean of campus life and shared within the university.

Concerned faculty members said they didn’t see how camping on the quad constituted an emergency and that they had seen no statement. “The administration didn’t show any grace or any sort of humility to even acknowledge there was some harm done,” said Dilek Huseyinzadegan, an associate professor of philosophy.

Professors also had questions about who was in charge that night. Did senior administrators tell Oddman what to do, or did she act on her own? Who approved the decision to involve the police?

As the fall semester was about to begin, Huseyinzadegan, Meighoo, and Sara McClintock, an associate professor of religion, sent a letter to the Faculty Senate’s president, asking that the senate investigate how the open-expression policy was “administered and enforced” during the April protest. They addressed the letter to the senate president, but not Dean Gelaye or the open-expression committee, they wrote, “because it is both these parties who have violated the policy.”

Over the course of the fall semester, the Faculty Senate sat down with Gelaye, three of the student protesters, and the professor who chairs the open-expression committee to learn more about how and why the event ended with threats of arrest. Several faculty members told The Chronicle that they hoped the proceedings would lead Emory to examine — and potentially overhaul — the open-expression policy.

At the very least, they said, the protocol on when and why to involve police in a protest should be more thoughtful.

“The reflexive reach for police really needs to be examined — ‘When in doubt, call the police,’” said Jonathan Prude, an associate professor of history.

The instinct to call the police is not an issue just at Emory, said Charles H.F. Davis III, an assistant professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who studies race in education. Davis supports abolishing campus-police departments.

“We’re socialized into this idea that somehow safety and policing are synonymous, when there’s so much evidence to the contrary,” Davis said. “Police tend to escalate these situations.”

As Emory faculty members pressed ahead with their inquiry, administrators pushed back.

The university’s first public statement defending the decision to shut down the protest came from Gregory L. Fenves, Emory’s president, in a September interview with The Emory Wheel, the student newspaper. Fenves said that “having overnight camping affects the operations of the university because we have to keep students safe.”

Fenves also defended Emory’s open-expression policy. He told the campus newspaper that he was open to changes. “But free speech is not completely unconstrained, and I think we have very good rules here that are very wide open about protest and demonstration,” he said.

Fenves reiterated campus-safety arguments in a December letter to faculty leaders, signed by him and Ravi V. Bellamkonda, the provost, and obtained by The Chronicle. If the protest had continued overnight, “this would have created safety concerns and significantly disrupted university operations,” the letter said.

The Chronicle requested interviews with senior administrators. Instead, a university spokesperson provided written responses to questions.

At Emory, campus protests are shut down only “after multiple attempts by observers” to ask participants to voluntarily change their behavior, stated the responses. The spokesperson detailed 10 actions that could lead the university to terminate an event, including violating the campus code of conduct, breaking a law, interfering “unreasonably with the general operations of the university,” and harming people or property.

Much of faculty members’ criticism centered on Gelaye’s role as dean of campus life and how the decision was made to call the Atlanta Police Department. When Gelaye met with the Faculty Senate in October, according to Meighoo, she said that while she was sorry for the way the protest was handled, she would not be issuing an apology.

Gelaye said that she and her office had stayed in contact with Fenves and Bellamkonda throughout the course of the night, according to professors at the meeting. “This in effect implicates the provost and president in the events of last April and raises yet more concerns about what happened,” said Clifton Crais, a professor of history and a member of the Faculty Senate.

Shortly after that meeting, a second faculty letter — again written by Huseyinzadegan, McClintock, and Meighoo — called for a formal apology from Gelaye and a “written assurance” that armed police would not be allowed on campus again in response to a peaceful protest. If she declined, the faculty letter said, Gelaye should resign.

Meanwhile, Crais prepared three draft motions: a motion of no confidence in Gelaye; proposed revisions to the open-expression policy; and a set of recommendations to Emory’s University Senate, which represents all students, faculty, and staff. That third motion asked for a task force to investigate the events of the April protest and develop more effective approaches for handling dissent.

At a subsequent faculty meeting, those steps prompted remarks from the provost, who expressed his support for Gelaye and said that it was premature for the Faculty Senate to be acting in any capacity before the open-expression committee had finished its investigation.

“It was basically, ‘You guys should stand down, and it wasn’t in your arena to take up the issue,’” Crais said. (The investigation from the open-expression committee is wrapping up, Ilya Nemenman, the committee chair and a professor of physics, told The Chronicle. “We are close, but dotting all i’s will still take some time,” he wrote in an email.)

A follow-up letter to faculty leaders from the president and provost on October 31 was emphatic: “That Dean Gelaye continues to be the target of criticism, including the consideration of a motion of no confidence, is unwarranted and without merit.”

On November 15, the Faculty Senate passed a motion requesting that all three senior administrators — Fenves, Bellamkonda, and Gelaye — issue a public statement by December 1 that clarified who called the Atlanta police and why, and acknowledged that doing so was “a dangerous choice.”

Instead of a public statement, Fenves and Bellamkonda responded with their December letter. “After midnight, there were few Emory Police Department officers left on campus,” the pair wrote.

Campus police, the letter continued, “made the decision to request support from the Atlanta Police Department in case the situation escalated. Fortunately, the protesters left the quad peacefully, and no arrests were made.”

In recent years, colleges across the country have revisited their policies on protests as administrators have faced pressure to better protect students’ free-speech rights.

Public colleges must adhere to the First Amendment, but “private universities are in a completely different situation,” said Keith E. Whittington, a professor of politics at Princeton University. “There’s no outside force that’s going to require them to take any particular approach to these issues. It’s entirely a question about what policies they’ve adopted themselves.”

Those policies have been tested in the last three months, amid widespread campus activism related to the Israel-Hamas war. Most protests have criticized Israel’s attacks on Gaza, which have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians. Some events have prompted police involvement.

At the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Brown University, protesters remained inside buildings after campus police warned that they were trespassing and needed to leave — similar to the Emory protesters who remained on the quad. Unlike at Emory, local law enforcement was not called to the scene. (All three institutions employ sworn police forces with the authority to arrest.)

Both UMass and Brown protesters said they would not disperse until administrators agreed to their demands, which called for the universities to condemn Israel in different ways. Neither administration did so.

Fifty-six students and one employee were arrested at UMass, while 20 students were arrested at Brown, all by campus police. In contrast to the Emory students, UMass students explicitly stated an intention in advance to defy police orders and get arrested.

Speech experts told The Chronicle that colleges — including private institutions — should strive to carve out space for dissent, even when protests get messy.

It can be helpful for a policy to spell out what type of speech is protected and how a college should respond to a disruptive protest, as Emory’s does, but too much detail and jargon can get confusing, said Neal H. Hutchens, a professor of educational-policy studies and evaluation at the University of Kentucky.

Emory’s protest policy stands out for its nine-page length. The protest policy at UMass, a public university, is shorter, at roughly 1,200 words. And the protest policy at Brown, a private institution like Emory, runs just five paragraphs. It states that “protest is a necessary and acceptable means of expression.” Protests cannot “interfere with the rights of others to make use of or enjoy the facilities or attend the functions of the university,” the policy states.

Crais, the history professor, said he believes the length of Emory’s policy makes it ineffective. The brief policies at other private colleges, such as Yale University, essentially say “don’t break things,” Crais said. He has proposed a 336-word version of Emory’s protocol based on Yale’s document.

“In my opinion, the open-expression policy is really not workable. It’s unusually complex, and given the large size of the committee, it struggles to respond to the various challenges before it,” Crais said. “It is less a policy to protect free speech, but more a speech-management apparatus.”

Debates over the role of policing on campuses have swelled over the past decade, as awareness of systemic racism in law enforcement has grown. Some institutions considered reforms after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, but a broader shift away from policing didn’t materialize. More recently, concerns about crime on campus, including potential mass shootings, have prompted colleges to shore up their security apparatuses.

A 2021 survey of 140 institutions found that the vast majority of both private and public colleges allow the local police department to be involved when student demonstrations escalate.

While Emory administrators have defended how they handled last spring’s protest, it is possible the university will alter its approach for future demonstrations. The open-expression committee’s investigation report will include recommended edits to the open-expression policy, Nemenman told The Chronicle this month.

The aftermath hasn’t dissuaded students from protesting. Another rally against “Cop City” took place in October.

At that event, students also called for the university to condemn Palestinian deaths in the Israel-Hamas war. President Fenves chastised the demonstrators for chanting phrases like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which he described as antisemitic.

Two professors criticized Fenves’s response in an opinion essay, while stating that the Palestine-related chants “surprised and alienated potential allies” of the campaign against “Cop City.” Other faculty members, meanwhile, expressed frustration that Fenves almost immediately issued a public statement about the October protest, something he didn’t do after the April protest.

Even if the university takes action this semester, several professors said the Faculty Senate will continue to push for a better protest protocol and seek transparency about what happened last spring. They said damage has already been done.

Faculty members expressed worries over the fear and anxiety experienced by the students during the night of the protest and in the months since.

“My perspective on the university’s approach towards free speech is that they support free speech when it is convenient for them, when it looks good for them, and when it poses no threat to the status quo,” said Radhakrishnan, the student organizer.

“I would like to see the university develop a plan to deal with inconvenient protest,” she added. “Which, to be clear, protests should be inconvenient. Otherwise it does not produce change.”