The Race to Pacify Protesters

By the time the parties converged at a “die-in” at Towson University’s central quad on a chilly day last November, campus-police officers and administrators almost outnumbered the handful of pro-Palestinian activists who were trickling in.

The police chief, a few student-affairs officials, and about six other police officers who’d been tipped off that an unauthorized demonstration was about to happen watched as eight to 10 students stretched out on a patch of the 21,000-square-foot lawn. The students surrounded themselves with dolls wrapped in white shrouds splattered with red. Some held Palestinian flags and signs decrying genocide and demanding that the university divest from any companies connected to the war in Gaza.

The administrators, and the student-government representatives they’d summoned, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the students to move to a designated free-speech area on the outskirts of the campus, warning them that they could be arrested if they refused. Five students were later disciplined for violating the university’s “time, place, and manner” rules for protests, which ban spontaneous protests on the quad and only allow pre-registered protests from groups that are recognized by the university. (The group putting on the event, the Towson Colonized Peoples Revolution, wasn’t recognized).

The students received deferred suspensions that require them, by December 15, to abide by the student-conduct code and write a research paper on how to start a student organization. If they commit one more offense, they could be kicked off campus. The disciplinary mark will remain on their records for seven years, and the punishment has “chilled” the students’ “ability to hold other demonstrations out of fear of retaliation from the university,” according to a complaint letter the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland sent to Towson’s president, Mark R. Ginsberg.

The headlines and outrage that ensued were exactly what the university was hoping to avoid when it set up its 41-member “advocacy advisory team” to closely monitor demonstration plans, intervene early, and guide students through the preferred protest process.

If the students had followed the rules, they would have first secured university recognition of their group, a process their supporters say could take weeks or even months. Then they would have registered their protest at least three days prior and met with an administrator and an event coordinator, who would have helped the students come up with a customized plan that wouldn’t get anyone in trouble. Using a bullhorn? That’ll require a sound monitor to make sure protesters stay below 96 decibels. Expecting counterprotesters? Campus police will likely be on standby, possibly with barriers to keep people apart.

Given the oppositional nature of student activism — the protesters were, after all, accusing the university of being complicit in genocide — it’s unclear whether the students would have heeded that guidance. But that hasn’t stopped universities like Towson from trying to insert themselves early, and often, into activists’ circles. Where some see a campuswide commitment to free speech, others see an attempt to sanitize and stifle speech.

The Baltimore-area university isn’t alone in trying to avoid the chaos that erupted last spring when some of the protests over the Israel-Hamas war escalated; students refused to break up encampments; and thousands were arrested. Colleges’ reputations took a hit as images of students being wrestled to the ground and zip-tied splashed across newspapers and social-media sites nationwide. Many colleges were also accused of not doing enough to protect Jewish students who felt threatened by the protests. Administrators’ relationships with students and faculty frayed, and presidencies tumbled. Meanwhile, backlogs of disciplinary cases piled on.

For months, Republican lawmakers have argued that colleges have allowed antisemitism to go unchecked by prioritizing the free-speech rights of pro-Palestinian protesters over the safety of Jewish students. They’ve called on colleges to move in earlier when protests escalate and to punish participants more harshly. That pressure is likely to increase with President Donald J. Trump back in power. He’s threatened to punish colleges that don’t take a tougher stance on protesters, including those he’s called “pro-Hamas radicals.”

With pressure intensifying to both rein in protesters and protect free speech, colleges, including Towson, Princeton University, Yale University, and the University of Texas at Austin, have set up or expanded free-speech teams, in some cases hiring full-time free-speech administrators and mediators. The goal, they say, is to protect people’s right to peacefully demonstrate by making clear what kinds of actions are and aren’t permitted. Representatives serve different roles, showing up at events to hand out flyers with the latest rules, issuing warnings, and mediating or de-escalating situations when protesters and counterprotesters clash.

On many campuses, the rules changed over the summer as administrators tightened “time, place, and manner” restrictions on protests.

The number of protest events has shrunk from about 3,200 last semester to just under 1,000 so far this semester, according to data compiled by the Crowd Counting Consortium, a collaboration between the University of Connecticut and the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. The decline is due, at least partly, to tighter restrictions on where, when, and how protesters can speak out without facing discipline or arrest, the consortium’s researchers say.

Although Towson officials say their rules haven’t changed, their approach to trying to work with activist groups has. The university’s “Tiger Advocacy Advisory Team,” which it calls TAAT, is divided into an education team and an “ops” or “street” team. The latter is called into action when a spontaneous protest erupts. Together, the members advise students on how to get their point across without anyone being hurt or disciplined.

The teams are filled mostly with professional staff members from campuswide offices, including academic affairs, residential life, inclusive excellence, counseling, and public safety. It also contains student-government members who interact with students during demonstrations.

“You name the office, they’re part of it,” said Matt Lenno, assistant vice president for student affairs at Towson and head of the “ops” team.

Sometimes, though, students go rogue, testing the university’s resolve to enforce its rules.

After the die-in protest, the ACLU criticized Towson’s “efforts to silence” the students and called on the university to expunge the students’ disciplinary records. A campus spokeswoman said she could not comment on student disciplinary matters.

At least 19 faculty members signed on to a letter of protest saying the demonstration hadn’t disrupted university operations or classes. An online petition accused the university of “unnecessarily escalating a peaceful protest that did not harm anyone or disturb the campus, classes, or research in any way,” adding that “the university determined that a small number of students laying on the grass” required more police than there were participants.

The advent of protest-intervention teams has provoked mixed reactions from free-speech advocates.

Ken Paulson, director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, thinks that some of the cross-campus teams colleges have set up go overboard.

“This is not the invasion of Normandy,” he said. “It’s about creating a collective understanding on campus” about the constitutional protection of free speech. “Once you have a shared understanding, you do not need bureaucracy. You do not need mediators,” Paulson said. “For far fewer resources, you could require every incoming class to take a 45-minute class on the First Amendment.”

Paulson warned that “an obsessive commitment to maintaining order” can prompt college officials to break up demonstrations even when no one’s been disrupted or harmed. “The best way for things to get out of hand,” he said, “is for the university to overplay its hand.”

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) have also said such efforts may erect unnecessary barriers that discourage people from protesting. Requiring people to register a protest in advance, they suggest, invites surveillance by police officers, campus officials, or overhead drones.

Laura Beltz is director of policy reform at FIRE, whose focus is protecting free speech. She said she likes the idea of having someone on hand to educate students about their rights, and websites that spell out what is and isn’t permitted and who to contact with questions. But she said the framing of the message is important.

“The devil is in the details, and it depends on how it’s carried out,” Beltz said. “The key is to be consistent and transparent with students. It could encourage free speech, or it could send a message that their speech will be monitored and shut down, and that could have a chilling effect.”

The requirement for advance registration “could serve as another hurdle students have to clear before they have a protest,” Beltz said. She added that it’s important to provide information and education about free speech early and often, starting in orientation “so it’s not just during an active protest when tensions are high.”

The AAUP issued a statement in April condemning the “militarized response” to what it called largely peaceful campus protests. Overly strict limits on when, where, and how free expression can be exercised “effectively gut the right itself,” the organization said. So, too, the requiring of advance registration for demonstrations, the statement said, which discloses the identities of student activists and allows colleges to monitor their activities.

“It’s presented by universities as content-neutral — everyone has to register,” said Risa L. Lieberwitz, former general counsel for the AAUP and current president of Cornell University’s chapter. “But in reality, it’s not because those who’ll be most discouraged from registering are those with a viewpoint that may be disfavored by the university.”

Lieberwitz added that “across the country, administrations are addressing protests and rallies as being crisis situations and calling any disruption a crisis that must be handled in a way that restricts free speech. Who’s the audience the university is speaking to by adopting these extremely restrictive policies? Donors, boards of trustees, and legislators — all of whom may be calling for crackdowns on speech and dissent.”

Other colleges have deployed or expanded squads to keep up with the roiling protests. Princeton University has a team of about 60 “free-expression facilitators” and five “free-expression coordinators,” staff members who attend campus events where things could get heated. The facilitators answer questions about university policies, issue warnings when necessary, and suggest ways students can avoid getting into trouble. Their primary role, a spokeswoman wrote, is to “ensure all community members have the broadest possible latitude to speak, write, listen, challenge, and learn.”

Each week, three facilitators and one coordinator are on call, with extras brought in as needed. Their charge: to ensure that participants can express themselves in peaceful, nondisruptive ways; reasonably accommodate counterprotests; safeguard the essential functioning of university operations; and protect an individual’s right to hear, see, and engage with a speaker or listen to a lecture.

The program was formalized in 2015 as campus activism became more combative both at Princeton and nationally, spurred on by the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement. The following year protests over race relations rocked the University of Missouri at Columbia and spread to other campuses.

In 2021, a year after the killing of George Floyd by police brought new urgency to the movement, Princeton invited professional staff across the university to serve as free-expression facilitators, training them in both the broad principles of free expression and specific protest response techniques.

Before a planned event, staff members from Princeton’s dean of undergraduate students’ office reach out to organizers “to explain the range of options available to them, offer logistical and policy guidance, introduce the role of the free-expression facilitators” and answer questions, the campus spokeswoman said.

Yale University also relies on free-expression facilitators. It’s among the institutions that tightened their rules on demonstrations over the summer. In updated guidance, the university said protesters need to wrap up events by 11 p.m., and they can’t sleep outside overnight or project images in certain areas of the campus. That includes Beinecke Plaza, where, in April, university police arrested 47 pro-Palestinian protesters for trespassing after they refused to leave an encampment.

Yale is formalizing an education and mediation program that began as a pilot last spring. Existing staff members, including student-life deans, have been serving as free-expression facilitators at speaking events, rallies, vigils, protests, and counterprotests.

The vice president for university life, Kimberly M. Goff-Crews, told Yale Daily News that the program became permanent this fall because those staff have other responsibilities, and it was clear students needed a regular point of contact with the administration when it comes to questions about free expression and demonstrating.

A job posting on LinkedIn seeks an “associate director of university life: administrator on call.” The job requires “the ability to be on campus with very short notice, as needed.”

“The associate director partners with members of Yale Public Safety and serves as an intermediary between the university administration, internal (students, faculty, staff, and alumni), and external stakeholders during protests and high-profile events,” the posting states. “The individual leverages their diverse background in fields such as student affairs, social work, counseling, community organizing, community policing, nonprofit work, or conflict resolution to foster positive relationships, ensure effective communication, and manage conflicts in dynamic and often-volatile situations, all in support of the university’s policies on free expression.”

The University of Texas at Austin this fall created an “event-readiness and response team” that works proactively with campus groups to make sure any protests or demonstrations comply with university rules. The team, housed in the dean of students’ office, is headed by Joe LoBrutto, formerly a detective sergeant with the university’s police force. The team contains three leaders and 12 staff members, all of whom fill their roles part time, in addition to their existing jobs.

The team was tested last month when two organizers with the campus chapter of Students for a Democratic Society tried to deliver a letter to the university’s president, Jay Hartzell, after being told they couldn’t enter the UT Tower, which houses several administrative offices, to hand it to him. The letter spelled out the activists’ demands that the university divest from companies connected with Israel’s war with Hamas and grant amnesty to students who were disciplined after protests last spring led to scuffles with police and dozens of arrests.

One of the students, Arshia Papari, said LoBrutto reached out to him to say he’d read the activists’ posts on Instagram about plans to deliver the letter. He said LoBrutto offered to deliver the letter to the president himself and “continued to pressure us to work with him.” But they had no interest in working with LoBrutto, Papari said, because of the aggressive way the police force LoBrutto was serving on last spring had treated some protesting students.

Instead, Papari and a fellow activist, Luca Reyes, made a show of their march to the UT Tower with the letter for the president; Papari, in a cowboy hat and keffiyeh, Reyes and another student carrying a banner demanding that UT “divest from genocide.”

LoBrutto met the students on the steps to the Tower and reiterated warnings that they were not permitted to take the letter inside, an online student publication, Reporting Texas, reported. The students, who said they never agreed to stay outside the building, went in anyway but were stopped before they could enter the president’s office on the fourth floor.

They talked with LoBrutto for about 45 minutes while a security guard stood nearby, Papari said in an interview. The students agreed to leave after being assured the president would receive the letter.

“A lot of this is about education,” LoBrutto said of his approach to working with students. “We discuss what possible violations there could be, how to avoid them, and how to come to a solution where nobody gets in trouble.”

As part of that effort, the Office of the Dean of Students has developed a free-speech assessment to educate people about the “the ever-present balance and delicate interplay between freedoms of the individual, freedoms of a community, and the university’s obligation to preserve its efficient and effective operations and functions.”

Going through a list of scenarios, a student would learn that making a factual statement that offends a counterprotester is protected speech, but encouraging students to disrupt the next home football game by rushing the field is not. Arguing with university administrators that their group did nothing wrong and shouldn’t have to disperse isn’t protected speech, but dispersing and then filing an appeal is.

No matter how it’s framed, Papari said he’s tired of feeling watched. “Generally any activist action that goes against the system — these things are monitored extensively by the university,” he said. “They kind of stalk our social-media accounts.” He said members of the readiness team attend activists’ meetings, creating an intimidating presence. “They stand in the corner watching students like hawks.”

LoBrutto said it will take time to build trust and rapport with students. “My goal is for them to feel they have an environment where their voices can be heard.”

Towson’s TAAT team came together after an incident in 2019. A Pennsylvania-based group that called itself “Bible Believers” showed up in a public area of campus, shouting racist, homophobic, and sexist slurs. The group, which tells its audiences that it wants to save people’s souls, was quickly surrounded by 200 to 300 students shouting at them to leave, Lenno, the assistant vice president, said. Band members streamed out of a nearby music building and blared the university’s fight song to try to drown them out. There were no barricades to keep the parties apart, and few administrators were on hand to try to break up the crowd or explain why the protesters had to be allowed in.

“We decided to learn from this experience,” Lenno said.

Today, if an anti-abortion activist sets up a display with pictures of aborted fetuses, a staff member from the university’s counseling center might be watching nearby and offer to talk to any students who appear to be in distress. If students want to know why the university allows a display that’s offensive to many people, a team representative might hand them a pocket guide on freedom of expression and offer to talk about it.

“When we get intel that students want to do an expressive activity, they have to meet with me,” Lenno said, referring to the catchall term used to describe protests, petitions, signs, leafleting, and similar activities that are protected by the First Amendment.

Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, the TAAT team was busy, he added. “We had 17 expressive activities in a 30-day period.” In the vast majority, he said, students complied with the rules.

Lenno makes no apologies for trying to stay a step ahead of protests. When a protest springs up without going through the proper channels, he said, his ops team is ready. “If I need to send a message to my team, they drop what they’re doing to come to the event.”

Lenno, whose office is in the University Union, said that when an unscheduled protest breaks out, he’ll “find out within minutes.” If it’s happening inside his building, he’ll head over with a few members of his team and tell the demonstrators that they’re violating the “time, place, and manner” rules that bar them from protesting inside buildings and blocking entrances or exits. If they refuse to move, he’ll start asking for students’ ID cards.

“We meet the students in the physical space where they are and engage in dialogue with them,” he said.

It doesn’t always feel like a conversation, he admits. “In some cases, it’s a bullhorn to the ear as we’re telling them to go to another place.”