Harvard Must Defend Its Libraries 

Harvard University has taken heavy criticism in the last year for not responding adequately to disruptive protests, encampments, and acts of anti-Semitism on its campus. Under the leadership of new president Alan Garber, it set out to ensure this year would be better. New and clearer rules pertaining to free expression, particularly protest and its limits, were established and clearly communicated to the community as the school year began.

Almost immediately, five faculty members challenged a prohibition on chalking by disobeying it. Harvard Dean of Arts and Sciences Hopi Hoekstra has since relaxed the rule, but Harvard has held to another much more important one established by then-interim President Garber and the deans last spring: “unless a particular School makes an explicit exception, demonstrations and protests are ordinarily not permitted in . . . libraries or other spaces designated for study, quiet reflection, and small group discussion.”

This rule has now been broken multiple times. First, in late September, a group of pro-Palestinian students conducted a “study-in” in one of the reading rooms and were banned from the library for two weeks as a result. Since then, several groups of students, including law school students and about 25 faculty members, have conducted similar actions with mostly the same results.

Many believe Harvard has overreacted and that the rules should be changed. The leadership of the Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard, a group that has been working to restore academic freedom and diversity of thought at the institution, has taken this view, for example. They argue the study-in “did not interfere with normal campus activity” and that the rule does not sufficiently detail what counts as a demonstration or protest.

University Librarian Martha Whitehead, by contrast, has beautifully explained that libraries are refuges for study and that even quiet protests disrupt the peaceful and welcoming spaces they cultivate for everyone in the community to use. “While a reading room is intended for study,” she wrote, “it is not intended to be used as a venue for a group action, quiet or otherwise, to capture people’s attention.” Noting also that some students saw the study-in “publicized and chose not to come to the library,” she insisted that a library should be a “sanctuary . . . where individuals know they will be welcomed.”

This is a viewpoint-neutral rule, and the question of whether Harvard should enforce its own rules has an obvious answer in a time of anomie. This generation of students needs to learn old wisdom; as Cicero wrote: “We are the slaves of the law so that we may be free.”

Whether one thinks the rule should be modified or not, it is critical to recognize why pro-Palestinian students and faculty are breaking it. They are not interested in reasonable discussion or sensible limits on their protest activities. They are not even really interested in free expression. Rather, they want to make the university look hypocritical. They want people to think that Harvard’s appeals to free expression and institutional neutrality are a front for its support of Israel and American empire and that it is seeking to repress pro-Palestinian speech. And of course, ultimately, they want the university to abandon its mission and values by taking a political position against Israel via boycotts and divestment.

The irony is that Harvard has been hypocritical about academic freedom and free speech, having failed to stand up for Roland Fryer, Carole Hooven, and Tyler VanderWeele, to give a few examples. Americans were rightly incredulous when former president Claudine Gay tried to claim that the university—which had just come in last place in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s annual student free speech survey—was committed to these values. But the point of critics who call out these deficiencies is that Harvard should do better. We respect the mission of one of our most elite universities and want it to be a better version of itself for the sake of its students, its faculty, and America.

The pro-Palestinian protesters want Harvard to become even worse, and their phony appeals to free expression should be transparent to everyone by now, as should their antics. They have a constant habit of confusing free speech and illicit conduct. They break rules, disrupt the university, damage property, and harass Jews—and then act like they are being suppressed merely because their speech is unwelcome. It is a tiring and mendacious routine that has been repeated on campuses across the country for over a year now.

Fortunately, most Americans and now a few college presidents disagree that occupying buildings, vandalizing property, and disrupting teaching and learning are free speech.

The faculty and students who violated Harvard’s libraries probably think they are heroes, embarrassing a corrupt institution, but, in truth, they are embarrassing themselves. Their childish behavior reveals their own complicity in one of the core problems in higher education today: the prioritization of political action over inquiry and debate. Harvard should hold the line against them—for the sake of both its libraries and the university as a whole.

This article was first published by Minding the Campus on November 12, 2024.