The University of Michigan is facing backlash from students, faculty and civil rights attorneys following a proposal to significantly restrict the right to protest on campus.
The “disruptive activity policy”, announced last week in a campus-wide email from the university president, Santa J Ono, would create strict punishments for anyone who interrupts official university events, including speeches, classes, athletic events, field trips, performances, graduation and award ceremonies.
Students and faculty who violate the rule could face expulsion or firing.
“Going to such extreme lengths to ban protests outright, it seems like an incredibly extreme step on the university’s part,” said Haley Johnson, a graduate student at the school.
The draft policy comes after students spent months calling on university leadership to divest from companies like Boeing and Lockheed Martin, which help provide weapons to the Israeli military amid the ongoing bombing campaign in Gaza. Similar calls for divestment have been taken up by students across North America, including groups at McGill University and Brown University.
The University of Michigan acted after Ono described as “unacceptable” a protest staged by Tahrir, a coalition of more than 80 student groups that support divestment, at last month’s convocation for honors students. Ono had been slated to speak at the event, but his speech was cut short by student protesters.
Ono later condemned the interruption of his convocation speech as an “intrusion on one of the university’s most important academic traditions”.
Campus protests – and the censorship that follows – have come into sharper focus this year, as university students continue to organize in support of the people of Gaza. In November, Columbia University suspended Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace, two pro-Palestinian groups on campus. That same month, George Washington University suspended their campus chapter of SJP after the group projected “Glory to our martyrs” on the wall of a library.
“My personal feeling is that what we experienced at the honors convocation should not occur again,” said Thomas Braun, a biostatistics professor at the University of Michigan.
Braun, who was on stage during the March event for honors students, also heads a faculty advisory committee that, he said, “consults with the president, provost and other executive officers of the university” on policies “that impact faculty interests”.
In January, the University of Michigan’s faculty senate became one of the first in the nation to call for divestment from “financial holdings in companies that invest in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza”.
Braun said that he and other members of the faculty senate were not consulted on the draft policy before its release last week. Despite reservations about the scope and intensity of the proposal, Braun said he supports “some” new rules on protest, adding that the interruption of Ono’s convocation speech “went over the line for me”.
“I personally respect your ability to protest whatever you want, but I also should have the right to decide that I don’t want to participate,” he said.
Like Braun, student leaders were surprised to learn that the university president was considering new rules prohibiting “disruptive activity” on campus.
“It’s really disheartening that our university would put out such a severe policy with no student or faculty input,” said Meera Herle, president of the University of Michigan’s student government. “This would be a major adjustment of our rights on campus, to put this out without consulting us is troubling.”
Herle was especially alarmed by the seemingly broad and vague language of the proposed rule, which defines “disruptive activity” as any action that disrupts “the free flow of persons about campus, whether indoors or outdoors, including any pedestrian, bicycle or vehicular traffic”.
In a letter slamming University of Michigan leaders, the American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan said the policy’s imprecise language “fails to make important distinctions that would prevent predictable first amendment violations”. The letter, sent this week to Ono and his vice-president, Timothy Lynch, warned that such restrictions on protest would lead to “discriminatory enforcement and uneven self-censorship”.
Ono released another email this week, in response to mounting anger over the potential repression of free speech on campus, saying that university leadership was “listening” to concerns and “will not rush the development of this new policy”.
Assurances aside, critics of the draft policy remain wary of the president’s apparent ambition to restrict protests at one of the nation’s top public universities.
“The announcement about the policy was shocking, and not in keeping with the legacy of the university,” said Sean Johnson, an astronomy professor.
“In my mind, protest is necessarily disruptive, the degree to which is a question of strategy for the activists.”
Jenan Kharbush, an environmental science professor, shared Johnson’s alarm that the university would consider such punitive protest restrictions. Kharbush, who is Palestinian-American, said the proposed rule represents an unfair act of retaliation against student organizing.
“These students are calling for divestment from companies that profit from the current genocide. That’s not antisemitic, and that’s not anti-Israel,” Kharbush said. “The university is obscuring the real message that these students are fighting for.”
Kharbush’s family came to the US as refugees after the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948, in which about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland after the creation of Israel. Her extended family is now scattered across Lebanon and Palestine, including Gaza.
“I’m so scared for the people in Palestine, and I’m so tired,” said Kharbush. “You have to go about daily life, teaching and working, all while having these questions in your head: will this end before everyone’s gone? Will this end before everyone in Gaza starves to death?”
From within their classrooms, Kharbush and Johnson can sometimes hear the sounds of student protesters chanting outside. To Kharbush, that is the sound of solidarity and support during a painful, anxious time. To Johnson, it’s “the sign of a healthy university campus”.
• This article was amended on 8 April 2024 to clarify that Santa J Ono was referring specifically to the protest that interrupted the convocation as “unacceptable”.
