Campus Protests

Assignment: Conor Friedersdorf, “Campus Protest Encampments Are Unethical,” The Atlantic (December 16, 2024); Xochitl Gonzalez, “Students Yelled at Me. I’m Fine.” The Atlantic (April 1, 2025); Washington University Board of Trustees, “Ad Hoc Committee on University Policies and Guidelines Governing On-Campus Protests and Demonstrations” (March 7, 2025)

Today’s class asks how we should think about protest on a university campus—not just in the abstract, but here, as students and teachers at Washington University. Campus protests raise some of the hardest questions in this course because they bring together speech, assembly, institutional mission, safety, disruption, moral urgency, and disagreement over what a university is for. Some protest tactics seize shared space, interfere with others’ access to the university, or use coercive pressure rather than persuasion. On the other hand, perhaps student anger, disruption, and confrontation should be part of the ordinary turbulence of democratic and intellectual life—and perhaps administrators and institutions should not overstate their own fragility when faced with student protest.

The WashU Board of Trustees report brings these questions directly to our own campus. It asks how a university should protect protest and dissent while also maintaining access, safety, academic freedom, and the ordinary work of teaching, learning, and research. As you read, pay attention to the competing goods at stake. Protest can be a vital form of expression, especially when ordinary channels of influence seem inadequate. But protest can also exclude, intimidate, silence, or prevent others from using spaces that belong to the whole university community. We will consider what rights and responsibilities you have as students, what obligations WashU has as an institution, and how a campus should distinguish between protest that is disruptive in ways a university should tolerate and protest that undermines the conditions that make university life possible.