Along the brick-lined Boylston Place alleyway, Emerson College students fresh to the fall semester flit between classes or catch a quick bite on a picnic table.
The bustle along this public walkway close to Boston Common today bears few traces of its role as the scene of a pro-Palestinian student protest police broke up last April. Gone are the sounds of demonstrators who camped out for several days, chanting and calling out on bullhorns for a ceasefire in Gaza. Officers in riot gear arrested 118 people in the middle of the fourth night, clearing out the participants, signs and tents.
Similar clashes — some more violent and others less so — played out last spring at other Greater Boston schools and major universities throughout the U.S., fraying the nerves of school community members along a spectrum of perspectives.
In the aftermath, Emerson and many other higher education institutions announced the new school year would come with new student protest rules. Reactions to the policies were mixed, even as some colleges looked to offer other ways — like guest lectures or group exercises — for students to hear or express opinions. Some students said they understand and appreciate tighter guidelines, while others expressed fury and frustration.
“Overall [my friends and I] are very disgusted with these new policies,” said Emery Frost, a sophomore at Emerson.
Frost, who participated in a handful of pro-Palestinian protests last school year, said the changes — like prohibiting protests not only in the partly city-owned alley, but also in residence halls, conference rooms, theaters or “academic settings” — feel like an overreach by the administration.
The rules, she said, restrict students’ speech and right to assemble too tightly, and they’re particularly problematic in her view given the small arts college’s focus on communication and artistic expression.
“It’s so anti-First Amendment, anti-civil disobedience — all of these things that built society that, idealistically, a school like Emerson would be supporting,” Frost said.
The rules don’t ban all campus demonstrations, but students must pre-register events with the school at least a week in advance. No protest can begin before 8 a.m. or stick around later than 7 p.m. Any student participant would also need to show authorities photo IDs and remove face masks if asked.
Arthur Mansavage, a third-year photojournalism major, is among several students who welcome the rule changes and reject the idea they’re unreasonable. He told WBUR he and many fellow Jewish classmates felt uneasy about the April protest and how it disrupted their experiences on campus.
He argued the new mandates preserve students’ First Amendment rights, while “making sure everyone else has all of their rights still: they can still go to class, they can still live peacefully and they can still live normally.”
“I think it’s a little absurd to be mad about making sure that the college itself is a safer space for everyone,” Mansavage added.
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Outrage and apathy over protest rules
Across the Charles River, MIT administrators too braced for another round of campus protests over the deepening crisis in the Middle East. Like Emerson, they also turned to updating university handbooks.
They banned all protests inside dorms, office spaces and study areas. Students were now required to give at least three-days’ notice about any campus protest.
Several student groups said the restrictions changed some aspects of their protest efforts. About two weeks ago, members of MIT Coalition for Palestine, for example, worried about the placement of their feet as they stood outside the university entrance to urge MIT to divest from Israel-funded research. The demonstrators had warned each other to stay on the sidewalk, on Cambridge property and outside the school’s jurisdiction.
None of the roughly 100 protesters were arrested that day. Richard Solomon, an organizer for the group and political science doctoral student, said at least 30 campus and Cambridge police officers did monitor the event and issued warnings about blocking the roads — something protesters had sometimes done during demonstrations last school year.
“They had zip ties,” he said. “They barricaded the street and told us if we tried to take the road they’d arrest us.”
A couple of miles away, Harvard set up A-frame signs to impress similar protest restrictions upon students: no classrooms, no dorms and no demonstrations without three-days’ notice. Chalk messages and tents could no longer be propped up on campus, including on Harvard Yard — the site of a weeks-long encampment last semester.
Several freshmen studying on Harvard Yard said the school’s updated policies were not among their most pressing concerns.
“For a lot of students, what’s top of mind is their classes, especially for first-years. We’re still getting acclimated,” said Hugo Chiasson, who has an interest in studying government affairs. He added that despite national attention on conflicts between pro-Palestinian protesters and Harvard administrators, campus felt less tense than he anticipated.
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Clamping down or clarifying conditions
It’s little surprise colleges are reviewing and shoring up campus protest policies as tensions around national politics and foreign policy spike, said Jeff Hunt, a Texas-based crisis communications consultant working with several New England schools.
Last school year, more than 3,000 U.S. students were arrested or detained during protests over the war in Gaza. Several university presidents, including former Harvard President Claudine Gay, faced intense criticism over their handling of the demonstrations.
University leaders, he said, are “under heightened scrutiny to ensure they’re preserving a free speech environment and that they’re also making sure they have a safe campus.”
“You can’t have one group’s free speech interfere with another group’s free speech,” he added.
The updated policies vary widely, but Hunt said he sees a pattern: schools are shedding ambiguity. New codes of conduct often outline explicit instructions on where demonstrations can and cannot occur. There’s language about event cut-off times and limits on devices like speakers and megaphones.
Administrators “are expecting that there are going to be a lot of fireworks,” he said, “and they’re just trying to prepare themselves.”
Legal experts also note student speech rights depend too on whether the institution is privately-run or public. State-funded institutions, like the University of Massachusetts system, can’t enact stricter protest policies than what the First Amendment allows. Private colleges, however, have more discretion.
“Public universities can only regulate the time, place and manner of speech, and they have to do it in a way that is neutral as to viewpoint or content of that speech,” said David Russcol, a Boston attorney who handles cases involving student rights in higher education. “A private university could make more decisions about certain types of speech that are not welcome on this campus.”
However, all schools can restrict speech that incites violence or constitutes racial or sexual harassment, Russcol added.
UMass Amherst is updating its protest rules to clarify that tents cannot be propped up without permission. The school also plans to better define what actions qualify as disrupting “university business.”
Emerson College administrators declined to comment further on the updated policies but referenced statements posted online two weeks ago.
“Last year, some community members reported feeling unsafe because of the type of rhetoric that was used, and others reported feeling unsafe because of the arrests of student protesters,” they wrote. “These feelings have prompted important questions about how we thoughtfully balance speech and the protection of community members.”
In a campus-wide message in late August, Harvard President Alan Garber highlighted the new campus rules and noted the college had “a responsibility to ensure that our disagreements can be openly expressed, whether we do so through writing or speaking, individually or collectively through organized protests and other activities, without infringing on the rights of others.”
Rakesh Khurana, dean of Harvard College, told WBUR the school supports protest overall but must focus on how demonstrations affect campus culture.
“We are a place where we do allow students to protest and we want to do that in a content neutral way,” he said in an interview. “It’s not just about having this rule or that rule. It’s really to create a culture and an environment, where we allow our capacities to disagree without being disagreeable, where we learn to see behind each others’ eyes, where we can find the strengths of our own arguments, but also its weaknesses.”
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Spurring dialogue in ‘a challenging time’
Beyond updating rule books, some schools want to try other ways to change how students engage each other on delicate matters.
Some schools, like Emerson, plan to invite speakers for lectures or draw students into group exercises designed to promote “respectful” dialogue.
Named Emerson Together, the speaker series and in-person chats aim to bring students into spaces where they can comfortably share their thoughts and challenge others, school officials said.
Harvard began a similar initiative, called Intellectual Vitality, a few years ago. School leaders ramped up its development after a 2023 survey of undergrad seniors indicated students felt they could not share beliefs openly on campus.
“The faculty were also talking to us about how they were afraid to teach certain subjects which they felt were important, but were worried about whether the conversations would get out of control,” Khurana said.
Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard dean of undergraduate education, added political tensions last spring made the effort more relevant.
“It was a challenging time on campus and a challenging time in the world,” she said. “The university should be a space within our society that says there’s not just two sides to every story, there are many, many, many sides.”
Chiasson, the first-year with an interest in governmental studies, said Harvard’s initiative seems compelling in theory.
“Civil discourse is really the way in which we force ourselves to reconsider our own beliefs,” he said. “It’s the way that we improve as individuals, as academics, as civil members of society.”
Still, Chiasson acknowledged it’s hard to say if it will make any meaningful difference yet.
The students just got back. The rules are new. Conflicts in America and abroad continue.
“In many ways,” he said, “exactly what happens remains to be seen.”
This article was originally published on WBUR.org.
