Will Harvard Punish Its Professors for Reading in the Library?

Two days ago, we read in the library. We read Martin Luther King Jr. We read Toni Morrison. We read Henry David Thoreau. We read Hannah Arendt.

We read Harvard’s University-Wide Statement on Rights and Responsibilities, which declares that “reasoned dissent plays a particularly vital part in its existence.” We read the Harvard Library statement of values, which enjoins “embracing diverse perspectives” — a message that, as it so happens, is printed on a banner outside of the room in Widener Library where we sat down to read.

We printed that same three-word phrase in large type on a reading list we brought with us into the library. We entered when the bells in Harvard Yard rang noon. We sat together reading quietly alongside two dozen of our faculty colleagues, equal parts tenured and untenured across five Harvard schools and multiple departments. When the bells rang one, we left.

Why did we read in the library? Admittedly, it’s an absurd question. Reading, after all, is what libraries are for. Or so we thought. But a few weeks ago, at least twelve of our students were suspended from the same library for doing the same thing: reading quietly, with small signs taped to their laptops.

We strongly disagree with Harvard’s decision to ban our students from the library over this conduct. A university should never deny access to scholarly resources as a mode of punishment. In fact, we believe these sanctions violate the American Library Association’s Bill of Rights.

More fundamentally, there was no reason to punish these students at all. A university has an interest in avoiding disruptive behavior in its libraries — things like shouting, marching, or blocking access. But sitting quietly and reading simply cannot be classified as disruption. This is true regardless of the clothing people wear or the stickers, reading materials, or printed sheets of paper they independently or collectively have with them. Indeed, punishing quiet readers for these attributes would invite discrimination based on the content of their non-disruptive expression.

In making these observations, we stand in disagreement with Harvard University President Alan M. Garber ’76, who recently said the University can and should punish people quietly reading in the library if their “intention” is “to deliver a common message.”

Respectfully, President Garber has it precisely backwards. A university should not punish community members engaging in non-disruptive behavior simply because those individuals hope to communicate ideas to other community members. The reason, echoed by Harvard’s own core values statement, is simple: Sharing ideas is why universities exist.

The day before we read in the library, we sent a letter to our colleagues in the administration who banned the students. In it, we made clear that we don’t see any meaningful distinction between our study session and the one the students held. They, like us, did not say they were conducting a protest. Rather, like us, they said they were holding a study session, with hopes that others might engage with the ideas they set out to study.

If there is one noteworthy difference between our study session and theirs, it is that the students all wore traditional Palestinian keffiyehs around their necks, while we and our colleagues wore black scarves. We did this with intention, to underscore the unequal and repeated disciplinary threats and actions targeting students who have expressed a particular point of view this last year. Our students’ suspensions from the library come amid a wave of new, excessively restrictive rules governing campus speech that have been codified in direct response to student protests about the devastation in Gaza.

As professor Melanie Matchett Wood wrote on behalf of the leadership of Harvard’s Council on Academic Freedom, “the students who sat quietly and studied did not interfere with normal campus activity, and Harvard thus has no compelling reason to prohibit their speech.” Wood further noted that current campus policies have “no definition of ‘protest.’” Indeed, even President Garber has acknowledged the “gray areas” in the rules adjudicating whether a reading exercise of the sort we engaged in is permitted.

On this score, we agree. The library rules, like so many other new speech-restrictive rules announced on university campuses of late, are chillingly unclear and dangerously broad. As we told the security guards who demanded our IDs on Wednesday as we sat quietly reading our texts, we do not believe we violated any university rules or values. We do not understand why a university would punish people for reading in a library, even if they are reading in hopes that others will engage with the ideas they are exploring.

But then again, our university punished our students for doing precisely that. Will it ban us too?

Andrew Manuel Crespo is the Morris Wasserstein Public Interest Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Reshmaan N. Hussam is an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School