Give Students a Chance To Be on the Right Side of History

Over the past two years, Harvard has limited the speech and protest of affiliates by imposing time, manner, and place restrictions on protests and arguably restricted the content of that speech.

Many institutions are reacting similarly as broad federal actions limit spaces for expression and criticism in media, law firms, agencies, companies, universities, and even Congress. Last weekend, ICE officials arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a permanent legal resident who served as a negotiator between pro-Palestinian activists and university administrators, on Columbia University property. Khalil now faces deportation.

In response, the White House subsequently gleefully posted “SHALOM, MAHMOUD” from their X account and promised that “This is the first arrest of many to come.”

Harvard must resist this great chilling. The University should reverse course by expanding permissions for speech and peaceful protest on campus — student movements can offer striking moral clarity and should be permitted to occur peacefully.

Some restrictions on speech are legitimate. For example, incitement of violence and personal attacks should not be allowed. But as the Trump administration’s recent decision to withdraw $400 million in federal grant funding from Columbia shows, tightening the rules governing free speech and enforcing them harshly and swiftly is unlikely to appease a government determined to exaggerate concerns about freedom of expression to punish and intimidate political adversaries.

Like the press, higher education institutions have a distinctive mission to foster robust debate and develop ideas — especially heterodox ideas. Corporations, government agencies, and even most civic organizations do not. Higher education campuses have a special role in democratic society as places where people learn and exercise the capacity to speak truth to power. But such free spaces are closing down across society in the face of political, financial, and social pressures — and even death threats.

Democracy’s survival and society’s moral progress depend upon having individuals and groups who challenge the rest of us when we do or believe the wrong thing, individually or collectively. Universities around the world have been indispensable sources of such critical ideas — as often through tumultuous protests as erudite programs of reform or conservation.

Across the globe and in the history of the United States, it is striking that student protesters who have gone against the grain of their societies seem more often right than wrong in the light of history.

People all around the world rightly cheered the brave Chinese students who protested for democracy in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square in 1989, many of whom were killed by units of the People’s Liberation Army. And the students in Yemen, Tunisia, and Libya who participated at the forefront of the Arab Spring movements. In an earlier era, student movements against dictators in Latin America followed similar trends.

In the United States, student movements for civil rights were strident, and in the South they were revolutionary. Looking back, few doubt that they were on the right side. The student movement against the Vietnam War was small until it was big, and was unpatriotic until the majority of Americans — including scholars of the region and the conflict — came to see the folly of the war and appreciate the sheer magnitude of its destruction, which caused more than three million deaths.

The students who demanded that their universities divest from South Africa seemed too radical to many. Rather than follow the wishes of the revolutionary African National Congress, many argued that it would be more sensible to practice “constructive engagement” with the apartheid government. That position seems laughably, or tragically, appeasing now, but it was a mainstream objection to student protesters at the time.

Speaking at the Institute of Politics in 1985, South African Archbishop Desmond M. Tutu said, “we’re going to be free. And when we get to the other side of this liberation game, we would like to be able to say ‘You know something, Harvard University was with us.’”

Tutu was asking Harvard to fully divest from South Africa. Though Harvard never did that, vigorous student protests throughout the 1970s and 1980s — which at times compelled University President Derek Bok to move out of his office — pressed the University to partially divest. Tracking a very long moral arc, Harvard awarded Nelson Mandela an honorary degree in 1998.

I don’t know why student protest movements seem to be more often right than wrong. Perhaps there is a moral clarity in youth that fades as the encumbrances of ambition and material responsibility increase.

It’s too soon to know whether we will come to regard demands for fossil divestment or “justice for Palestine” as righteous causes as we now think of the civil rights and the 1980s anti-apartheid student protesters. But enforcing strict protest regulations denies us the ability to find out.

Archon Fung is the Winthrop Laflin McCormack Professor of Citizenship and Self-Government at Harvard Kennedy School.