For Academic Freedom on Campus, Time, Place, and Manner All Matter: Content-Neutral Policies Prevent Capture by Political Ideologies

This article originally appeared on Heterodox Academy.

Students who have been protesting the actions of Israel in its war with Hamas — an occurrence mostly at elite and extremely wealthy universities —

have set up encampments that violate university policies and therefore have been sanctioned, for example, at Columbia, Princeton.

Given this context, it is important to ask a basic question: Is all expression on campus—anytime, anywhere, and by any means—protected speech?

Take as an example what transpired on March 15, 2024, when Harvard Medical School held its Match Day.

After months of applications and interviews, students and their loved ones were finally able to celebrate the day they found out which hospital they will be training at for the next few years.

According to the Boston Globe, students and faculty protested a speaker—the president of the American Medical Association (AMA)—because the AMA declined to consider a proposed resolution demanding a ceasefire in Gaza that would allow Hamas to continue with its horrors, including exploitation of hostages and human shields, and its own genocidal designs as spelled out in the Hamas charter.

The AMA Board of Trustees affirmed its “commitment to ‘medical neutrality,’ a principle of noninterference with medical services in times of armed conflict.” The Boston Globe noted, “Students and family members walking into the normally celebratory annual event were greeted by a wall of mostly silent protesters bearing signs saying, ‘Let Gaza Live!’ and ‘AMA is complicit in genocide.’” Also, “students unfurled a large banner from a balcony inside the building’s atrium that said, ‘AMA is complicit in genocide.’”

Oddly, the disruptors taped their mouths because they implausibly believed they were being censored by Harvard Medical School, because Dean George Daley sent a message days before reminding the school of “mutual respect and public discourse” university guidelines: that disrupting school events could be punishable, and that such violations could have “long-term professional consequences,” given the questions asked in future physician licensure and credentialing applications.

Daley’s warning regarding disrupting the Match Day ceremony is an example of the fact that— given the vast opportunities for protected public demonstrations—universities also have reasonable policies about time, space, and manner restrictions on speech that prevent the disruption of the ordinary scholarly and educational activities of the university itself. Every institution must have policies that enable it to operate without unreasonable disruptions. Time, space, and manner policies are designed to do this; to comport with the First Amendment (at public institutions) and with free speech principles (at private institutions), they should be explicitly content-neutral, meaning they apply no matter the ideological content of that speech—whether radical left-wing international socialism (Marxism) or radical right-wing national socialism (Nazism), or whether theism’s transcendence or atheism’s materialism.

Having reasonable time, space, and manner policies is what actually sustains possibilities for exercising academic freedom; otherwise, a university would have no content-neutral procedures and structures to support open inquiry and civil discourse. Every speaker could be heckled into silence. Every square inch of university property, and every hour of the day, could be commandeered for biblical sermonizing or secular postcolonial preaching. FIRE (Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression) notes that “the First Amendment does not require schools to allow a loud protest in the dead of night.”

Similarly, many schools have narrow policies that prevent disrupting classroom lectures, blocking hallways or routine walking pathways between buildings, using bullhorns to disrupt educational events, protesting in administrative buildings where people work, or setting up indefinite 24/7 encampments that prevent others from using university property.

For instance, Harvard disciplined students who a few months ago violated Harvard policies and interrupted classroom lectures with protests and, despite warnings, protested in the central administrative building where staff work.

By providing a reminder of the school’s policies, thereby preventing more sensational and flagrant disruptions of the ceremony, Daley probably saved many medical students from future career problems with licensure, job applications, and insurance and hospital credentialing.

Strangely, the disruptors leveled false accusations about their dean and the Harvard Medical School leadership. They taped their mouths shut for media consumption to illustrate their groundless accusation of being silenced. Being told that you are not allowed to disrupt a schoolwide event just because you don’t like the views of an invited speaker is not infringing on one’s right to speak or protest. It is merely a reminder of the university’s norms of respect and public discourse at a ceremony where people with different views will be present, and that the goal of the event is a once-in-a-lifetime, sacred, professionally formative ceremony, not a soapbox for maligning others as genocidal. This would be equally true if the disruptors were protesting a ceremony speaker who does abortions or sex-change operations on minors, and they were warned by their dean to follow time, place, and manner policies that prevent ceremony interference.

Outside of narrow technical questions of what is legal or a procedural violation, there is also the question of what is ethical, even if legally allowed. We believe the actions of the disruptors corrupted Match Day.

The disruption may have intimidated many students into not attending. Dr. Richard Schwartzstein, a faculty member with extensive experience teaching in the amphitheater where the disruption took place, told us he estimated that only 25 to 30% of the medical school class was in attendance.

A possible explanation is that the disruptors intimidated up to 70% of their fellow students into not attending Match Day, therefore robbing them of one of the more meaningful and hallowed days in their professional development as doctors.

Why did so many students not attend? A clear implication of what the disruptors’ signs and the giant banner said is that those who would attend the ceremony and hear the speaker would be “complicit in genocide,” like the AMA. But this is a false implication. Anyone in attendance has a right to disagree with the Match Day speakers, or even the disruptors. Attendance of the Match Day ceremony by no means would signal support of genocide or any other violence. Yet, so many avoided their own Match Day to not be painted as genocidal. This is wrong and it’s why ceremonies and classrooms have different rules and norms of respect and collegiality than those governing a more public forum on campus, where there are ubiquitous opportunities to signal one’s beliefs and where others can ignore or engage as desired.

As opposed to protests in a quad on campus, in a classroom, or in a once-in-a-lifetime ceremony like Match Day, we cannot assume everyone thinks the same way about the day’s controversial issues. In such environments, people should not be bombarded with someone else’s parochial and highly controversial belief system, especially when the event in question has nothing to do with that belief system, and the university is nonsectarian. To do otherwise suggests self-righteousness about one’s own beliefs and a lack of humility about respecting others in attendance. If you do not agree, consider how you would feel about a Match Day disruption in which students and faculty held up images of Jewish women raped on October 7, 2023, with demands for justice? Signs demanding reparations for people killed in recent months by migrants who crossed into America illegally? Signs with images of third-trimester babies who were aborted? Signs with images of people recently tortured in communist nations, like North Korea?

Such disruptions also threaten ethical patient caregiving. A physician must be able to connect with their patients, regardless of a patient’s ideology or religion. Ideologically motivated disruptions threaten the ability of patients to trust the students and physicians who engaged in the protest, and Harvard Medical School and its affiliated hospitals in general. Patients, regardless of their view of how best to stop Hamas horrors, need to have confidence in their clinicians’ care, competence, and good judgment. Similarly, false accusations of suppressed speech and being complicit in genocide, and intimidating others to not attend a crucial ceremony, undermines that confidence.

The disruptors probably didn’t consider the Holocaust survivors and their families—some of whom attended Match Day, others of whom are their current or future patients—who see in current events, and in antisemitic reactions, resonances of pre-Holocaust discourse, blood libels, dehumanization, and racism. Indeed, this very story was brought to us by a terrified child survivor of the Holocaust who has reasonable concerns with potential quality of care in a Harvard Medical School–affiliated institution.

Beyond the moral myopia toward patients and colleagues, patients also may be concerned by this display of conformity and limited critical thinking, in this case about what is historically an extraordinarily complex geopolitical conundrum for physicians. As we have described in our own research, physicians were among the earliest and most enthusiastic joiners of the Nazi party.

Because of their agreeable and conscientious personalities and hierarchical training, physicians—of any worldview—are susceptible to succumbing to groupthink and conformity (at Harvard, there are about 5,500% more liberal than conservative faculty).

For example, we wonder how many of the Match Day disruptors had ever heard about the racist historical roots of the Hamas charter, the history of Islamist antisemitism, and the meetings in Berlin in 1941 between Hitler and the Jerusalem Mufti (a father of Palestinian nationalism),

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where Hitler confirmed that he supported the “struggle against a Jewish homeland in Palestine” and had aimed at “the annihilation of Jewry living in Arab space under the protection of British power.” The Mufti noted that “the Arabs were Germany’s natural friends because they had the same enemies as had Germany, namely the English, the Jews and the Communists.”

Though educated to carefully examine randomized controlled trials, the Match Day disruptors appear not able—or not motivated—to probe beyond the questionable statistics that Hamas cites. For instance, there is strong evidence showing that the Gaza Ministry of Health has faked its casualty numbers.

This does not bode well for disruptors’ ability to go beyond confirmation bias and critically analyze quantitative data and its sources when they agree with the hypothesis presented. In addition, the Match Day disruptors likely have not considered how they may enable Hamas terrorism by calling Israel’s actions genocidal. Joining a revolutionary movement dedicated to the status of an entire group as “oppressors” has been observed before, and we must not repeat the mistakes of the 20th century, where doctors became pawns and stooges of Nazi and Communist ideology, and the practice of medicine become hijacked by revolutionary pseudo-religions.

But all can learn from this event. Amid ideological fervor, it is easy to forget that academic freedom and civil discourse on campus very much depend on having reasonable time, space, and manner restrictions elaborated in policies, and that having such policies make the abstract right to academic freedom possible in an actually existing university. Campus rules should be enforced in content and viewpoint-neutral manners, no matter who is protesting. As a thought experiment, imagine if protestors were not members of the highest intersectional social justice caste on campus and were instead heterosexual, Christian males of European origin who were disrupting Match Day or setting up unauthorized 24/7 encampments in Harvard Yard to protest the hundreds of abortion procedures done per day at Harvard hospitals. How many hours—or should we say, how many minutes—would it take for the administration to disband and sanction every last one? It is clear that in today’s campus culture, rules are applied differently depending on which group one is in: If one claims the status of “oppressed,” one operates by more charitable rules than if one is slandered as an “oppressor.” This is illiberal, unfair, and unbecoming of an institution that strives to foster academic community.

When plenty of opportunities exist on campus to publicly express one’s moral and religious beliefs, universities have a right—in a content-neutral manner—to narrowly safeguard the classroom, the safety and functioning of public spaces for educational purposes, and special ceremonies against disruptions that protect possibilities for learning and professional development for all.

Omar Sultan Haque, M.D., Ph.D., and Harold J. Bursztajn, M.D., are both Harvard Medical School alumni and faculty. The views expressed here are theirs alone.