Hollow Rules: The Ivy League’s Mixed Messaging on Campus Disruption

Tal Fortgang ‘17

When Princeton President Christopher Eisgruber spoke at Harvard on November 5, 2025, he expressed what to his detractors may have sounded like an epiphany. “There’s a genuine civic crisis in America,” he said, noting how polarization and social-media amplification have made civil discourse uniquely difficult. Amid that crisis, he concluded, colleges must retain “clear time, place, and manner rules” for protest, and when protesters violate those rules, the university must refuse to negotiate. As he warned: “If you cede ground to those who break the rules … you encourage more rule-breaking, and you betray the students and scholars who depend on this university to function.”

Eisgruber is a leader among university presidents, and if his peers come to a similar recognition about the need to enforce neutral rules about speech it will be a welcome development. Over the last two years, those presidents have been reluctant to reinforce free speech protections by distinguishing clearly and consistently between protected and non-protected expression. In his recent book Terms of Respect: How Colleges Get Free Speech Right, and promotional appearances, President Eisgruber has insisted free speech cannot mean unconditional license for disruption. Universities must welcome dissent and challenge, without allowing protest – or the aura of righteousness that often surrounds activism -- to impair the academic mission or suppress the rights of other members of the community.

This framework – distinguishing between content-based restrictions (which universities should generally avoid, though there are exceptions) and time, place, and manner restrictions (which universities must enforce) – is so regularly repeated one tires of hearing about it. If time, place, and manner rules are so important, why are we still fighting about campus disruptions? The answer is that those rules are paid lip service and then usually honored in the breach. Their enforcement is inconsistent to the point of being rendered null. When some disruptors are punished while others who engaged in coercion or violence are quietly rewarded, all the tributes to neutral rules in the world mean nothing. Free expression and campus order continue to suffer, and critics rightly start looking for more draconian ways to ensure that universities function as they are meant to.

The Ivy League has done a terrible job of sending a consistent message. Columbia University is a leader in this regard. After various demonstrations over the past two years included destruction of property, trespassing, and many other clear (and undisputed) violations of school rules, the administration handed out suspensions and even a couple of expulsions for individuals found responsible. Columbia publicly characterized the disruption as unacceptable because it threatened academic function and campus safety. 

So far, so good. On paper, this looks like the kind of enforcement Eisgruber advocated. Break into a class, get kicked out of school – classroom functioning depends on it. But what about all the evidence cutting the other direction?

Were faculty members who prevented students from traversing through the unsanctioned encampment in the middle of campus helping or hurting free expression on campus? Certainly not. They were engaged in a civil rights violation – preventing people from freely traveling where they were entitled to walk. 

Manan Ahmed was one such Columbia professor. He was filmed stopping a student from entering an unauthorized encampment. When the student asked why, Ahmed shrugged and said that the students inside the encampment wanted this particular student – or perhaps those like him – to stay out. His behavior was risible and exclusionary, the complete opposite of encouraging discourse and debate, arguably illegal and inarguably in service of a violation of school rules. Columbia’s history department has promoted him from Associate Professor to full Professor. 

One exception proves a rule; multiple exceptions are no longer so exceptional. Citing students’ “right to protest,” then-Professor Camille Robcis also stood guard outside the Columbia encampment. Her participation only showcases how confused the culture of protest is. Even a history professor inverts the idea of time, place, and manner restrictions – standing guard to ensure the integrity of a violation of those restrictions -- in the name of the right to protest. Robcis has since been promoted to Chair of the department. 

One begins to see how simply incanting truisms about putting protest in its place fails to achieve its desired effects. Our cultural veneration for protest makes it hard for administrators to condemn violations of neutral rules, and blinds them to ways in which even people claiming the mantle of free speech actually undermine it.

Similar mixed messages have come from Harvard. On October 18, 2023, a first-year Israeli student began filming demonstrators. According to police and court records (and widely circulated video), two graduate students, Ibrahim Bharmal and Elom Tettey-Tamaklo, along with others, approached him, blocked his phone camera with keffiyehs and fluorescent vests, surrounded him, and forcibly escorted him out of the protest crowd. The victim alleged that he was struck by multiple individuals.

In May 2024, Bharmal and Tettey-Tamaklo were charged with misdemeanor assault and battery and a Massachusetts civil-rights violation for their actions. A Boston judge later dismissed the civil-rights count and ordered them into a pretrial diversion program: anger-management classes, conflict-resolution training, and 80 hours of community service. 

That alone raises serious questions about how bigotry is taken more or less seriously depending on the identities of the victim and attackers. But what happened afterward is more troubling still: Tettey-Tamaklo received a Harvard Graduate Teaching Fellow role in August 2025; Bharmal was awarded a $65,000 fellowship by the Harvard Law Review. 

In other words: individuals charged with assault, on video using the cover of protest to engage in violence, were rewarded with positions of authority and influence. The very institution where crowds nod knowingly at the distinction between neutral rules and violations of free speech fails to conduct its own affairs accordingly. 

Princeton has not been immune to this phenomenon. During the occupation of Clio Hall in 2024 and its immediate aftermath, President Eisgruber’s administration emphasizing order and safety while simultaneously signaling hesitancy about strict consequences. The brief occupation on April 29, 2024, began as part of a pro-Palestinian encampment demanding a range of actions including divestment, and resulted in 13 protesters being arrested and charged with criminal trespassing before the encampment later moved to Cannon Green. President Eisgruber’s initial statement decried the incident as “completely unacceptable” and highlighted the need for everyone on campus to “feel safe,” while university leadership framed the sit-in as an escalation into unlawful behavior that endangered staff and law enforcement. That rhetorical pressure on the protesters was echoed in senior administrators’ characterizations of the events and the invocation of safety concerns for staff. 

At the same time, Princeton’s approach to enforcement was uneven: after Public Safety repeatedly warned that those remaining in Clio Hall past a deadline would be arrested, officers ultimately issued summonses and released the protesters rather than seeking harsher campus penalties, with the University indicating students were unlikely to face disciplinary sanctions beyond probation. As ever, the protective characterization of “protest” saved the day. Faculty and students defended the occupation as peaceful, as though rules against keeping the good order of the university were just recommendations. That view ultimately won out. Faculty members held a special meeting to recommend amnesty for the students, who do not appear to have suffered any consequences. If you violate time, place, and manner restrictions for certain reasons, the powers-that-be will come to your aid; what emerges by implication is content-based restrictions against disfavored views, who face the prospect of discipline because no one on the faculty or in the administration is sympathetic to their cause. A regime of inconsistent application violates its obligations to treat students and viewpoints equally. 

This is hypocrisy, of course, but it is more than that, too. It signals that some coercive behavior and physical confrontation may be tolerable, perhaps even rewarded, if administrators analyze the facts in the light of the glowing halo of protest. Based on who has been rewarded despite (or perhaps because of) their participation in campus activism, one might even infer that the prevalent rule for doling out consequences has nothing to do with protecting speech and everything to do with which causes hold institutional favor. 

There is a broader lesson here. The distinction between content-neutral time, place, and manner rules and content-based restrictions is sound, but insufficient if it is not reinforced consistently, swiftly, and decisively. The framework is only as good as its implementation.

Skeptics have good reason to believe that universities will continue to equivocate when forced to apply neutral rules to activist protest. Universities including Columbia and Harvard have long embraced protest as part of their identity: sit-ins, civil-rights marches, anti-war demonstrations. Indeed, in the same New York Times article where Prof. Robcis justified her assistance to campus rulebreakers, another professor saw exactly what was happening. In The Times’s paraphrase, astronomy professor James Applegate “thought the faculty’s participation in the campus protests was part of a romanticization of the Vietnam-era antiwar protests.” Applegate himself said it well: “These guys are trying to relive 1968,” and not for the sake of discourse. “I don’t think they have any intention of having a sensible conversation with anybody.” Sometimes it takes a scientist to remind humanities experts what they are meant to be doing. 

Right now, universities simply lack the credibility to assert that they understand the importance of neutral rules. To regain that credibility, they will have to take steps to ensure they are prepared to act as decisively as their words indicate. 

Campuses that do not already have transparent enforcement guidelines, with clear definitions of prohibited conduct such as harassment, assault, obstruction, intimidation, should publish them. These should include clear consequences, and clear timelines for adjudication. 

Adjudication should happen promptly, through bodies that do not simply replicate ideological biases. Delays, obfuscation, and administrative foot-dragging undermine trust more than any single controversial decision.

Personnel decisions, including hiring, fellowships, promotions, administrative posts, must align with institutional conduct norms. Universities should obviously refrain from rewarding individuals who have been responsible for harassment, violence, or other activities at odds with universities’ mission of open inquiry and civil discourse. That is a bare minimum for being taken seriously on these issues.

It would also be nice if universities could clarify, for its students and faculty alike, that free speech protections are not only about protest. They are about creating an environment of learning, where all are equally free to study, debate, and move freely. Harassment, intimidation, and coercion, even when conducted under the banner of protest, is not protected dissent but a violation of crucial community norms.

We are in broken-record territory now, but it bears repeating: institutions must rededicate themselves to genuinely pluralistic discourse. They must resist pressure, and subdue their own impulse, to treat protest as the purpose of campus life or as institution-sanctioned theater. Campus activism deserves to be taken seriously: It can be where real ideas are hashed out, or where certain ideologies assert their privileged status. Only consistent leadership can ensure that the former does not yield to the latter. Not only in written policies but in actions, personnel choices, and disciplinary decisions. 

High-minded lines about the importance of neutral rules may receive applause and plaudits for being tough, reasonable, and fair on matters of free speech. And they are a good start, an important principle, and a simple way to communicate what behavior is an is not acceptable. But defraying our civic crisis depends not on the elegance of the framework but whether the stewards of our institutions have the courage and integrity to apply it fairly to all.

Tal Fortgang ’17 is a legal policy fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a regular contributor to PFS and contributing writer at The Dispatch.