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Princeton University issues new guidance on free expression, assembly under shadow of anti-Israel protests

The guidance covers a range of activities undertaken by anti-Zionist protesters on college campuses last year.

By Dion J. Pierre, The Algemeiner

Princeton University has issued new guidance on free speech and assembly, notifying its students of what is expected of them amid an election year and a polarizing Israel-Hamas war that continues to set off anti-Jewish incidents on college campuses across the US.

“While Princeton does not regulate the content of speech, it may reasonably regulate the time, place, and manner of expression to ensure that it does not disrupt the ordinary activities of the university,” the university says on a newly unveiled “Protests and Free Expression” website.

“The university also enforces rules prohibiting discrimination and harassment. A wide range of protest activity is allowed, but protests must not create a hostile environment (or otherwise violate the law), or significantly disrupt university operations and events.”

The guidance covers a range of activities undertaken by anti-Zionist protesters on college campuses last year, which included illegal occupations of administrative buildings, unannounced “sit-ins,” and the circulation of antisemitic conspiracies about Israel which distorted the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and falsely accused the Israeli government of committing a genocide of Palestinians.

Princeton students committed many of these offenses during spring semester, according to the Daily Princetonian, with activists taking over first the McCosh Courtyard and then Clio Hall before settling on the Cannon Green section of campus, where they erected a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.”

The paper added that Princeton president Christopher Eisgruber’s administration was sterner in opposing the encampment than his Ivy League counterparts, stating early on that arrests would follow unheeded orders to clear the area.

Ultimately, he negotiated a settlement with the protesters, agreeing to consider divesting from Israel but refusing to boycott the Jewish state or amnesty any protesters who were arrested or disciplined for breaking the rules — punishments which, the paper said on Sunday, have not been overturned.

One of the who students whom campus police arrested in April, Aditi Rao, told The Daily Princetonian, that the university’s new guidance is “crazy,” adding, “Where else does one protest the institution than the home of the institution itself?”

She continued, “I think what the university is quite evidently attempting to do right now is to, for the 16 or so students that it knows are still viable organizers in the movements, create an easy reason for further disciplining.”

Eisgruber has also reportedly hinted that the university may adopt “institutional neutrality,” a policy of refraining from issuing statements on contentious political issues.

During a speech which marked the beginning of the new academic year, he said, according to the Princetonian, “It’s not the job of a university or a university president to validate your opinions or to tell students or faculty members what to think about the issues of the day.”

However, experts have told The Algemeiner that while institutional neutrality would ostensibly lessen the extent to which universities promote anti-Israel bias, it may lead to an abdication of their duty to advocate principles which hold together the fabric of Western civilization and protect the academy from ideas which undermine the pursuit of truth.

When John Hopkins University adopted institutional neutrality in August, National Association of Scholars (NAS) president Peter Wood said the policy “empowers the mob by giving activists of popular causes the assurance that the university’s officials will not get in their way.”

He continued, “The ideal has proved delusional, and as a weapon it is easily used against reform as for it. We must call for universities to espouse substantive ideals of truth, liberty, and citizenship, even though they cut directly against the ideological commitments of many of higher education’s administrators and faculty members. This is a challenging task. But Hamas’s massacre of Israelis [on Oct. 7] has stripped us of many illusions … We must say forthrightly what virtues we wish our universities to champion. And if we wish our universities to fight once more on the side of the angels, the swiftest way to that goal is to teach them how to speak with courage by speaking so ourselves.”