12-03-2024 4:49am

"DIE-INS" & FREE

Hunt Valley Life Staff

The Race to Pacify Protesters

Is a new team of campus administrators protecting free speech or undermining it?

Overzealous Intrusions?

By Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle Of Higher Education

Cover Photo: Gabriel Donahue, The Towerlight

By the time the parties converged at a “die-in” at Towson University’s central quad on a chilly day last November, campus-police officers and administrators almost outnumbered the handful of pro-Palestinian activists who were trickling in.

The police chief, a few student-affairs officials, and about six other police officers who’d been tipped off that an unauthorized demonstration was about to happen watched as eight to 10 students stretched out on a patch of the 21,000-square-foot lawn. The students surrounded themselves with dolls wrapped in white shrouds splattered with red. Some held Palestinian flags and signs decrying genocide and demanding that the university divest from any companies connected to the war in Gaza.

The administrators, and the student-government representatives they’d summoned, tried unsuccessfully to persuade the students to move to a designated free-speech area on the outskirts of the campus, warning them that they could be arrested if they refused. Five students were later disciplined for violating the university’s “time, place, and manner” rules for protests, which ban spontaneous protests on the quad and only allow pre-registered protests from groups that are recognized by the university. (The group putting on the event, the Towson Colonized Peoples Revolution, wasn’t recognized).

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