At the heart of Interim President Richard L. McCormick’s “Guidelines To Keep Our Campus Safe During Demonstrations and Other Campus Events” message is a myth about the non-disruptive student protest. On page five, the University guidelines warn that “Demonstrations and protests will not be allowed to disrupt the academic environment.“ There is a problem with this framing: the non-disruptive student protest does not exist and pre-distributed guidelines will not make it so.

The protests and rallies that took place on the Stony Brook campus last year were peaceful. To my knowledge, there was no violence initiated by the diverse, multiracial, multi-ethnic and interfaith students that marched, rallied and sat-in throughout the fall and spring semesters. There were no class interruptions, no blocked traffic or closed offices and absolutely no property damage. Students were able to learn, professors could teach, research continued without interruption, staff members were able to complete their tasks and administrators could still manage school affairs. 

Still, twice last semester, former President Maurie McInnis called the University Police Department (UPD) on protesting students. On March 26, the UPD arrested students for holding a sit-in in the lobby of the Administration Building. After the administration called over 100 state troopers and the UPD on campus, these forces threatened the faculty and students surrounding the Staller Steps. These police then grabbed those who refused to leave the steps, twisted arms, forced some students down and left bruises. It was the police who unlawfully seized and held “at least a dozen” cell phones for almost two weeks. When confronted, University officials justified this violence by saying that the student protests were disruptive. But they never publicly and credibly defined what exactly was disrupted. 

At her most cogent, McInnis claimed that police were unleashed to clear the Staller Steps for a previously scheduled event. Do we actually need police to mediate students sharing the commons of a large campus green? Must we have billy clubs, guns and crime scene tape separating us from each other? Stony Brook students must learn how to share common spaces, despite and across differences. The police tape and cruisers cordoning off the campus green during the last weeks of the spring semester in May were a failure of our shared educational mission. Students should not be barred from shared spaces because of their identity or beliefs — not by their peers and certainly not by the police. Coexistence and dialogue are skills practiced and refined over time. If we cannot share the campus green, how do we hope to share the world? 

The history of student protest in the United States is a history of disruption. When young people marshal their power to propel their communities toward a new horizon, there is a clash between the prevailing status quo and the new values students champion. This clash is what John Lewis of the Student Non-Violence Coordinating Committee meant when he coined the phrase “good trouble”; it is the substance of civil rights organizer Bayard Rustin’s call for “angelic troublemakers” in every community. Throughout the 20th century on U.S. campuses, young people have responded to injustice by troubling the waters. 

By invoking and valorizing this myth of a better type of “student protest” — one that would trouble no one and disrupt nothing — Stony Brook administrators are setting up our students to fail. Their stringent rulebook casts students’ efforts to express themselves as sovereign political actors illegal or risky. Want to march through the campus? You must have your route pre-approved. Want to hold a peaceful divestment sit-in in the Administration Building? You are risking suspension, expulsion, arrest or worse. Oh, and by the way, drawing with chalk on the sidewalk may be considered criminal mischief. Projecting light onto buildings is also prohibited. 

The University’s insistence that they “will enforce” these guidelines in a “viewpoint-neutral manner“ is no consolation. Banning and criminalizing peaceful protest is itself a value. Tolerating students only when they conform with particular administrators’ sensibilities and insisting that law and order must be the defining features of campus life are both controversial values; this approach is far from neutral. The school year has only just begun and already, students have already been harassed by the UPD for handing out flyers about Palestine. 

With these restrictive guidelines, the Stony Brook administration puts itself at odds with its own history. Our University’s Africana Studies Department originated in the 1968 student protests that were so large and disruptive that then-President John Toll called a moratorium on classes for three days to hold a public listening session. The University praises the legacy of the late mathematician Jim Simons and forgets that Simons came to Stony Brook after his public opposition to the Vietnam War disrupted his career.  When Stony Brook University divested from South African apartheid in 1985, they did so after student protests. 

As our university’s administration sends out guidelines announcing their intention to criminalize protesting students in the upcoming year, I am reminded of Frederick Douglass’ insight from 1857: “If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”