Of course, this is a willful misunderstanding of the role of protest. An expression of political discontent that is not disruptive is called an email, or a petition, or a meeting. Protests are by necessity disruptive: They emerge when other forms of negotiation have been exhausted. (And students and faculty have, in fact, explored such avenues.)
“The role of the administration is to defend the values of the university as a place for education, inquiry, teaching, learning, expression, and yes, even protest,” Milanich said. “And that is what the university administrators to my mind have completely ceded.”
“There have been [historically] other approaches than calling the police onto campus,” Erik Gellman, a professor of history at UNC-Chapel Hill, told me. “We even had a former chancellor who had committed to never inviting armed police or armed guards to suppress student free speech. Here at UNC, the recent actions of the interim Chancellor Roberts violated that commitment.”
