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UT president: It wasn't a protest. It was criminal trespassing.There is a long, proud history of protest at The University of Texas at Austin. I am grateful to work at a university where students, faculty and staff care deeply enough about community, national and world events to rally around those causes.
Demonstrations play a role on campuses such as ours. A university, after all, encourages students to discover and develop points of view, and to express them. These activities challenge the ways we think and feed a campus’ dynamic atmosphere. UT students have held dozens of peaceful protests, largely without incident, throughout this academic year.
We also have a responsibility to keep the campus and its people safe, and to allow our teaching and research to continue. Our rules provide structure for this responsibility and set up conditions for the co-existence of protests, safety and education. We are constantly reviewing those rules, improving on them, and making sure they protect everyone—those who are protesting and those who are learning, working or visiting campus. These rules also protect free speech, and enforcing them uniformly and consistently keeps us from discriminating against any particular point of view.
For decades, groups with an incredible array of differing views have shared a respect for our rules. These students, though energized by a conflict or cause, have nevertheless worked with us and found permissible ways to express themselves without putting others at risk.
Regrettably, protesters, including many not affiliated with UT, have refused in recent weeks to accept these rules and processes. It pains me deeply that even though the organizers declared their intent to break our rules, they rebuffed numerous attempts by our Office of the Dean of Students to meet beforehand. The on-campus encampments they said they would establish, and then did, were clearly prohibited by our rules, including a prohibition against camping that became effective in 2012. They also threatened to effectively disrupt the education of more than 52,000 students and to set an alarming precedent for anyone seeking to establish encampments in the future. Demonstrators were repeatedly urged, then ordered, to take down the encampments and disperse.
At every step, they refused. At that point, regardless of anyone’s opinion, this was no longer a traditional assembly or protest. By the plain language of our rules, it was criminal trespassing.
Some have asked why Texas Department of Public Safety officers were on our campus during the protests. This is a fair question with a clear answer: They were protecting the safety of our campus community by assisting the University of Texas Police Department. Our police department is outstanding, but its size is limited. We knew—as did the demonstrators—that it was unlikely to be adequately staffed for what was coming.
We have watched with concern as disruptive and illegal encampments have sprung up on other university campuses, and we took seriously the pre-protest threats—voiced by organizers and others with no affiliation with UT—to “occupy” our own. As university leaders, we recognized that at other schools, encampments have preceded further and more serious disruptions, safety risks, injuries, and ultimately, more severe and dangerous police intervention. Also, if we allowed encampments in this instance, it would be nearly impossible to stop encampments from other groups in the future without facing challenges of chilling speech or viewpoint discrimination.
It is difficult—for all of us—to see serious police presence and arrests on our campus. It is worse, though, to see a handful of people flout rules meant to protect everyone. It is worse still to see that disorder escalate from encampments to occupations, as has happened at Columbia University and UCLA. And it is terrifying to contemplate where such occupations might end—and who might get hurt.
We share the sincere and deep concerns of many Longhorns about the lives lost in Gaza and Israel. Their human reactions—and their need to express them in hope of a better world—show the importance of our traditions of protest and assembly.
Still, UT is a community. Our foremost responsibility has always been to keep that community safe.
We want to work with protesters—within our rules and laws—so they can express themselves. We need them to work with us to fulfill the responsibility we share.
Jay C. Hartzell is president of The University of Texas at Austin. Read more
The University has also published an FAQ about the recent protests, which can be found here. |
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