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This article was written by a member of the Boston University Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. BU AAUP is an organization dedicated to protecting academic freedom and pushing back against attacks on higher education in the United States. This article is part of a series documenting the suppression of free speech at BU.
Prior columns in this AAUP series have revealed some ways in which the Boston University administration has constrained free speech on BU campus. We understand that University leadership, here as elsewhere, is under pressure from the Trump administration and no doubt believes it is simply being prudent in managing that pressure.
But the result is serious erosion of rights of speech and protest in our University community at just the time when vigorously protesting injustice, abuse of power and lawlessness is most urgently needed.
The silencing of one student organization, BU Students for Justice in Palestine — SJP — began before the reelection of Donald Trump but reveals how the BU administration shifted rules to suppress student activism, ramped up the pressure on SJP after the presidential election and ultimately caused SJP to disband.
In this op-ed, we report on SJP’s struggle to speak out and protest what it sees as a genocide in Gaza and BU’s implication in funding war. To be clear, this op-ed does not seek to take a position on Palestine, but defends the rights of students to protest injustice where they see it.
Our University community must be free to protest without fear of silencing or discipline by BU administrators except under preexisting, content-neutral rules, applied with restraint and judgment, sensitive to context and appropriate to the educational mission of the University. Instead SJP’s experience demonstrates that BU manipulated its own rules to restrict student speech that the University considered politically risky, rather than embracing earnest student expression as an important product of the University’s educational purposes.
There is a direct throughline to BU’s current repression of pride flags because, as will become apparent, the BU administration honed their process and justifications for repression through experimentation at SJP’s expense before finally arriving at a facially neutral, but politically motivated, policy.
President Trump has exploited universities’ continued willingness to apply leverage on students to prevent them from organizing against his actions abroad and at home, and in doing so has stifled the student activism that often cultivates broader resistance to government overreach.
In Oct. 2024, the Office of the Dean of Students — ODOS — informed the student leaders of the Center for Gender, Sexuality, and Activism — CGSA — that they must remove pro-Palestine posters from their space, which were stored there by members of SJP. CGSA’s executive board allowed use of its space by other student organizations, including SJP.
A student had filed a complaint, claiming the posters constituted discrimination on the basis of national origin. Concerned law faculty intervened to explain to ODOS that forcing removal of only SJP posters would constitute content-driven regulation of speech inconsistent with basic principles of free speech, especially given the range of other posters in the same space.
Photos of the room at the time showed poster-sized signs reflecting a range of causes and concerns, including “We Support Reproductive Rights for All Genders,” “Raytheon Profits Off Murder in Yemen,” “Hate Speech Is Not Free Speech,” “Fact: America is Built on Slavery,” “Consent Isn’t Just for Straight Relationships,” “Kops Off Kampus”— and yes, at least one “Divest from Israel,” another “From the River to the Sea,” an “Imagine Not Being Against Genocide” and three letter-sized Palestine flags hanging on a string. Perhaps the most unexpected grievance: “BU Doesn’t Need Your Quarters — Free Laundry Now!”
Disappointedly, the law faculty never received an adequate response from the ODOS, only that the office believed they had the responsibility to police any speech on University property.
But the ODOS abandoned its effort to have the posters removed shortly thereafter, without communicating with the students about its reasons or policies. Thus, even as the ODOS seemed to back down, SJP could have no confidence in the scope and security of their speech rights going forward.
A couple weeks later, SJP members engaged in quiet study-ins during two afternoons in the Computing & Data Science building, where students studied within the communal study area in the lobby of CDS while wearing keffiyehs and having pro-Palestinian flyers on their laptops and nearby surfaces. SJP also hung up flags and signs in protest in the building’s windows.
None of the activities in CDS seemed to violate the letter of any University rules. Nevertheless, the ODOS delivered a formal warning to SJP for its afternoon study-ins, relying on a provision of the BU Interim Events and Demonstrations Policy stating that no “event” may “take place over more than one day (24 hours) without express written approval” from the ODOS in order to ensure that “community spaces remain open and adaptable for all users.”
Presumably the cited provision, appearing immediately before the prohibition on permanent physical encampments, means that a group cannot occupy a space for more than 24 consecutive hours. It seems implausible that it is intended to ban engaging in two distinct gatherings on consecutive afternoons. Moreover, the study-ins did not interfere in any way with the space’s remaining “open and adaptable for all users,” nor did they “interfere with or disrupt University operations.”
The disciplinary letter also cited a rule against posting unattended signage, but the flyers that accompanied the study-in were very much attended. It is telling that after law faculty made these straightforward points to ODOS, the Demonstrations Policy was quietly revised, without consultation with the law faculty or even notice after it occurred. The new rules prohibited signs being put on University property even if attended, a revision aimed at barring future demonstrations akin to this particular SJP study-in.
The merits of the revised rules aside, those rules cannot fairly be used as justification for disciplining conduct that predates the revisions. Nevertheless, SJP was given a “formal warning” and required to meet monthly with an ODOS officer “to ensure compliance with university expectations.”
There was no fact-finding process or ability to appeal this determination, despite law faculty requesting such an opportunity. So instead, faculty attended these meetings and witnessed ODOS asking SJP to preview any future demonstrations for ODOS approval, which per the events policy is not a requirement for student groups.
ODOS, deliberately or not, disciplined SJP because its message was objectionable in a way that the messages of most student groups are not. The sequence of events, occurring at a time when similar signs across campus by other student groups were not questioned by BU administration, makes it clear that the University was censoring a single issue and looking to prevent the voicing of a particular perspective.
Thwarted at having a demonstration, in early Feb. of 2025, SJP sought to have BU Student Government hold a referendum of the undergraduate student body on three questions: whether BU’s investments should be made more transparent, whether BU should divest from companies “complicit in human rights violations in the Middle East” and whether BU should reinvest the divested funds in “aid for marginalized groups, including — but not limited to — Palestinian students and scholars.”
SJP worked with the Student Government in the hopes of conducting a survey that would obtain a fair representation of undergraduate sentiment. When SJP sought to have the referendum fully publicized through the monthly student government email, however, BU administrators disallowed that content, again clamping down on SJP’s efforts to get its message out.
On Feb. 6, after being precluded from using University-wide email, the vice president of SJP sought to publicize a new referendum, administered by SJP and BU’s Young Democratic Socialists of America, by dropping flyers down into the Questrom atrium. A subsequent disciplinary letter from ODOS alleged that the group also publicized the referendum by dropping flyers in CDS, unfurling a banner from CAS, affixing flyers to bus stops and trash cans on the street and placing flyers on numerous classroom chairs.
After a Feb. 14 meeting regarding these alleged violations, ODOS placed SJP on probation rather than working with the group to find a way that was more acceptable to the University to carry out the referendum. Facing the onerous conditions of probation, BU SJP would disband later that semester.
The ODOS also began disciplinary proceedings against the SJP vice president who dropped the flyers in Questrom. On March 27, 2025, after the usual interview with an ODOS Judicial Affairs representative, the student received a disciplinary letter that found a violation of University rules, specifically “the Office of the Dean of Students’ Publications & Publicity Policy, which stipulates that ‘posting signs, posters, and fliers is permitted only on authorized bulletin boards.’”
This discipline, a Letter of Reprimand and Warning, confirmed again that — even when the University forecloses traditional channels for students to exercise their speech rights — alternative, innocuous efforts by students to make their voices heard will not be tolerated.
To be clear, we accept that the reprimand and warning in response to the dropped flyers lacked the defects of the other instances of discipline targeting SJP, in that the conduct came within a plausible reading of the letter of the ODOS’s policies.
But we do not believe her discipline represents an appropriate exercise of judgment on the part of ODOS when seen in context. The student experienced her discipline as the latest episode of University hindrance of pro-Palestine protest activity, since her action represented only the most modest interference with University operations, seeking only to foster a good turnout in the referendum after the University prohibited student government from publicizing it in its monthly email.
We believe that a genuine commitment to the educational mission of Boston University would require supporting students in speaking out and organizing against what they see as injustice in their world. In none of our discussions with University officials has anyone disagreed with that position in the abstract.
SJP’s recent history has included exactly the sort of protest activity that the University should encourage, given its use of reasonable — even if unauthorized — efforts to call attention to what the SJP has understood as an ongoing genocide. Instead, the University manifested an eagerness to clamp down on student speech when it offended the sensibilities of other students or potentially administrators.
The University must commit to an educational mission that embraces and celebrates free speech, rather than disciplining and intimidating students who seek to exercise that foundational right.
Are you concerned with the issues raised here? If so, help us understand how the University’s actions have affected your political expression, your education or your research. Contact BU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors at [[email protected]], or write your own story for publication in the pages of the Daily Free Press via [[email protected]]. We can succeed in moving BU’s Administration only if we learn each other’s stories and demand that faculty and students be included in University governance to defend the fundamental values of higher education.
