Illegal Protests or an Illegal Order?

​President Trump on Tuesday declared on Truth Social:
 
“All Federal Funding will STOP for any College, School, or University that allows illegal protests. Agitators will be imprisoned/or permanently sent back to the country from which they came. Americans students will be permanently expelled or, depending on on [sic] the crime, arrested. NO MASKS! Thank you for your attention to this matter.”
 
There is less to unpack here than there is to fill in. The basic question raised by this post is what the Trump Administration will consider an “illegal protest”?
 
Absolute clarity is needed on this point. A protest on behalf of Gazans, or even in favor of Hamas, is not an illegal protest. It is as fully protected by the First Amendment as would be any protest. Just because we believe an opinion is off-putting, stupid, or vile does not make it a crime.
 
A good example of an illegal protest can be seen in UCLA’s toleration of protesters harassing Jewish students and declaring “Jew-free zones” on campus. Jews were denied access to all parts of the UCLA campus unless they renounced their faith. That protest broke the letter of the law and was fascist in its heart. Federal judge Mark Scarsi told UCLA in no uncertain terms that the university had to act against these illegal protests. The judge said that the attacks on Jewish students were “unimaginable” and “abhorrent to our constitutional guarantee of religious freedom.”
 
Another needed distinction is whether an institution is public or private. The First Amendment only restricts the power of the government to abridge speech. This means that a public university like UCLA has an obligation to lean hard to give maximal space for speech, even vile speech. But go up Highway 101 to Stanford University, and you find a private institution with more leeway to define what is or is not acceptable speech on campus. But just a little. Stanford University accepts federal funds, which comes with some strings about any limits on speech. Moreover, California’s Leonard Law mandates that private schools respect speech that would be protected off campus.
 
So again, what is an illegal protest? It is one in which protesters defy time, place, and manner restrictions of the administration of their college or university to take over a part of a campus, to occupy a building, to engage in violence or destroy property, or to harass students and faculty.
 
We trust that Department of Education Secretary Linda McMahon will instill these distinctions in President Trump’s directive.

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