A few weeks ago, I ran into an old acquaintance at the restaurant Mecha on Crown Street. She was back at Yale to start her first year at the law school and I was in town for a short stint before returning to California and my sabbatical at Stanford University. We met in January 2017 — when she was an undergrad and I was finishing up my doctorate — and we both were part of organizing a large rally in front of Sterling Library to protest the Trump “Muslim ban.” We both only half-jokingly remarked that we hoped we didn’t have to start organizing again together this year.

The protest, on Sunday, Jan. 29 of that year, has been one of the highlights of my now 16 years at Yale, as an undergraduate, then graduate student and now faculty member. Over 1,000 people showed up to that rally — from almost every school on campus and from the New Haven community. Former President Peter Salovey was there, along with the deans of schools, the heads of colleges and hundreds and hundreds of students.

I will never forget the large contingent from the School of Management arriving carrying candles as they entered from College Street heading towards the gathering in front of Sterling Memorial Library. It was a moving moment during an evening I’ll never forget. I was never so proud to be a Yalie as I was that night. While the event had a few speeches, it was often mostly silent. On the library’s facade, one word that drew us together was illuminated in bright, white letters: “SOLIDARITY.”

Fast forward to 2024, only a few weeks ago, Yale announced new policies to restrict protests, or rather to put conditions on them that would make them more difficult to organize. Based on the new regulations, one wonders if the 2017 rally on Cross Campus would have been allowed nowadays. We sought no permission for the gathering, just invited our friends and colleagues, then showed up with candles, a megaphone and a projector to beam that one word into the darkness. 

At the beginning of September, President Michael Roth of our sister institution, Wesleyan University — just up the road in Middletown — wrote in the New York Times he’d like to see more activism on campus, not less. He was a bit more pointed on NPR when he suggested college presidents were “pricing in” a Trump victory in November, hoping their own self-regulation would keep their institutions safe from attacks from the right, from people like vice presidential candidate JD Vance LAW ’13. Of course, this is what Yale history professor Timothy Snyder calls obeying in advance.

The words and decisions of university presidents matter. Jason Stanley, another Yale colleague, has written extensively on the role of higher education in the context of authoritarianism. His new book, “Erasing History: How Fascists Rewrite the Past to Control the Future,” is devoted entirely to this very subject. Universities are targeted by authoritarians because they are often the site of dissent and resistance. It’s for these very reasons that authoritarians seek to control these institutions or shut them down. And before you suggest that “it can’t happen here,” look towards the European Union — to Hungary, in particular, where Viktor Orban has done just that. The American right looks to Orban in this regard as a role model.

What will our new president, Maurie McInnis, do now? These new policies undoubtedly have her approval, even if they were drafted fully or in part before her arrival. At Stony Brook University, where McInnis previously served, she consolidated security on campus under the rubric of something called Enterprise Risk Management, which came under criticism from faculty and students there. If the broad calls for law and order on campus are used to limit protest at Yale, one has to ask: to what end?

President Roth was able to thread the needle at Wesleyan this past year without the draconian responses we saw across the country at other institutions, in which university presidents said they had no recourse but to send in police against their own students, in what Columbia history professor Adam Tooze has called an exercise in the use of the “state as blunt force.” No one was compelled in the spring to send in the cops on students and faculty and my greatest worry is that repression of dissent as the first and best response to what is happening on our campuses is something too many academic leaders agree upon.

The new regulations on protest at Yale are regressive and self-defeating, and in the end illiberal. I am blue through and through: I’ll defend Yale as an institution of higher learning to the end, even in its myriad imperfections and limitations. But when the university starts contorting itself to bow to the authoritarian impulse now on the rise in American politics, we should all call it out. I’ll give Snyder the last word: “Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” It is not a lesson we should be teaching here.

GREGG GONSALVES is a 2011 graduate of Yale College and a 2017 graduate of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. He is an associate professor at the School of Public Health and an associate professor (adjunct) at the Yale Law School. He can be reached at gregg.gonsalves@yale.edu.