Yale News

In an interview at the annual Buckley conference, Dean of Yale College Pericles Lewis shared new details behind the administration’s response to the protests last spring, including the decision to arrest students. 

During the hour-long interview, Lewis answered questions from Buckley speakers director William Barbee ’26 and audience members, who were Buckley fellows and donors. Lewis spoke on a range of topics including institutional neutrality, fostering open political dialogue on campus and self-censorship among students. 

Lewis was unusually candid about the University’s response to spring campus protests. Lewis and other administrators, including University President Maurie McInnis and former President Peter Salovey, have been generally reserved on the topic, rarely speaking publicly about the administration’s response to the protests and how the University might approach similar situations in the future. 

Last week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a report which accused universities including Yale of failing to discipline antisemitic conduct during pro-Palestinian protests. In the Buckley interview, Lewis defended the administration’s response. 

“We were criticized in the congressional report recently for not having given out stiffer penalties to some of the protesters. But I think we made pretty clear that they can protest within reason, that is to say with respect to time, place and manner,” he said. “And the students who were arrested were disciplined for preventing the ongoing activity of the University in disregarding the time, place and manner restrictions, which were reasonable ones.” 

The “time, place and manner restrictions” refer to restrictions the University places on campus protest, which as of last spring included needing permission to use outdoor spaces and erect outdoor structures. 

Last April, students set up an encampment on Beinecke Plaza without permission, calling on the University to divest from military weapons manufacturers. After three days, the Yale Police Department cleared the encampment, arresting 48 protesters for trespassing.

After the first encampment was cleared, protesters set up a second encampment on Cross Campus. The encampment blocked access to Cross Campus unless pedestrians agreed to community guidelines including “being committed to Palestinian liberation and fighting for freedom for all oppressed people.” Organizers later moved tents to allow a pathway for people to pass through. YPD cleared the encampment one night later, on the morning of April 30, making no arrests. 

During the audience Q&A, Mitchell Dubin ’25 followed up with Lewis about the enforcement of the time, place and manner restrictions during the spring protests. Dubin maintained that the University did not fully enforce the restrictions during the spring, and asked whether the University would enforce them in the future. 

“Is there anything new that suggests that these same reasonable time, place and manner restrictions that were in place last year would actually now be enforced?” Dubin asked. “Because obviously a policy that exists without the enforcement mechanism is as good as just having nothing.”

In response, Lewis denied that the time, place and manner restrictions were not enforced. 

He acknowledged that the restrictions were not enforced right away and gave two reasons why the administration chose to delay enforcement. 

“I would not say that they were not enforced; however, what happened in some cases was that the enforcement was somewhat delayed,” he said. “But to be candid, it doesn’t make sense to arrest students who are encamped in tents in the middle of the night, and it doesn’t make sense to arrest students or clear them out when we don’t have an adequate number of police present in order to make it safe.” 

Dubin asked Lewis if the college was investing in further resources for enforcement, which Lewis did not answer. 

Dubin wrote to the News after the event that “anyone with a pulse” can tell it was “a lack of will” and “not a lack of resources, as the administration claimed” which prevented the University from immediately enforcing the time, place and manner restrictions. 

At another point in the interview, Lewis emphasized that there was “very, very little violence” during the encampment period because of the administration’s chosen response. Some peer institutions endured “broader violence” because, Lewis said, “arrests went very wrong.” 

At institutions such as the University of California, Los Angeles, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara, it was reported that the dismantling of encampments led to violent altercations between student demonstrators and police. 

At Columbia University, former President Minouche Shafik called in police hours into the occupation of a campus building. At least nine of the 46 arrested protesters at Columbia sustained injuries including a fractured eye socket, concussions, an ankle sprain, cuts and injured wrists. 

On May 1, the Yale Police Department violently arrested four protesters, including two students and two New Haven community members, though the arrests were separate from the two encampments. An external review acknowledged a “lapse” in YPD conduct, concluding that “disproportionate” force was used. 

Lewis spoke about another hindrance to seeking disciplinary action against every student protester: access to their identification. 

“We’ve also been criticized specifically in a congressional report a week ago about not having punished every single student who broke the rules at the encampment, but the technical reality of that is that you can only punish a student once you’ve taken their ID in order to arrest them,” he said. “If I only went around and punished students that I happen to recognize, that would be unfair selective prosecution, right?” 

The House report revealed that since the protests, Yale has reprimanded 23 students and is currently reviewing 22 other disciplinary cases. Two other students have been placed on disciplinary probation, per the report. 

Students who are arrested are automatically referred to the Yale Executive Committee, the body which decides disciplinary action, Lewis previously told the News. 

Lewis also discussed the distinctions between protected free expression and discrimination, harassment or threats of violence during the interview. This distinction, he said, governed why the University sought disciplinary action in some cases and not others.

Free expression is protected under the First Amendment whereas intimidation and threats of violence, he explained, “are not protected by the First Amendment in any way.” It is the responsibility of the University to enable free expression and seek disciplinary action against intimidation, Lewis said. 

The News asked Lewis specifically about an incident last spring where a protester recited a poem calling for “death [to] follow” those who “facilitated this mass killing,” referring to the war in Gaza. The student who recited this poem has been placed on probation, according to last week’s House report. 

Lewis said he could not speak about a specific incident, but explained more generally that the administration tried to pursue disciplinary actions during the protests in line with how similar transgressions have been disciplined in the past. 

He emphasized that threats of violence cross the line from protected free expression to something that requires the University to pursue disciplinary action, but remained ambiguous on when specific incidents might cross the line from protected free speech to intimidation or threats of violence. 

“University presidents got in a lot of trouble in front of Congress last year trying to make the distinctions,” Lewis said, to audience laughter.

The Buckley Institute was founded in 2011.

Correction, Nov. 11: The article has been updated to reflect that Shafik called in police hours into the occupation of a campus building, not the central green.