‘Setting Clear Boundaries’: Texas Governor Signs Into Law a University System-Wide Ban on Encampments, Masked Protests

Texas, which boasts one of the largest public university systems in the country, is the second state to implement an encampment ban. The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, has signed into law a bill that will bar students enrolled in Texas’s public university system from setting up anti-Israel tent cities come the fall semester. A state senator, Brandon Creighton, proposed the measure in March in response to the protest movement that roiled universities across the country following Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack and Israel’s harsh response. The law, dubbed “the “Campus Protection Act,” seeks to affirm the free-speech rights of students and university employees while “setting clear boundaries to prevent disruption and ensure community safety.” Specifically, the legislation directs each university in the state to adopt its own free-speech policy while including various mandated “restrictions on the time, place, and manner of expressive activities.”Those proscribed activities include using amplifying devices during class hours; staging “substantially disruptive” protests in common outdoor areas of campus during the last two weeks of the semester; setting up encampments; protesting while masked; lowering and replacing a university-owned American flag or Texas state flag; and setting up demonstrations between the hours of 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. Several of the provisions align with recommendations for combating antisemitism on campus that have been issued by Jewish advocacy groups across the country. The new law also repeals a provision in a 2019 state bill, SB 18, that requires universities to allow any common outdoor space on campus to be used as a traditional public forum, thus granting university leaders the authority to decide which areas can be used for expressive purposes. The measure was championed by Texas Republicans who sought to prevent the state’s public universities from being overrun — yet again — by disruptive anti-Israel protests. Over the past year and a half, Texas schools like the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University, and others were rocked by anti-Israel sit-ins, marches, and encampments, some of which led to clashes with law enforcement and resulted in numerous arrests. The measure was welcomed by a campus antisemitism watchdog group, Documenting Jew Hatred on Campus, which praised Mr. Abbott for ensuring that universities “make reasonable efforts to provide a welcoming education environment for all students, including the Jewish, Zionist, and Israeli students,” the group tells the Sun. “Common sense time, place and manner restrictions are necessary to ensure that education, which is one of the main missions of the university, is not interfered with and disrupted,” the group adds. “Sadly, when universities fail to enforce such restrictions, Jewish, Zionist and Israeli students are harassed and intimidated.”The law has faced criticism from free-speech advocates, who argue that it is too vague and impedes constitutionally protected forms of expression. A First Amendment advocacy group, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, took particular issue with the legislation’s restriction on when a demonstration can be staged. “Wearing a MAGA hat or a Bernie T-shirt would be prohibited between 10 p.m. and 8 a.m. because the political apparel is an expressive act, and therefore covered as an expressive activity,” FIRE’s lead counsel for government affairs, Tyler Coward, told the Washington Post. Mr. Coward reckoned that he hadn’t “seen a law regulating campus expression that’s this restrictive.” Others say the bill undercuts the free-speech protections awarded to Texans in 2019, via SB 18. However, that was disputed by the author of the SB 18 bill, Senator Joan Huffman. She stated that the new law “does not undermine the intent or goals” of the 2019 measure, and that “both bills work to ensure that our academic environments remain spaces for open dialogue and learning, fostering an atmosphere where diverse perspectives can thrive while maintaining safety.” While nearly every state has faced unruly anti-Israel protests on university campuses, Texas is only the second state to impose an outright ban on student encampments. Arizona, which boasts a significantly smaller university system than Texas, outlawed campus encampments in May. The new law builds on an executive order issued last year by Texas’s governor that required state universities to update their free-speech policies to incorporate the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism. That definition notes that some forms of anti-Israel speech — like claiming that the existence of a state of Israel is a racist endeavor — may be antisemitic. President Trump has gone after universities that stand accused of failing to protect their Jewish students from antisemitic harassment and discrimination on campus. The government has made moves to revoke billions of dollars in federal grants and contracts from those universities, accusing them of violating the Civil Rights Act of 1964. That law bans entities that receive federal funding from discriminating based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin.

‘Setting Clear Boundaries’: Texas Governor Signs Into Law a University System-Wide Ban on Encampments, Masked Protests

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