Columbia’s actions this past week, especially its decision to invite the NYPD onto campus, have prompted me to post a new chapter, “Assembly as Political Practice,” forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Peaceful Assembly (Tabatha Abu El-Haj, Michael Hamilton, Thomas Probert & Sharath Srinivasan, eds.). Recent events highlight the interrelationship between protest politics and electoral politics, the rise of a new McCarthyism focused on educational institutions, its power, but also the pervasive devaluing of it as a form of politics. Most disheartening to me personally is the widespread perceived reasonableness of Columbia’s actions including among First Amendment scholars. It stems, in my view, from a misconception of assembly as a lesser form of speech and an inclination to over estimate the risks of disorder.

“[A]ssemblies come in a range of . . . forms, including annual parades, smaller political protests, and weekly gatherings of social groups. All these forms of assembly sustain and reinforce the capacity for democratic politics, and their value does not turn on their expressive ends alone. Both the possibility of effective democratic politics, and a proper construction of the right of peaceful assembly, demand that we recognize the value of assembly, as assembly, and its latent and constitutive political functions.”