"Whateva! I do what I want!"
Stomping your feet like a child is not the way to advocate for free speech.
If you are squatting on someone else's property, and growing a garden on the land without the consent of the property owner, you are not a "victim" if the property owner tells you to leave. You do not get to appropriate someone else's property for your own personal use and consumption, no matter how "righteous" you consider your cause to be.
From the B Square Bulletin article on continuing protests against Indiana University's expressive activities policy:
"Think about what this meadow was like before settlers turned it from a sustainable prairie into a drab waste of water with nothing to pollinate."
This is absurd. No, the university trustees and administration are not "settlers." The university owns the land. Pro-Hamas protesters were squatting on the university's property and planting a garden on university property without the consent of the landowner. The pro-Hamas protesters were the colonizers. This is childish foot stomping, the equivalent of saying "Whateva! I do what I want!"
As a state institution, the university must allow free speech. Protesting, speeches, marches, letter writing campaigns, publishing opinions online, petitions, and signs are all forms of free speech that the university is not allowed to punish, especially when it is targeting a particular point of view. Squatting on university property and planting a garden for your personal consumption are not acts of "free speech."
The most consistent objection is the restriction on protests between 11 pm and 6 am. This is because people need to sleep, and about 10,000 students live on campus. The issue is not whether speech is more disruptive at 11:05 pm than it is at 10:55 pm. The reality of any noise control ordinance or regulation is that a line has to be drawn somewhere, at a specific point. City government has a noise ordinance, and even the dormitories on the IU campus have "quiet hours." None of this is new or unprecedented.
I wrote back in August that this was a good policy, but reasonable people can disagree with some aspects of the policy. What is not reasonable is to assume you have the "right" to use university property for your own personal garden. Prior to 2024, were there any protests that took place after 11 pm? Is this a legitimate free speech issue? This looks much more like a juvenile case of "You can't tell me what to do!" If the window was wider, the criticism would be much more reasonable. The "free speech" advocates are harming their own cause.