Last month, my fellow teachers at the University of Maryland, College Park, began their fall classes with the usual concerns: learning students’ names, logging into the WiFi, searching for bartending gigs if they didn’t get enough classes. But we received a new challenge this year: Nine pages of restrictive rules about who can say what, when, and where on campus. Our administration is afraid of what its students and teachers might say, so they unleashed new rules that would make a homeowners’ association blush. College Park is not alone. Instructors at the University of California system, Indiana University and dozens of other colleges are facing identical new rules, creating a culture of fear in places where ideas should flow freely.

These nine pages include rules on public speech from years past, along with a host of new ones that specify just about every way people on campus are allowed to express themselves. Campus police will enforce the new rules. They have not been discussed by the University Senate. In a pattern familiar to colleagues at the University of Kentucky, where the Board of Regents recently disbanded the faculty Senate, our administration is bowing to political pressure and circumventing shared governance. They are so afraid of their students and teachers that they have forbidden anyone from memorializing the Israeli and Palestinian dead on October 7, despite admitting there is no evidence of any threat.

The new rules are absurd and hypocritical. The use of chalk, which must be a particular water-soluble variety, is now restricted to two specific places on our 1,340-acre campus. Lawn signs are prohibited. No one seems to have told the churches and political campaigns. The University of Maryland forbids amplified sound during business hours and rightly prohibits harassment based on race, gender or other protected characteristics. But no one has stopped the anti-abortion fanatics outside my office window who regularly play loud videos of mangled fetuses and scream slurs at women students.

The new rules forbid tents, which will be news to everyone drinking before football games. And the policy correctly forbids anyone from interrupting classes. Of course, we interrupt every class on campus whenever there’s a weeknight game and our provost tells teachers to move class online and warns us that the parking spots we pay for may be taken by tailgaters.

This hypocrisy makes clear that these policies are not for everyone. They’re directed squarely at students protesting the war on Gaza. The University of Maryland’s protests were relatively muted compared with other schools. And we know much of the most serious harm on campuses last spring was done by right-wing agitators and police. At the university, we know that neutral-sounding rules aren’t applied neutrally. In 2016, after a noise complaint in university-owned apartments, University of Maryland police laughed as they pepper-sprayed Black students screaming on the ground, the students said. When fraternities poison or burn people in hazing rituals, they receive stern letters and suspensions — not police raids. These new rules will fall hardest on Muslim, Arab, Southeast Asian and progressive Jewish students and faculty. We’ve already seen it: Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace were planning an interfaith vigil for the dead on October 7 until President Darryll Pines announced that only university-sponsored events would be allowed. They are so afraid of students that they forbid them from grieving.

Administrators are afraid of what students and teachers might say, partly because they’re afraid of alienating wealthy donors on whom they rely more and more as state support for public higher education shrinks. Millionaire donor Bruce Levenson spent last fall emailing professors who decried the war on Gaza — with President Pines and Provost Jennifer Rice cc’ed. It was surreal, like your cranky uncle on Facebook picking and choosing who gets to speak in public.

Our schools should run on facts, not fear. And the facts are clear. The people making plans to shoot up synagogues and universities are not students and teachers on the left, but fanatics on the right. The people banning books about the Holocaust are conservative activists, not lefty college kids. There will be unreasonable or reckless members of any protest. They should be addressed as individuals acting on ad-hoc expressions of pain and outrage.

The University of Maryland is not afraid of protests from the past. Last year, our library proudly displayed records of the tent cities built in protest of South African apartheid and the mass demonstrations against the Vietnam War. And they shouldn’t be afraid today. We’re here to learn. Learning can be uncomfortable. I’m sure today’s protesters will be memorialized in a future campus exhibit. Hopefully we use the right chalk to remember them.

Daniel Greene (dgreene1@umd.edu) is an associate professor of information at the University of Maryland, College Park and vice president of the College Park chapter of the American Association of University Professors.