Alex Gourevitch pushes back on the three principal justifications for cracking down on pro-Palestinian, anti-genocide protests. He argues forcefully—and rightly, in my view—that the costs of permitting those protests is greatly exaggerated. I could not agree more with his call for a more developed defense of the right to protest as we resist the new McCarthyism. But in defense of both recent protests and our right to protest more broadly, we need to say more.

To explain the scope and limits of the right to protest—on college campuses and in the public square more broadly—we need an account of the affirmative value of assembly, including its disruptive forms. We need to explain why protest should be permitted, even when it is discomforting and disruptive, by explaining why protest is such an important good. That is what we do with freedom of speech. We protect speech despite its many harms, from misinformation and disinformation to hate speech and revenge porn. And we do so because we have a rich understanding of the values it serves—facilitating the search for truth, fostering democracy, enabling individual autonomy. We need a similar rich account of the values of assembly and protest.

Unfortunately, we will not get much help in this effort from discussion of the First Amendment. (I expand on this point in a forthcoming article in the Columbia Law Review.) True, the First Amendment explicitly protects peaceable assembly—a form of conduct—not just the freedom of speech. Despite this textual guarantee, those who engage in nonviolent protests in the United States, both on and off campus, have been functionally left without a right. Even where the First Amendment applies, the Assembly Clause has no independent significance in jurisprudence, and the Supreme Court has not decided an important assembly case in decades. Why? Because in both law and public discourse, a multifaceted First Amendment tradition has been reduced to a right of free expression. We have thus lost sight of why the Founders chose to explicitly and independently protect a right of peaceable assembly, broadly construed.

So how should we understand the value of assembly? Not, I think, as primarily expressive nor instrumental. Assembly is important not simply because it enables us to show what we stand for or advance our cause. Instead, I see three ways that assembly is an important good.

First, it is a social form of politics, one that is critical to building, sustaining, and reinforcing our capacities as political agents. Protest arises out of and contributes the social ties and social solidarity that help facilitate the transmission of information and the capacity to organize civically and politically when necessary. Second, assembly is a uniquely disruptive form of politics. To be sure, protests are often disruptive to ordinary routines, both on campus and off. But that is not what I mean. Assembly is disruptive because it often—sometimes unexpectedly and quickly—upsets public narratives and political and social orthodoxies. Size, persistence, and spontaneity are often essential to this disruptive power. Third, as acts of public gathering, protests are often a demand for recognition and civic inclusion, particularly for marginalized members of our community. By appearing in public, groups and issues that are otherwise ignored resist public erasure or denial—as gay men did during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, for example.

In short, assembly and protest serve basic democratic purposes: they help to build our capacity to act collectively, disrupt received wisdom, and provide public recognition and inclusion.

Think about recent protests in light of these values. The assembly lens enables us to see recent protests as a public demand for recognition and inclusion by students of Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and South Asian descent (“We are right here. We are on campus.”). It similarly sheds a different light on their disruptiveness: the size, persistence, and determination of the campus protests revealed cracks in longstanding political orthodoxies about Israel as a state and the uniformity of political support for Israel in the United States, especially among young Jews. Finally, it would enable administrators to recognize what the protests and encampments offer to those students who participate: fostering the foundations of democratic engagement by building social ties, social solidarity, and a sense of political empowerment.

A greater appreciation of assembly’s function allows us to see its integral relation to the social mission of universities. Universities are in the business of training independent minds and enabling critical thinking. But not just that. They are also in the business of forging social capital through assemblies—first-year orientation, homecoming, and alumni weekends. Social gatherings, as university administrators well understand, are foundational to building the social solidarity required for academic success and the university spirit and powerful alumni networks that produce employment, socioeconomic mobility, and even latent political networks. Those social gatherings rarely include everyone at once, even as universities seek to ensure all students find a sense of belonging. Campus protests are simply a different—and especially important—form of the social experience of college.