The UNC Encampments, 3 Years Later

Date/Time
Date(s) - 10/07/2026
3:00 pm - 4:00 pm

On this day three years ago, our university became the site of both rebellion and repression; on this day three years ago, the Israeli military dropped the first of what would be thousands of bombs on the Gaza Strip. As genocide unfolded before us, students, faculty, and staff exercised their right and obligation to speak out against injustice, and our administration did everything in its power to suppress it. Under the harsh moral light of genocide and complicity, freedoms that we took for granted at the university- freedom of speech, freedom of assembly- revealed themselves to be all too frail. And on the fifth day of the Palestine Solidarity Encampment, these fragile freedoms collapsed. Rather than engaging with peaceful student protest through dialogue, our administration turned to violence to silence us. Student protestors were suspended, jailed, brutalized, hospitalized for exercising their duty to speak in the face of oppression. 

This administrative repression ushered in a new era of censorship in Chapel Hill. Pro-Palestinian student groups were banned from campus, activists barred from walking at graduation. A new regime of heightened on-campus surveillance was implemented to monitor and punish dissent, and pro-Palestinian art was torn from the walls. Today, our campus remains in the long shadow of the encampment. To understand the state of freedom of expression at UNC today, we must revisit this moment of rupture and interrogate it. 

This First Amendment Day, join us to ask these questions together- with the community members who experienced the encampment three years ago and are living in its legacy today. What was it about the Encampment that made it such an exception to UNC’s stated commitments to free expression? Why was speech about Palestine treated as such a threat? How has the university’s approach to protest and dissent changed since the Encampment? And, more broadly, who gets to determine what can be said, protested, displayed, or challenged at the University?

It is part of UNC’s First Amendment Day and is free and open to the public. Students can earn Campus Life Experience (CLE) credit.