At least one hundred students staged a major demonstration outside of Ballou Hall yesterday, protesting President Anthony Monaco’s teary decision to curtail students’ abilities to commit acts of academic dishonesty. The unilateral measures – including a ban on all forms of cheat sheets and the criminalization of copying answers from another person’s exam – went into effect immediately. Already, the new rules face ardent opposition from cheating rights advocates on campus.

The controversy stems from the Second Amendment to the Tufts Community Union Constitution, which forbids the school from “…compelling an Undergraduate to Bear False Witness.” While some legal experts argue that the clause refers solely to freedom of speech outside of the classroom, others claim that it protects a student’s right to answer a test question correctly. Previous attempts at finding a compromise (including limiting the amount that one can cheat to twenty questions per course) have failed to secure bipartisan approval.

Now, pro-cheaters are making their voices heard – literally. When not handing out literature sponsored by No wRong Answers (NRA), a national lobbying group, megaphone-wielding activists called for the Board of Trustees to invalidate President Monaco’s executive actions. Chants of “Phony Tony’s Gotta Go!” and “I Don’t Care that It’s Not Fair!” reverberated throughout the academic quad.

Despite unity in purpose, motivations differed among the protesters. While some mentioned their loyalty to the Constitution as their impetus for action, others invoked a South dorm culture that has always included cheating on essays and exams as part of the residential hall’s identity. Students also cited security threats against rigorous intellectuals – referred to by some with the pejorative term “n**d” – as their source of confidence in the Second Amendment.

“Some people will always have knowledge,” asserted Johnny Lott, a senior economics major and one of the rally’s leaders. “But under that hack Monaco’s new so-called ‘plan,’ the good guys aren’t able to know the truth when they haven’t bothered to study all semester. How can we keep our GPAs safe if we don’t have the right to concealed-carry our cheat sheets?” Teri Wu, a junior studying biopsychology, echoed Lott’s sentiment. “Hell, I wouldn’t mind it if we armed teachers with Google on their phones,” Wu said. “You have to be able respond in a crisis.”

In a meeting with reporters, mechanical engineering major and Monaco’s press secretary Meredith Vasquez dismissed the student protestors as “reactionary and retrogressive.” She drew attention to successful cases at Boston University and Wellesley College, where campus-wide bans on cheating have improved academic performance across the board. “They can ignore the empirical evidence all they want,” Vasquez said, “but they can’t refute it.”

Still, the facts have yet to get in the way of a good argument. Already, the TCU Judiciary Committee has issued a writ of certiorari in the case of Students for Cheating v. Monaco, with a hearing scheduled for next month.