While colleges have traditionally been known as places to draw their individual conclusions following exposure to different ideas, recent waves of suppressed protests on campuses question this conception and free speech at college as a whole.
There’s an expectation of safety when one comes onto a university campus. It’s the reason for campus safety departments. It’s why many colleges have alert systems. Universities want to make sure students are safe both in cases of extreme weather, tornados, or snow storms, and dangers such as gun violence, knife threats, and sexual assault . It’s expected that if the police have to get involved, it’s to protect students.
Of course, in terms of emotional safety, things get complicated. In an increasingly polarized country with viewpoints growing farther and farther apart from each other, it’s unlikely that any institution will house only one view. Campuses – in terms of emotional safety – hand off supportive services to different organizations or departments within the university as opposed to the university itself. Different organizations can cater to specific demographics of students while the university is tasked with the well-being of all students. A big part of this well-being comes in the form of student expression and how if the university sides with one group over another, the institution is vulnerable to claims of First Amendment violation.
As a student, it’s frustrating to watch how negative speech substantially affects a college experience. It’d be amazing not to see rhetoric equivocating abortion to murder chalked on the sidewalk during the morning walk to classes. The night would be more enjoyable without having to walk past a religious demonstrator, claiming how hell awaits those in the LGBTQ+ community, on the walk home.
Yet, when looking at the circumstances through an objective angle, this rhetoric is understandable. In order to function, the university must allow speech someone will find offensive, unwelcome, and disagreeable. If they didn’t, they would constantly be shuffling through speakers invited to campus to see which ones are non-offensive enough for approval. That sort of censorship is unsustainable, and would violate the First Amendment.
Universities would remind, as per First Amendment rights, students affected by chalkings or speakers to protest such realities. Many protests on campus sprout from direct circumstances, but as the last few weeks have proven, others can arise from frustration with world events.
Modern protests on college campuses have become widespread in the last few weeks, with arrests and suspensions coming out of the demonstrations against the violence in Gaza. If there’s not one happening at a local campus, all one has to do is go on social media or check one of the live reporting feeds from a newspaper.
Instantaneously, headlines will rush in reporting student arrests, expulsions, closure of buildings, police interference, and in a few rare cases even deployment of tear gas;. All of which is a lot to take in. Campuses that are supposed to be safe for both student freedom of expression and physical safety are now questionable on both counts.
Those defending police interference and deployments of force argue that students have violated the rules of their respective institutions during the Pro-Palestine protests. Restrictions on student protests are allowed in terms of time, place, and manner restrictions (not allowing encampments on campus greens, not allowing protests to block traffic, and punishing behavior that is deemed as violent).
A common form that the current protests have taken is the pitching of tents on college greens and occupying that space. For institutions such as Brown University, school policy prohibits encampment on college greens. When students didn’t vacate, administrators called in the police, and things escalated from there.
In response to encampments on the University of Minnesota Twin Cities campus, the administration closed major buildings and ended class early on the last day before exams out of fear for students’ safety. While this reason looks viable on paper, students on campus, including the farstoolgophs instagram account, called out the double standard in canceling classes given the school’s decision to keep classes open during a blizzard earlier in the semester. Blizzards can create unsafe roads and sidewalks, leaving students vulnerable to injury when classes could continue online without a threat to student safety.
While it can be argued that the policies at Brown are geared towards protecting students and supporting their decisions, it’s hard to give that same support to UMN.
Yet upon negotiation, the students at Brown University stopped. They made a deal with the administration, agreeing to take down their tents if the administration would hold a meeting to vote on the topic of no longer supporting companies connected to Israel. This situation provided a non-violent solution, one that other universities may follow by example.
The protest at Columbia University is another instance of protests breaking campus policy, not by encamping on the greens, but by occupying the inside of Hamilton Hall. Such use of force is not new to the campus, its roots dating back to Vietnam War protests in 1968.
The protests in 1968 weren’t popular, with many considering them unpatriotic and disruptive, but nowadays, public opinion agrees with these protestors looking back. In an interview with NPR, Eleanor Stein, a protestor from Columbia in 1968, described how following arrests of students on campus, supporting protestors went from an issue that divided to a universal conclusion.
They agree that the protestors were doing the right thing. Is that how public opinion is going to look back on the current protests in ten years, twenty years, fifty years? How will public opinion look on the current administrations at these colleges?
These administrations claim they care about the safety of students, yet don’t seem to have plans in place to de-escalate situations instead of making them worse. The reality is painful, with the majority of campuses resulting in police action, some even pepper-spraying protestors. Universities, given their advocacy for free speech, should be able to discipline students without turning to violence. By choosing violence, they are in danger of setting a precedent that only certain students’ safety matters. This goes against the supposed aim of universities as places to foster free speech and debate and calls into question administrators’ capabilities to govern their student bodies, the whole point of their position.
