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Washington, D.C. – A rash of First Amendment controversies and heated debates over how to balance free speech rights with student safety have embroiled many universities around the Washington area.

During Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ speech at Georgetown University’s law school last month he criticized American colleges as being echo chambers “of political correctness and homogenous thought” and for sheltering “fragile egos.”  The event drew resistance and protests from faculty and students.  The next morning, 10 Confederate flag posters were discovered on the campus of American University after Professor Ibram X. Kendi gave a presentation on the school’s new Antiracist Research and Policy Center.  American University had a string of similar incidents in the last year.  In May, bananas were found hanging from nooses on the campus after the election of an African American, Taylor Dumpson, as student body president.  At Howard University, about 50 students shouted down former FBI director James Comey, the keynote speaker, at their 2017 Opening Convocation on September 22.  A swastika appeared in a residence hall bathroom at Georgetown University on September 21, the start of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish high holy season.

These are just a few of the flurry of events forcing local universities to address the increase in racist hate speech, and grapple with how to protect both the First Amendment and student safety.  About 80 students, faculty, and parents gathered at Busboys and Poets, a restaurant and meeting place in Hyattsville, Maryland to attend a community event hosted by WAMU, a local National Public Radio station, on September 26.  The event explored the relationship between speech that makes students uncomfortable and conduct that makes them feel threatened.  The host, Kojo Nnamdi, interviewed four panelists and took questions from the audience.

Im at #kojoinyourcommunity in Hyattsville on mic duty, ready to hear from the audience. @ausgpresident is getting things started. @kojoshow pic.twitter.com/Y74B4dwYNT

— Avery J.C. Kleinman (@AveryJCK) September 26, 2017

“Colleges and universities are not only places where students go to get educated.  They are places where students go, because they live there,” noted Taylor Dumpson, American University’s student government president, who detailed her ordeal of racially motivated harassment on campus and social media in the panel discussion. “You don’t expect to go home and have someone make you feel like you’re not welcomed in your own space.  That’s what college students are expecting when they go to college campuses.”

Pointing to the potential danger of hate speech, the panelists discussed the disturbing incidents on campus reported by students at the University of Maryland in the months preceding the racially motivated murder on their campus of Richard Collins.  Collins, a black student from Bowie State University, was stabbed to death at a bus stop by a white student in May.  The murder is being charged as a hate crime.

Jeremy Mayer, associate professor at George Mason University, wanted to separate harassment and violence from provocative speakers. “The things that make racial incidents on campus scary is the anonymity and the silence of the coward.  They don’t put their name on the bananas and the nooses,” said Mayer a panelist at the event and co-author of the book Closed Minds? Politics and Ideology in American Universities.  “It’s the campus speaker—Richard Spencer, Steve Bannon, or Ann Coulter.  If they come to your campus, that’s awful, but it’s out in the open.  You can protest that, and you can see your community rising up in solidarity against it.  What I fear is the bombers, the secret killers, the guys with cars in Charlottesville, but not campus speakers.”

Relatively new practices designed to help address some of these issues were explored such as the creation of “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings.”  There are two different visions of “safe spaces,” as defined by Katherine Ho in the article “Tackling the Term: What is a Safe Space?” published on January 30, 2017 in the Harvard Political Review.  One is a haven for students from marginalized groups to organize among themselves, and the other is an “academic safe space,” where individuals in a classroom are free to share views that can make others uncomfortable.

“I can never know what it’s like to be a woman or a minority on a college campus, and I have absolutely no problem if communities ask for and receive a so-called ‘safe space’,” said Mayer, one of the conservative voices on the panel, defending the practice.  “But I have to say that when you read the National Review or other conservative media, you’d think all of George Mason or other campuses were safe spaces.  If they are there, they are pretty small.”

Rashawn Ray, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, described his aspiration for the classroom.  “We have to create brave spaces,” Ray said during the panel discussion.  “Brave spaces are very different from ‘safe spaces.’ Brave spaces are spaces where we can have critical conversations—where we can say that we’re going to respect what someone else said even when we disagree.”

Caleb Kitchen, a campus Republican and master of public policy candidate at George Mason University, described his school creating a so-called “healing space” immediately after the election of Donald Trump at the request of diversity groups on campus to discuss their political and racial concerns and fears. The college Republican group that the administration invited to speak at the event was driven away by students shouting at them.  “That’s not a safe space.  That doesn’t lead to the tough conversations that need to happen,” commented Kitchen in the panel discussion.

Free Speech on the National Stage

Research supports this anecdote.  John Villasenor, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and University of California at Los Angeles professor, last month published results from a national survey taken in August of 1,500 current undergraduate students at U.S. four-year colleges and universities.  The survey included respondents from 49 states and the District of Columbia.

The study found that 51 percent of students believe that it is acceptable to disrupt a speech by “loudly and repeatedly shouting so that the audience cannot hear the speaker.”  Moreover, 19 percent of students believe that using “violence to prevent a speaker from speaking” is acceptable.

“Freedom of expression is deeply imperiled on U.S. campuses,” wrote Villasenor.  “In fact, despite protestations to the contrary (often with statements like ‘we fully support the First Amendment, but…’), freedom of expression is clearly not, in practice, available on many campuses, including many public campuses that have First Amendment obligations.”

Credit: Brookings Institution

These types of debates over the First Amendment have been nearly inescapable for all Americans this fall, whether they are attending college classes or not.  Recently, President Trump denounced the NFL and other sports leagues for not firing players who knelt during the national anthem.  This action was meant as a form of protest of police brutality against African Americans.  At a rally in Alabama on September 22, Trump posited, “Wouldn’t you love to see one of these NFL owners when somebody disrespects our flag to say, ‘Get that son of a b—- off the field?’”

At the same time, college campuses around the U.S. have been particularly fertile ground for free speech controversies.  The Berkeley Patriot, a conservative campus newspaper at the University of California, Berkeley, canceled its “Free Speech Week,” that was scheduled for last month.  The newspaper’s attorney delivered a letter to campus officials complaining that their intentions to host the event had been “subjected to extraordinary pressure and resistance, if not outright hostility,” from the university. The event was the brainchild of Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur.  His past speaking engagement at the university in February was shut down by protests that turned violent, causing $100,000 worth of damage to the campus.  Of the more than 1,500 demonstrators that had gathered peacefully, the university blamed 150 black-clad, masked agitators for the mayhem.   These protestors smashed windows and threw rocks, commercial-grade fireworks, and Molotov cocktails that ignited fires.  At least six people were injured.  In the aftermath, President Trump weighed in with a tweet threatening to pull federal funds from the school for not allowing Yiannopoulos to speak.

Credit: Raghav Mathur

Consequently, UC Berkeley was ready to spend more than a million dollars on security for “Free Speech Week” this September.  The event was criticized by its former Chancellor Nicholas Dirks as being a publicity stunt and a setup against the university, a campus where a free speech movement was started in the 1960’s.  “You have some groups that charge that Berkeley no longer believes in free speech,” Dirks told National Public Radio.  “They make it impossible for the university to actually operate in good faith, and then proclaim once again, that this is a university that is just marinated in radical left-wing ideology and is completely intolerant of them and their views.”

Georgetown University in the Spotlight

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions chose a local university to weigh in on the events at Berkeley, and the broader debate over free speech on college campuses.  “Freedom of thought and speech on American campus are under attack. The American university was once the center of academic freedom, a place of robust debate, a forum for the competition of ideas,” Sessions declared during a speech at Georgetown University’s law school on September 27.  “But it is transforming into an echo chamber of political correctness and homogeneous thought, a shelter for fragile egos.” He decried the implementation of “safe spaces” on campuses, called for a national recommitment to ensure First Amendment rights at universities, and said the Justice Department will be issuing statements of interest on upcoming legal battles on such issues.

Sessions also took the opportunity to defend President Trump for rebuking professional athletes for the act of kneeling in protest during the national anthem. “The president has free speech rights, too,” responded Sessions to a question from the audience.  “If they take a provocative act, they have a right to be condemned, and the president has a right to condemn them, and I would condemn their actions.”

An open letter opposing Sessions’ policies was signed by 30 Georgetown law professors and faculty, which stated that they “condemn the hypocrisy of Attorney General Jeff Sessions speaking about free speech.”  Heidi Li Feldman, professor of law and associate professor of philosophy, was one of the authors of the letter.  “A concern that a number of people had about Attorney General Sessions’ choice of topic was that his own DOJ [Department of Justice] is busy prosecuting people, I’d argue, on entirely specious grounds when they have used their own right of expression,” said Feldman.  “For him to come and talk about the value of free speech while being active in a government that is headed by a president who doesn’t seem to understand anything at all about the U.S. Constitution and the citizenry’s right to free speech is pretty rich.  So, I think people did find it, at minimum, hypocritical.”

Around 150 students and faculty protested Sessions’ speech during the event.  Some wore black tape over their mouths and many knelt to emulate the NFL players’ protest.  Attendance to the event was by invitation only, and the university confined demonstrators to protest zones.  More than 130 students who had been accepted to attend the speech were disinvited the evening prior to the event.  Lauren Phillips, a Georgetown law student, believes that she was disinvited, because the Center for the Constitution, which hosted the event, curated a list of conservative students who would be a sympathetic audience.

“During his speech, AG Sessions mocked students who seek out ideological ‘safe spaces’ on campuses while making his speech in a ‘safe space’ of ideologically-screened students.  AG Sessions also denounced universities’ confinement of students to ‘free speech zones’ on campus, while at that very moment, Georgetown confined students protesting to a ‘free speech zone’ outside of which the university forbid us to protest,” argued Phillips.   “AG Sessions is a cabinet-level official who has been a public figure longer than I have been alive.  For the AG to be so frightened of a hostile audience while making a speech decrying ‘safe spaces’ is extraordinary.  To me, his actions were the height of hypocrisy.”

Seeking Solutions

Georgetown University is attempting to contribute to the broader debate by its launch of the Free Speech Project this summer to “assess the condition of Free Speech in America today – in higher education, in civil society, and in the world of state and local government,” according to its website.  After teaching undergraduate seminars on free speech at Georgetown and Harvard, Sanford J. Ungar, the creator and director of the project, saw the need to discuss these issues outside the classroom on a larger stage.  “My hope is that we can at least contribute to a new spirit around the country where the important issues of our time are discussed in a civil manner, and there’s tolerance of one side to listen to another,” said Ungar.

A key component of the project is its Free Speech Tracker, which will “offer a compilation and analysis of interesting incidents – some emblematic of a broader debate and others admittedly eccentric – that have occurred in the halls of state legislatures, on the greens, and in the classrooms of college campuses, and in civil society more generally,” states its website.  “Although some incidents are more consequential than others, collectively they tell a story about the state of the First Amendment in America today.”  The site will also offer video interviews with thought leaders and an archive of pertinent commentary and analysis of free speech issues.

There are other organizations actively monitoring this issue on a national level. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, which is critical of efforts to restrict speech on campus, last month launched a database of statements from college leaders on issues such as guest speakers, academic freedom, speech policies, and due process. “University leaders have divergent views on the protection of civil liberties on campus, and it’s important for members of these universities as well as the public to know where these leaders stand,” said Zach Greenberg, a legal fellow at FIRE.  “This list is not meant to shame or blacklist college leaders, and all the statements we’ve tracked are publicly available.”  Other databases that they offer include a database of speech code policies at universities and a database of when universities have attempted to disinvite speakers.

Confronting Real Fears

But while entries in these databases may be quickly piling up, school administrators have to continue to manage the day-to-day fears and concerns of students created by threatening speech.  A young woman in the audience at the community event at Busboys and Poets raised her hand and brought the conversation back to Richard Collins, the black Bowie State student, stabbed to death on her campus last May in what is being charged as a hate crime.  She listed incidents on campus that many students felt crossed a line preceding his death such as white supremacist posters and “deport dreamers” chalk writing.  “Our administration considered this a conversation and told us to continue the conversation,” remarked the University of Maryland student, describing her university’s response.  “Well, the end of that conversation was the death of a black student on our campus.”  She asked where the line is between what could be considered mere dialogue and allowing provocative speech or speakers on campus that might embolden people prone to violence.

Associate Professor Jeremy Mayer responded, “I don’t think we know enough about how hate turns to violence to be able to say, ‘that word right there,’ that’s the one we have to stop.  I don’t think there’s a dividing line between hate speech and free speech.  It’s all speech.  When we have violent actions we prosecute, but we do not say that a speaker who advocated deporting dreamers was responsible for this tragic murder.”

Associate Professor Rashawn Ray made a distinction between fulfilling an educational obligation in the classroom and permitting harassment and intimidation on campus.  “We have to draw the line.  We would not tolerate any of those types of conduct in the workplace,” countered Ray.  “You would get fired if you hung a noose in a workplace, if you left bananas somewhere, and yet there are people who are claiming that that is free speech on university campuses, it’s not.  It’s intimidation.  It’s a hostile environment.”

Kojo Nmandi, the event’s host, subsequently asked the panel, “How do we define violence?  Can language be violent?”  Mayer responded by aligning himself with the American Civil Liberties Union’s position that speech cannot be violent.  “Just remember that for 100 years it was illegal in parts of America to express an idea, and that idea was abolition, because the authorities said that someone publicly speaking in favor of freeing slaves was disrupting public order and would be likely to start a riot.” noted Mayer.  “So, when ideas are forbidden from being aired, I think that is what is wrong.”

Circling back to the controversial events at UC Berkeley, Nmandi asked about the provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, who identifies individual students by name in his speeches for a variety of reasons—for instance if he disagrees with them or if they are undocumented immigrants.  “I’ve watched those videos.  He is such a rodent,” Mayer said of Yiannopoulos. “But I do believe he has a right to free speech.”  Mayer thinks that student groups should be allowed to invite him if they choose.  Nmandi pushed further, asking what if the nooses found at American University had individual’s names such as Taylor Dumpson on them.  “The noose I’m not defending.  That is not speech.  It’s an act of vandalism.”  Dumpson described the painful effect of what she has endured and offered her hope for the future of free speech, “I think a new wave of limitations to First Amendment rights is going to come when we begin to understand and do more research on how you quantify harm, because emotional trauma is harm.”

 

Writing and timeline graphic by Amanda Mosher

Washington, D.C. – When Christopher Brown made the three-hour journey on a bus to Charlottesville, Va., with fellow Howard University students in the middle of August, he was still stunned by the events that had taken place a week earlier when white nationalists marched through the University of Virginia’s campus during the night, holding torches and shouting racist slogans.  The following day, the demonstrators rallied around a statue of Robert E. Lee, a Confederate general, located in Emancipation Park.  The scene turned violent when a car plowed into a group of counter-protesters, killing one person and injuring 19 others.

Having grown up as an African American in Birmingham, Ala., Brown has always been aware of racial division, but the events in Charlottesville surprised him. “America just hasn’t really gotten to the place that I thought it had,” Brown said. Motivated to take action, he jumped at the chance to join a Howard University service day to support the people of Charlottesville. The effort was coordinated through the university’s Office of the Dean of the Chapel, an interfaith group.

At universities around Washington and beyond, students and professors are also grappling with what the events in Charlottesville, a college town, say about race relations on campuses.  “Shocked…just speechless and shocked,” Phronie Jackson, a D.C. native and professor of public health and psychology at the University of the District of Columbia, said of the rally. “You’d think that we’re moving back to an era of Jim Crow, and that’s terrifying.”

Yet others viewed the events as somewhat inevitable in the era of President Trump.  “It was surprising to see it, but I was not shocked. It was something that had been coming,” said Rodrigo Posada, a student at the University of Maryland.  “Problems with white supremacy and racism are being brought out now, because of this new government condoning such actions.”  In the days following the Charlottesville rally, President Trump failed to immediately condemn the white nationalists.  He blamed both the protestors and counter-protestors for the violence that ensued.

Another student seemed to agree with Posada, “I wasn’t surprised to see it, because it’s just white supremacy coming forward with a face,” said Kendra Cobb from Albuquerque, N.M., a law student at Howard.  “I’d actually prefer to see it, because then I know who my enemies are.”

Mariel Bailey of Denver, Colo., who is working toward a master’s in homeland security at the University of the District of Columbia, was less disturbed by the events.  “We’re taught to be apolitical.  In our program, if you do anything government related, if you work for Homeland, CIA, FBI, any of those agencies, the president is your boss.  We’re taught that whatever he says goes.”

Other students were affected on a personal level.  “In daily life, you think about what’s going to be people’s reaction towards you based on whatever they see in the media. So sometimes that affects how you trust people,” said Bader Manef, who grew up in Saudi Arabia and attends Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis as a medical student.  Manef has found his school’s recent series of events celebrating multiculturalism a helpful way to mitigate racial and ethnic tension on his campus.

Likewise, the Howard students’ pilgrimage to Charlottesville seems to have made a deep impact on Brown: “I learned that change starts with us, especially the change that we want to see personally in this world,” he said.  The students from Howard, a historically black university, began their trip at Thomas Jefferson’s former plantation, Monticello, to learn about the slaves that had worked there.  They later met with local chapters of groups such as Black Lives Matter and student groups at the University of Virginia.  Security guards escorted the students through the streets of Charlottesville to read a letter in front of the statue of Robert E. Lee.  This letter pledged their support to those in the community shaken by what had occurred. They also paid their respects at the site where counter-protester, Heather Heyer, had been slain.

“Being there, there were a lot of tears shed from the community,” Brown said of the trip. “I felt like they didn’t have another university that did what we did—travel three hours just to say, we’re in support of you.  We could have just wrote a letter and sent it, but we traveled as a pilgrimage to the university.  So, I felt like they felt the support more than if they just received another letter.”

Writing by Amanda Mosher