Final Exam Essay

Colleges shouldn't punish student protesters (essay)

Submitted by Charles H.F. Davis III on October 18, 2017

This month, during a meeting at the University of Wisconsin Stout in Menomonie, the University of Wisconsin

System Board of Regents adopted a systemwide policy that punishes student activists [1] exercising their

constitutionally protected right to protest. Specifically, the board adopted language that states students will be

suspended if found to have twice engaged in violence or other disorderly conduct--neither of which have been

clearly defined--that disrupts the free speech of other people. Students will be expelled if found to have done so

three times.

The board’s decision, in which only one regent--state public schools superintendent Tony Evers--cast a

dissenting vote, comes as a pre-emptive and intentional sequel to legislation introduced by Republicans in the

Wisconsin State Assembly [2] this past spring. Although the policy will not go into effect until system leaders

write administrative rules and it is subsequently signed off on by the governor and state lawmakers, the decision

re-establishes a dangerous precedent at a critical political moment in higher education. To be clear, it is a

decision that reinforces institutionalized white supremacy--and other oppressive forms of systemic power--by

criminalizing the self-advocacy undertaken by the most vulnerable populations in our nation’s colleges and

universities.

Since 2014, at least four states have adopted policies that address the discontinuation of campus “free speech

zones” at public colleges and universities, which effectively repealed previous policies that limited where

students could lawfully engage in demonstrations. This includes the state of Missouri, which, after the killing of

black teenager Michael Brown and collective action by Concerned Students 1950 at the University of Missouri,

Columbia, was the ostensible epicenter of protests that swept the nation [3]. Although none of the

aforementioned policies explicitly advocate for disciplining students, they do suggest, implicitly and explicitly,

that the dissolution of sanctioned protest spaces should not be interpreted as protecting the right of students to

disrupt the suggested free speech of others. This point is an important one, as many conservatives have

obscured the right to free speech by calling for it to be expanded to include “right-leaning” speakers (and their

campus sponsors) who publicly advocate white nationalist and white supremacist agendas.

Let us consider the University of Wisconsin at Madison in particular (the flagship institution in the University

of Wisconsin System) and the board’s recent policy decision when viewed retroactively. Many students who

engaged in disrupting a speech by Ben Shapiro [1], former editor of Breitbart News--which was recently

exposed [4] for its intentional efforts to seed neo-Nazi and white nationalist ideas into the mainstream--would

have been considered for suspension and expulsion. This despite the fact that their civil disobedience was in

direct response to the racist rhetoric advanced by Shapiro. Furthermore, similar rhetoric had already manifested

itself in a litany of racist incidents on campuses [5] the semester before, at which point hundreds of mostly black

and brown students responded in protest [6] to demand greater institutional accountability for a hostile racial

climate on campus.

However, it is also important to note that what recently transpired in Wisconsin is not unique. At least seven

states [7] have, over the past three years, passed legislation under the guise of strengthening protections of free

speech on campus, which may have serious implications for student activists and others engaged in disruptive

counteractions. In North Carolina, for example, House Bill 527 [8], also known as the Restore Free Campus

Speech Act, has already become law. The act explicitly prohibits institutions from “disinviting speakers whom

members of the campus community wish to hear from” as well as establishing “a system of disciplinary

sanctions for students and anyone else who interferes with the free speech rights of others.” Following the trend,

even the falsely regarded bastion of liberal progressivism, California, to which I recently moved, has introduced

into its assembly the California Campus Free Speech Act [9], which would affect both public and private

institutions.

What is consistent about the rationale of policy makers advancing such legislation, including that of University

of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross, is a conflation of civil discourse and the intellectual debate of ideas

with students’ contestation of antiblack rhetoric and racist worldviews. Such a conflation disregards the well-

documented, rigorously researched and empirically proven role that hate speech plays not only in inciting

violence but as a form of violence itself. Furthermore, such rationale obscures and perverts the very foundations

of free speech, both as law and as a movement, by subverting its expressed intention to protect and uphold the

forceful contestation of unjust institutional forms and relationships of power. In effect, these policies intend to

create a false equivalency between antioppressive and oppressive free speech--however, the latter remains

underpinned by racist ideologies of material consequence. They also aim to suppress and criminalize, through

punitive measures, those not only willing to labor in the name of justice but also those who must because

disruption remains a tactic on which their very minds, bodies and spirits depend.

An insidious and hypocritical fallacy undergirds the aforementioned rationale, put forth both by postsecondary

institutions and state legislatures, which must be challenged. That is, higher education stakeholders must widely

contest the notion that colleges and universities are (and should be) ideologically neutral on social and political

issues.

At minimum, we must continue to illuminate the ways in which colleges and universities have not only

historically benefited from institutional forms of power (e.g., use of African slave labor [10] and transacting black

bodies for financial gain [11]) but also still contribute to the social reproduction and exacerbation of issues such

as class stratification, sexism and rape culture, and, yes, the proliferation of white supremacist worldviews. In

doing so, higher education scholars as well as faculty members, administrators and students expose the clear

discontinuity between the values many colleges and universities espouse and their institutional actions. Drawing

attention to this reality, in this political moment, requires institutions to be accountable for answering the

question of whether their neutrality, within a broader climate of injustice, squarely situates their historical

legacy on the side of the oppressor rather than in solidarity with the oppressed.

Charles H. F. Davis III is an assistant professor of clinical education at the Rossier School of Education at the

University of Southern California and chief strategy officer and director of research at the USC Race and

Equity Center.

Footnotes:

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/midwest/ct-university-of-wisconsin-protest-punishment-

20171006-story.html

[2] https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/06/student-activists-meet-republican-lawmakers/531372/

[3] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2015/11/16/experts-consider-what-protests-over-racial-tensions-

mean

[4] https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-

nationalism?utm_term=.ucyYWWy9AD#.ybGGWWP2zj

[5] http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/records-detail-range-of-incidents-students-

reported-to-uw-madison/article_ce842d14-d313-5255-be36-31b2db3b3538.html

[6] http://host.madison.com/wsj/news/local/education/university/hundreds-at-uw-madison-protest-student-s-

arrest-racist-incidents/article_d655c1d5-2815-5278-9400-4eb40379d719.html

[7] http://www.capitol.tn.gov/Bills/110/Amend/SA0333.pdf

[8] http://www.ncleg.net/gascripts/BillLookUp/BillLookUp.pl?Session=2017&BillID=H527

[9] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=201720180ACA14

[10] http://uvamagazine.org/articles/unearthing_slavery_at_the_university_of_virginia

[11] https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/17/us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html

[12] https://www.insidehighered.com/editorial-tags/academic-freedom

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