Free speech hypocrisy at Wash U

The Hill recently published an essay by Chancellor Andrew Martin of Washington University in St. Louis, where I am a faculty member. I agree with Martin’s thesis while interpreting it entirely differently. After last academic year’s season of protest against the genocide in Gaza, “this year must be different.”

We disagree on how it must be different, because the chancellor feels that student protests should be even more tightly restrained than last year’s violently subdued protests. Oddly, this sentiment rebuts Martin’s own reputation as a free speech absolutist, with which he arrived at Wash U.

“We’re not bound by the First Amendment, unlike a public university,” he told our school newspaper, but “I think that the right policy is for us to behave as if we are.” The context was his decision as a dean at University of Michigan to host the infamous white nationalist Richard Spencer. Martin doubled down when he required all Wash U freshmen to read a book by former ACLU head Nadine Strossen that argues that legal cases like a New York court’s 1961 decision to allow a Nazi rally are essential for democracy.

But those precedents didn’t stop him from taking an action he omits from his essay. In April, he ordered the arrest of over 100 people on the campus for a student-led nonviolent protest in solidarity with Palestine, including Wash U students, alumni, faculty from multiple universities and Green Party presidential candidate Jill Stein.

A strange paradox: in his freshman year, my former student Caleb Hughes was required by Martin to read a book insisting that free society tolerates Nazi protests. A year after Caleb graduated, Martin had him arrested for pro-Palestinian protest.

Because that protest showed no evidence of violence or vandalism, the mass arrest was widely criticized by newspapers, civil rights organizations and politicians across the St. Louis area, and by Wash U faculty and alumni. The arrests caused the hospitalization of a professor from a nearby university; the banning from campus of the president of the St. Louis Board of Alderman; and the suspension and banning of multiple Wash U faculty and students, many of whom were scheduled to graduate.

The historically passive Wash U faculty rallied the Faculty Senate to intervene in the administration’s disciplinary response, but the Board of Trustees summarily rebuffed the bid. Martin called in his essay for universities to “model active listening” in difficult times. He didn’t specify who talks and who listens.

That lack of specificity represents a national trend. Over the summer, university administrations revised expressive speech policies at over 100 campuses with restrictions so broad they could foreclose most forms of protest. They’ve demanded protests be registered in advance, limited hours when protests may occur, banned megaphones and restricted flyers and signage. 

Administrators like Martin typically rationalize these contradictions of their professed values through strategically vague abstraction. Having long decried undergrads for anti-speech illiberalism, they now discover abundant boundaries on expressive speech.

“Free expression is foundational to education,” Martin writes, but “has limits…Behavior or speech that threatens, intimidates, harasses, discriminates or unreasonably disrupts teaching and learning cannot be tolerated.” Fair enough.

But how do we define “threaten,” “disrupt” and “reasonable?” Laws invoking such terms offer definitional criteria nowhere to be found in Wash U’s and other schools’ conduct codes. And who decides if these criteria were met? At campuses across the country, administrators and trustees will deliberate behind closed doors and pronounce from on high what speech does or doesn’t violate invisible criteria of offense.

Consider the two justifications that Martin offers for suppressing free speech. First, he singles out encampments as uniquely disruptive forms of protest. But from Revolutionary Boston to MLK’s lunch counter sit-ins to the Berkeley Free Speech Movement (where campus activism was born), the occupation of public space has been a cornerstone of American social movements. This is presumably why Martin himself previously allowed a protest encampment advocating for a living wage for campus employees at Wash U, even meeting with the campers. Why was that encampment acceptable when the pro-Palestinian one wasn’t?

Second, the chancellor insists that protests cannot “instill fear.” But how do we decide if something inherent to the protest instills fear? Wash U administrators have provided no examples of threatening behavior from protesters, instead citing 911 calls from bystanders terrified by loud chanting. By this standard, surely someone has expressed fear at any protest ever worth the name.

What’s more, this argument — that the sole criteria of a speech act’s threat is whether a listener feels threatened — is the exact doctrine that Strossen and similar campus free speech advocates identify as the greatest threat to free expression. Martin appeared to agree when telling Michigan students terrified of a white nationalist guest speaker that they were in no danger. Why isn’t a Richard Spencer speech a threat when a pro-Palestine chant is?

These contradictory standards display what activists call “the Palestine exception.” Self-declared defenders of free speech suppressed protests against the slaughter in Gaza because of ideological content, and in this respect Wash U joins its peer institutions.

But the Palestinian cause won’t be the only example of such hypocrisy. Many university administrations decided last year that calling the police is effective PR management. If that goes uncorrected, expect more causes to join Gaza on the roster of implicitly forbidden subjects. The emergent doctrine of American universities is “free speech for me but not for thee.”

Let this year be different indeed.

Michael O’Bryan is a senior lecturer in the English Department at Washington University in St. Louis.