UNC-Chapel Hill Chancellor Lee Roberts – Photos: unc.edu
UNC-Chapel Hill’s new chancellor, Lee Roberts, recently published an op-ed in which he laid out his beliefs about freedom of expression on campus. Roberts’s piece was no doubt occasioned by disputes about free speech that arose in connection with pro-Palestinian and anti-genocide protests at UNC last fall and spring.
Though he has no credentials as a First Amendment scholar, it is worth knowing what Roberts thinks about these matters because his ideas about freedom of expression on campus are likely to function as guiding principles for other university administrators in their dealings with students and faculty. As such, his views deserve a closer look.
At the level of abstract public-relations rhetoric, much of what Roberts says is unobjectionable. “Everyone on campus,” Roberts says, “must embrace the freedom to exchange [challenging] ideas without compromising the safety of our students and colleagues, and without disrupting the operations of the university and our ability to serve the public.” Okay, fair enough.
As important as this freedom is, Roberts adds, “no one person’s freedom of expression is more important than another person’s right to teach, learn, discover, work or speak free from harassment and discrimination. No one has the right to disrupt campus operations, threaten or intimidate others or vandalize public property.”
This too seems reasonable. The very freedom we cherish requires no tolerance for harassment, discrimination, or intimidation. It would be hard to find many students or professors who would disagree. Yet at a concrete level, in the current historical moment, there is a problem here. It lies in what Roberts fails to say.
One thing he doesn’t say is this: “Don’t confuse being confronted with challenging ideas, even ones that offend you, with harassment or intimidation. Don’t confuse feeling unsafe with being unsafe.” He might have said this because we have seen the tactic of using claims about safety, harassment, and intimidation used to shut down protest and stifle free speech. Roberts blew the opportunity.
Roberts also avoids saying what the voice of management usually prefers to remain implicit: we’ll decide what constitutes harassment and intimidation; we’ll decide which time, place, and manner limits on speech are reasonable; we’ll decide what is legitimate activity and what is disruption. In other words, don’t confuse the university with a participatory democracy.
This might mean, as a practical matter, for example, that if tents are pitched on the campus green for an alumni fundraising event, all is well. The bar is open. Get out those checkbooks! But if tents are pitched on the campus green to protest U.S. foreign policy, this is unauthorized and will be defined as disrupting university operations.
It could also mean that if one group of students claims to feel threatened by vigorous public criticism of a foreign state with which they feel identified or whose policies they fervently embrace, administrators could decide that this amounts to prohibitable harassment. Here again Roberts might have gone on record as advising students to toughen up and not expect the university to quash ideas they don’t like to hear.
In contrast to UNC, administrators at the University of South Florida at least deserve credit for honesty, for saying the quiet part out loud. Included in a set of new rules handed down this fall is this plain statement: “[T]he university reserves the right to determine how to apply and interpret all time, place, and manner limitations on activities.”
Administrators at UNC and most public universities presume to “reserve” the same right: to make the rules and decide how they apply to any given case. Accept this undemocratic arrangement and you can have all the freedom of expression you want; reject it and you will be charged with disruption. If Roberts didn’t say this, perhaps it was because he figures students will learn the lesson soon enough, if they didn’t learn it last April when UNC administrators ordered police to roust peaceful protesters.
Roberts also says in his op-ed that we are in a time of “great polarization about fundamental ideas of freedom, culture, and democracy,” and so it is all the more important to practice respectful dialogue. Again, it’s hard to disagree with a generality like this. By all means let us avoid beating each other over the head as we discuss these matters in the lecture hall and seminar room.
But Roberts also knows, yet avoids saying, that tensions around free speech at UNC last year did not arise in the context of what would have otherwise been genteel Dialectic Society debates about “freedom, culture, and democracy.” They arose in the context of what the demonstrators argue is a U.S.-backed genocidal assault on Palestinians by an extreme right-wing government in Israel. That’s the historical moment we’re in.
Students, faculty, and others who oppose this ongoing assault are not seeking to banter amiably about ideas. They are trying, through their expressive action, to alter the policies and practices that support the violent oppression of a dispossessed people. This kind of expressive political action can get loud because it must overcome the willful deafness of those in power. It also threatens business as usual and elite control, which is why managers of even self-proclaimed “neutral” institutions will try to shut it down.
It would have been in keeping with the philosophy of the conservative Republicans who hired him if Roberts had distinguished between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. For years, conservatives have mocked so-called liberal snowflakes who can’t face disagreement without melting. Roberts could have turned this point around and asked everyone to stop cynically invoking “safety” as a reason for quashing the voices of others, and to stop confusing criticism of one’s cherished beliefs with harassment.
To expect Roberts to go beyond this—to reflect publicly on the undemocratic structure of the university, the myth of institutional neutrality, the inequalities in power that chancellors serve to protect—would be expecting too much. Those who enjoy power rarely benefit from exposing the machinery that sustains it. University administrators and their patrons prefer to keep this machinery in the background, unremarked upon, lest it be called into question—lest people who freely exchange ideas begin to think it’s necessary to make things work differently.