After police clashes with pro-Palestinian protesters turned campuses upside down in the spring, administrators sought to come into the fall semester equipped with freshly tightened protest policies.
The University of South Florida was among them. A pro-Palestinian encampment at the main campus in Tampa ended with tear gas and the arrests of 10 people.
Over the summer, USF officials proposed prohibiting activities after hours or on weekends, barring protests near academic spaces during the final two weeks of a semester, and even nixing the sale of homemade food. Local news outlets asked: Was USF effectively banning bake sales?
USF invited community members to weigh in during a 30-day comment period before the changes were finalized. The Chronicle submitted a public-records request for that feedback, hoping to see how students, faculty, and staff felt about changes that could tighten the university’s grip over their plans.
The three-dozen comments obtained by The Chronicle reveal that community members were about as frustrated with what they saw as an affront to free speech as they were with the extra hoops they would have to jump through in order to host events.
The responses to the USF survey provide a new look at how students and employees are reacting to the wave of fall policy updates, from minute amendments to significant overhauls. They also suggest a widespread concern among both students and employees that measures aimed at maintaining order will create more of a hassle than they’re worth.
A spokeswoman for USF wrote in an email to The Chronicle that while the university reviews its policies regularly, officials decided that, in light of the spring protests, it was time to revisit the activities policy and elements “that may have caused misunderstandings or confusion previously.”
While other colleges made the same calculation, USF’s updates stood out as among the most stringent. But USF did alter some of its measures in response to the community feedback.
Community Concerns
The provision that events without prior approval must end by 5 p.m. and not take place on weekends or during campus closures was the largest sticking point in the USF survey responses. Students pointed out that they are often not out of class by then, and contractors noted that such constraints could hurt their businesses.
“As a food and beverage provider many of our planned events occur during the time that you are wanting to ban events from happening on campus,” wrote Jameka Williams, a marketing coordinator for Aramark on the St. Petersburg campus. “Not only will this disrupt our business, but it will take away a significant amount of profit from us as well.”
The clause stating that food prepared at home could not be sold on campus also drew a strong reaction.
“Bake sales are one of our most effective fundraising tools, and homemade foods are among the most popular,” wrote a student in the College of Medicine whose name was redacted. “The advantages of homemade foods include not only increased profit margins, but also the chance for us to bond while baking or cooking together.”
Another commenter, who did not identify herself but focused mostly on the burden the new restrictions would have on academic departments, closed her response pointedly: “And no bake sales? Why on earth are you targeting bake sales?”
Still, what garnered the most attention were the potential barriers to holding campus demonstrations. In addition to specifying that protests and unreserved events can’t happen around academic spaces during finals, the proposal requires approval for the use of amplified sound and limits how long signs could be posted to two weeks.
Commenters threatened to withhold donations, predicted lawsuits against USF, and suggested that the policy was written in bad faith. “In the history of higher education, student protests have their marks,” one wrote. “In this attempt to shut down a student’s ability to voice their concerns, you are finding yourselves on the wrong side of history.”
In his comment, Ryan Ansloan, senior program officer for policy reform at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said the proposed amendments were “unreasonable” and would reverse the progress USF has made in protecting students’ free-speech rights.
“The restrictions work in tandem to place several steps of paperwork and bureaucracy between students and the public square,” Ansloan wrote.
Ansloan specifically took issue with the daytime default for activities and added stipulations for leafleting.
“A lot of the proposed changes to the policy shifted the default from ‘You are free to demonstrate spontaneously without jumping through hoops,’ to a default of ‘You have to receive prior approval before engaging in meaningful public demonstrations,’” Ansloan told The Chronicle in an interview.
USF’s graduate-student union made similar points in its comment. Its co-president, Tessa Barber, told The Chronicle she and her colleagues took issue with the proposal’s vague language.
“For example, it uses terms like ‘academic space’ and more specifically, ‘areas adjacent to academic space,’” Barber said, referring to the locations events cannot be near at the end of the term. “And while it does define ‘academic space’ in the beginning, it neglects to specify or measure how exactly far from those spaces is adjacent. So in theory, this could be applied to the entire campus.”
Indiana University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Connecticut, and others installed new protest and encampment guidelines ahead of the 2024-25 academic year, seeking to prevent a repeat of the spring’s chaos.
“You’ve got a lot of schools that clearly had the First Amendment and free speech in mind” as they drafted new policies, Ansloan said. “And then you’ve got other schools that definitely prioritized control.”
Indiana University became a flashpoint of the encampment period after a last-minute rule change paved the way for the university to call the police on protesters who had set up tents in the Bloomington campus’s dedicated free-speech zone. Its new rules, which went into effect in August, prohibit “expressive activity” between the hours of 11 p.m. and 6 a.m.
Before the policy was finalized, the university’s student government asked students to give input. IU denied The Chronicle’s request for those survey responses on the grounds that the materials were “advisory and deliberative.” The state’s records law allows exceptions for materials “that are expressions of opinion or are of a speculative nature, and that are communicated for the purpose of decision making.”
The End Result
The final activities, signage, and use-of-space policy at USF went into effect at the end of August with a few adjustments.
It removed the ban on unapproved activities over the weekend and during campus closures, and instead applied a 5 p.m. cutoff across the board. It also moved a promise that public space be available for expression “without registration or approval” to the very top of the policy and took out a caveat that this spontaneous expression come from people “participating as individuals.”
With some rewordings, the final copy preserved the end-of-semester pause on activities near academic areas, as well as the aforementioned provisions on bake sales, amplified sound, signage, and tents. And the consequences for transgressions remained the same.
Ansloan said FIRE plans to touch base with USF to flag some of its remaining concerns, but gave the university credit for soliciting feedback and adopting some revisions.
“They have twin obligations now,” Ansloan said, “to, we hope, revise the policy a little bit further. But also, students are on campus now. So enforcing the policy that is in effect in a way that respects student’s free-expression rights is job number one now.”
