A debate that has flared at Wesleyan University for the past two weeks, over where to draw the line between freedom of speech and the need to ensure that the campus is a safe space for students from minority backgrounds, peaked in a students-only meeting here on Sunday night.
The campus’s nearly 150-year-old newspaper, The Wesleyan Argus, has been at the center of the debate, and one of the paper’s editors said a potential resolution was discussed that might strip the paper of the funding it uses to print twice weekly. The money, provided by the Wesleyan Student Assembly, would instead go toward creating Work-Study positions at any of the campus’s publications if the resolution is brought to the table as it was discussed on Sunday.
The meeting lasted more than two hours, and students had to show a Wesleyan ID card to enter the room.
Kate Cullen, president of the Wesleyan Student Assembly, said in an email that no such resolution had been brought to the floor of the assembly, but one student senator discussed a resolution that he began drafting in recent days.
If the Student Assembly does pass such a resolution, students could have a chance to vote on whether to reallocate the funds the Argus receives from the assembly.
Rebecca Brill, a co-editor in chief of the Argus, said another potential step that was discussed was to create an editor of equity and inclusion to oversee the balance of the newspaper’s content.
The students-only town-hall meeting was called to address controversy over an op-ed published in the Argus two weeks ago that criticized the Black Lives Matter movement.
The op-ed, which was written by a student and ran on September 14, questioned whether the Black Lives Matter movement was prompting positive change, and whether it could be contributing to increased danger for police officers.
“If vilification and denigration of the police force continues to be a significant portion of Black Lives Matter’s message, then I will not support the movement, I cannot support the movement,” the piece’s author, Bryan Stascavage, wrote. “And many Americans feel the same,” he added.
Anger Toward the ‘Argus’
Although Mr. Stascavage is a staff writer at the Argus, the op-ed reflected his personal views, not those of the paper’s editorial board. Still, the piece sparked anger toward the paper among some students, who protested on the campus and on social media.
A petition calling for the Wesleyan Student Assembly to defund the Argus if it did not comply with a list of demands gathered more than 150 signatures. Those demands included committing Work-Study or course-credit positions at the volunteer-based publication, reporting each month on the use of the newspaper’s funding, offering social-justice and diversity training for all publications on the campus, actively recruiting minority students to write for the Argus, and providing space on the paper’s front page dedicated to the voices of students who feel marginalized.
An open letter to the campus, signed by “A Group of Concerned and Unapologetic Students of Color,” described why some students had felt compelled to protest. “The Argus is an institution whose history of devaluing people of color in our community proves that it plays a role in the perpetuation of institutionalized racism,” the letter reads. It also states, “We do not have the time, nor luxury, to be caught up in this smokescreen of free speech. Let us be clear: This is not an issue of your free speech. This is an issue of our voices being silenced, our communities under attack.”
The letter also calls out administrators for not supporting concerned students of color on the issue. The university’s president, Michael S. Roth, released a statement in a blog post saying that debates that make people uncomfortable shouldn’t be avoided. “Debates can raise intense emotions, but that doesn’t mean that we should demand ideological conformity because people are made uncomfortable,” says the statement, which is also signed by Wesleyan’s provost and its vice president for equity and inclusion. “As members of a university community, we always have the right to respond with our own opinions, but there is no right not to be offended.”
Ms. Brill, of the Argus, said the calls for defunding the paper shocked her because the issue that contained the controversial op-ed was so focused on free speech. “The fact that this is actually not just reactionary and that it may actually be the policy that’s invoked is really surprising,” she said.
The petitioners are invoking their own right to free speech, she pointed out, as students have boycotted the newspaper in the last two weeks.
The petition, which was written in a Google Document, was closed to signatures last week after some of the content was changed and sarcastic comments were added. Ms. Brill said some of the students who had started the petition had removed their names as the issue picked up national attention.
After Sunday’s meeting, a senior who identified himself as G Foley and said he was conflicted by the issue and ultimately did not sign the petition, said the meeting had focused on the Argus’s history of not including minority students, rather than the controversial op-ed itself.
Jess Zalph, a senior and member of the Argus’s staff, said the meeting was more of a big-picture look at the issues of racism, on the campus and elsewhere, than a specific discussion of the op-ed. The meeting was less heated than expected, she said.
The Paper Reaches Out
This past week, Ms. Brill has focused on hearing from different people on the campus as she weighed how the newspaper should respond to the student body. She spoke with professors in the African-studies department and the university’s vice president for equity and inclusion. After the op-ed was published, she attended a large meeting of students of color and allies, as well as a staff meeting of The Ankh, a campus publication produced by students of color, to discuss the op-ed and hear about the response it evoked.
“What we’re doing,” Ms. Brill said, “is making decisions that will allow us to come to the agreement for people who are critiquing the Argus, and for valid reasons, but doing so on our own terms.”
Frank LoMonte, president of the Student Press Law Center, a nonprofit organization that supports freedom of the press at the collegiate level, said one reason many college newspapers, and journalism in general, lack diversity is that they draw on students who are able to work at no pay as they seek training.
Several students who signed the petition did not return requests for interviews or said they were unavailable to do so.
Ms. Cullen, the student-body president, said in an email that she thought the meeting had gone well. “We discussed how our community has been feeling and processing, and how we can create collaborative steps forward. We spoke in small groups and at large. It was a much-needed break from the pressure of having the media analyzing every step we take,” she said.
Several students here said the student body leans to the left. Last year hundreds of students took part in a Black Lives Matter march. But some students said that they had found people on the campus resistant to hearing views that don’t align with their own. Many said students can be quick to shut down conservative viewpoints, and debates on the campus are largely one-sided.
While most students are open-minded about many social issues, there is a “sense where we agree with you only if you agree with what we believe,” said Devon Tucker, a junior.
Daphne Gampel, a freshman, said that while she thought the criticism of Black Lives Matter and other social movements can draw focus away from the movement itself, all students should have a space to share their opinions in campus publications.
She said there was a “general openness and acceptance of all different types of belief systems and points of view” on the campus.
An African-American student, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the issue had become so controversial, said there was a frustration that The Ankh was published only once a semester. With more funding, she said, it could be a space for minority students to share their opinions more frequently.
Mr. Stascavage, the student who wrote the op-ed in the Argus, said that he expected people to disagree passionately with his views, but that he was surprised that Wesleyan students would try to limit his freedom of speech. He compared the demands of the petitioners to a “hostage situation.”
Still, Mr. Stascavage said he planned to keep writing and sharing his views on controversial topics — he has been mulling thoughts on the university’s Title IX policies, he said. Much of what he writes are theories that he has developed and wants to encourage people to debate, he said.
Mr. Stascavage said the discussion at Sunday’s meeting was “kicking the can further down the road because nothing has really changed one way or the other.”
