Free Speech or Threat? An Anti-Gay Pamphlet Roils a Public University

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In the wake of anti-gay pamphleteering in an “Introduction to LGBTQ Studies” class, the president of the University of Louisville is seeking to reassure students and faculty members who expressed fear and outrage over its initial handling of the incident.

The president, Neeli Bendapudi, met with the students on Thursday, effectively pre-empting, at least for now, a planned student protest on the university’s flagship Belknap campus, where a fifth-year engineering student distributed a pamphlet called “God and Sexuality” and lingered outside the classroom last week.

The incident called into question whether the classroom is a protected space for free speech and at what point administrators should intervene when marginalized groups feel threatened. Faculty members involved in the dispute felt that the dean of students’ office was dismissive of their safety concerns. The university, however, maintains that the pamphleteer followed the law and campus policy.

Kaila Story, an associate professor with appointments to the departments of women and gender studies and of Pan-African studies, teaches the LGBTQ-studies class where the pamphleteering incident occurred. According to her and to Ricky L. Jones, chair of the Pan-African studies department, here’s what happened:

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On January 28, a few minutes before the class started, the engineering student — whom university officials, citing federal student-privacy law, have not named — placed anti-gay pamphlets on students’ desks. As the class let out, Story approached the pamphleteer, who was sitting on the floor in the hallway outside the classroom. He admitted to distributing the pamphlets but refused to give his name. They disagreed about his right to hand out the literature: Story said he was limited to campus free-speech zones; the pamphleteer said, as a paying student, he could distribute them anywhere. Story told him she was contacting the university’s department of public safety, and the pamphleteer left.

Two days later, at the end of the next class session, the engineering student returned. Campus police officers were stationed outside the classroom. They told Story the engineering student wanted to speak to her. She declined and asked the officers to escort him away, which they did.

The chairs of her departments, Jones and Dawn Heinecken, spoke to staff members in the office of the dean of students who were, Jones said, dismissive of their safety concerns.

The university’s media-relations office told The Chronicle that the dean of students, James (Michael) Mardis, and Bendapudi were not available for comment.

‘Called by God’

Mardis’s staff met with the engineering student and felt that he was stable, the dean’s office told Jones and Heinecken, a judgment the administrators reached in part because the student was married and had recently purchased a house.

The engineering student said he had been “called by God” to deliver the pamphlets, the student-affairs administrators told Jones and Heinecken. The administrators said that they had reached an agreement with the student under which he would give 48 hours’ notice of any plans to return to Story’s class.

Given that the student had apparently studied the class schedule and may have targeted it in part because Story has publicly discussed being lesbian, Jones said, two days’ notice was of little comfort, particularly on the heels of this week’s high-profile shooting at Texas A&M University at Commerce.

President Bendapudi was out sick with pneumonia when all of this occurred, Story and Jones said. When she returned, she met with Story and expressed unhappiness at how the dean of students’ office had handled the situation.

Bendapudi promised Story that campus police officers would be stationed outside the classroom when the class meets for the remainder of the term.

John R. Karman III, the university’s director of media relations, said in a written statement that “administrators were informed about this incident late last week and have met with the faculty who had raised the issue. Officials also have met with the student and have been assured that his intention was only to provide information rather than to intimidate.

“While the student’s actions caused concern among the students and faculty in the classroom, he apparently followed the law and university policy when distributing the literature,” the statement continued. “The university values diversity in all its forms, including diversity of opinion. That said, student safety is our top priority. We will continue to monitor the situation and will take steps to ensure an environment that supports the highest level of learning.”

Story asked her students to hear the president out and to delay their planned protest.

Her meeting with Bendapudi “reassured me in a lot of ways, squelched a lot of my concerns,” Story told The Chronicle. “And I feel hopeful moving forward that this kind of situation won’t happen again. Students should not be in a position of having their learning disrupted by hate.”

‘The Teacher’s Domain’

Even though some might find it offensive, the pamphlet is probably protected speech, said Will Creeley, senior vice president for legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free-speech advocacy group.

But, he said, the classroom is “the teacher’s domain.”

“If there’s interference with a professor’s ability to teach,” he said, “different concerns come into play.”

From a legal standpoint, a classroom is “not viewed as an open forum” in campus-speech cases, said Neal H. Hutchens, a lawyer as well as a professor and chair of higher education at the University of Mississippi. The pamphlets’ distribution before class might raise questions about “when is the actual point of disrupting the classroom environment.”

But, he said, courts are sympathetic to colleges that make good-faith efforts to keep their students safe. He said that “it’s not enough to just say he’s protected by the First Amendment, end of story.”

Dangers to marginalized and underrepresented groups like LGBTQ+ students are real, and fears are not unreasonable, Hutchens said, and, from legal and administrative standpoints, that is “an incredibly important part of the equation.”

Beyond legal questions, universities must consider “the broader context of how these ideas circulate on campuses,” said Jim Downs, a professor of history at Connecticut College whose books include Stand by Me: The Forgotten History of Gay Liberation (Basic Books, 2016).

“There is a long history of religious groups’ using religious teachings as a Trojan horse to usher in homophobia,” he said. That is one way “homophobia gets deployed and intimidates students.” Inaction by a university condones such hatred, he said.

Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University and author of Safe Enough Spaces (Yale University Press, 2019), said Bendapudi was handling the situation well, in her decision “to meet with students and faculty affected and assure them that they’re not going to be pawns in somebody’s free-speech game or religious fantasies.”

Roth stressed that he is not a lawyer and speaks as a university president and as a professor. “If someone wants to speak out about the evils of a group’s way of life, they can do that in the public square,” he said, “but I think that to insinuate themselves into the classroom and its proximity is a form of intimidation and harassment.”

Experts are predicting that 2020 will be a volatile year for free-speech conflicts on campuses because of political polarity and the coming elections.

Story, who has taught at the university since 2007, said nothing like this has occurred before. The incident is, she said, “reflective of the scary times we live in.”