One University Asks: How Do You Promote Free Speech Without Alienating Students?

Controversy arrived at DePaul last May sporting dark sunglasses and highlighted hair. Milo Yiannopoulos, a young, gay, and provocative symbol of the alt-right, had been stirring up college students across the country on his “Dangerous Faggot” tour with a mix of anti-feminist barbs, derision of the Black Lives Matter movement, and praise for Donald Trump.

Mr. Yiannopoulos was ready for DePaul, a private, Catholic college in Chicago. But DePaul wasn’t quite ready for him. Less than 15 minutes into his talk in front of a largely white audience, a group of mostly black protesters moved onto the stage and shut down the event. After a 25-minute standoff, Mr. Yiannopoulos led an impromptu march through the campus.

The event blindsided the administration, which had been working for months to respond to concerns minority students had raised about racial profiling by public-safety officers, microaggressions in the classroom, insufficient financial aid, and other issues. DePaul’s president, the Rev. Dennis H. Holtschneider, had met with the Black Student Union in January to talk about their experiences. In April chalked slogans such as “Blue Lives Matter” and “Make DePaul Great Again” were quickly washed away by the campus grounds crew and criticized by the administration, making headlines and raising concerns that the university was hostile to both minorities and free speech. And now this.

The day after the talk, Father Holtschneider, who was traveling abroad, apologized to the DePaul College Republicans, which had organized the event, saying the protesters were wrong to interrupt Mr. Yiannopoulos’s speech. After a backlash from students and faculty members who said they had been harassed through email, phone calls, and social media after protesting the speech, or for expressing support for those who did, Father Holtschneider apologized again eight days later, but this time to the campus at large, saying he had failed to appreciate how hostile the climate had become during and after the event. His about-face illustrated one of the most-pressing questions facing universities today: Can you support free speech while also making all students feel welcomed? Or is that an impossible balancing act?

DePaul is one of the more visible examples of how fraught and personal these issues have become on campuses across the country. This summer, its neighbor, the University of Chicago, came under fire after the dean of students sent a letter to incoming freshmen that sought to remind them of the university’s longstanding commitment to free expression while singling out safe spaces and trigger warnings as ideas the university does not support. Some students called the remarks callous and insensitive toward their concerns. Many other colleges, too, have had to face increasingly toxic political language and symbolism on their campuses.

This academic year, DePaul is trying to right its ship. It has rolled out a lengthy action plan focused on speech and race. And it is reconstituting a speech-and-expression task force to answer questions raised by last year’s events, including whether it is ever acceptable to ban speakers.

Father Holtschneider says these debates are not just intellectual ones. One in three DePaul undergraduates are the first in their families to attend college. And one-quarter are from underrepresented minority groups. “I have a campus filled with students who understand bigotry, racism, and xenophobia,” he says. “These aren’t theoretical issues at DePaul. These are their day-to-day lives.”

Criticism From All Sides

Administrators have held a number of town-hall meetings and other events with students and professors to help shape the action plan. In addition to reviewing its principles of speech and expression, DePaul is revising the speaker-request process for student organizations, bolstering support services for minority students, and developing educational programming on topics such as difficult conversations in the classroom and implicit bias. It is also exploring the feasibility of creating an African-American student resource center, and it is looking to increase faculty diversity through better recruitment and retention programs.

While much of this work is just starting, the university has already gotten heat on and off campus, illustrating the difficulties that lay ahead. To some, the university has so far failed to organize deeper discussions on campus about complex topics such as race and politics, opting instead to create a laundry list of to-do items, such as a speaker series, campus-climate surveys, diversity training programs, and the creation of various task forces to study other initiatives, including a universitywide bias-response team. One professor compared the action plan to an “overstuffed á la carte menu.”

To others, DePaul is trying to tamp down any hint of controversy through excessive regulation of outside speakers. Complicating matters is the public spotlight: DePaul has been criticized by free-speech advocates, such as the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, and has been portrayed on conservative media sites as being hostile to conservatives. Mr. Yiannopoulos, for example, has included a clip from the DePaul protest in his video introduction as he tours college campuses this fall.

DePaul also has a small, vocal conservative movement, embodied by groups such as the College Republicans and Young Americans for Freedom, pushing back against what it sees as political correctness run amok. “DePaul was founded on a mission to educate the urban poor, and to them that has become the marginalized people,” says Nicole Been, a senior and head of the campus College Republicans. “And in their book, unless you’re a white, straight, cisgender, Christian male you’re somehow marginalized.”

Ms. Been notes that DePaul has refused to allow Mr. Yiannopoulos to return to campus, citing safety concerns as well as his inflammatory speech. It has also turned down a request to invite Ben Shapiro, another conservative commentator, citing potential safety concerns. Outside speakers are being assigned to smaller rooms, the number of security personnel is being increased at some events, and attendance has largely been restricted to students, faculty, and staff members. In a recent meeting with Father Holtschneider and Eugene L. Zdziarski, vice president for student affairs, Ms. Been said, she and other campus Republicans were told they needed to bring in “more intellectual people, more scholarly people.” It was a message Mr. Zdziarski echoed in a campus letter, challenging students to invite speakers with “substantive messages.” Ms. Been says that her group has invited a number of intellectually minded people to campus but that they don’t tend to draw big crowds.

She says she wishes DePaul would “just do what the University of Chicago did” and make clear that free speech is welcome. The message to students, she says, is “If you’re upset about it, we’re sorry, but we’re not going to punish this group.”

Students from more-liberal organizations on campus echo some of her concerns. Sam Pfeiffer, a member of the DePaul Socialists, says he was charged $240 to cover security costs for a talk by Paul D’Amato, author of The Meaning of Marxism, who spoke to about 60 students. Mr. D’Amato said he never got a clear answer as to why security was necessary for such a low-key event. “What the administration is doing is trying to prevent political arguments and potential debate and controversy on campus,” he says.

Administrators say they’re not trying to control speech, but rather seeking to ensure the safety of their students. They note that 69 percent of the more than 500 people attending Mr. Yiannopoulos’s talk inside the main student center — the largest venue on campus — came from outside of DePaul. Students reported being harassed and pushed by people who attended the event and being taunted with racial slurs. After the event, says Father Holtschneider, some visitors stuck their heads inside the Center for Identity, Inclusion, and Social Change and mockingly asked, “Is this your safe space?”

He said the depth of the problem became apparent to him in the days following Mr. Yiannopoulos’s speech. While his immediate reaction was to support free expression, he soon heard of the blowback that was hitting the campus. Professors and students received threatening messages, and some of their family members were harassed, he says. “It was a level of vituperation that was just awful.”

Stuck in Silos

Meanwhile, some professors have criticized the administration for not taking bolder action. After Breitbart, the conservative website Mr. Yiannopoulos works for, described her as the “radical professor” behind the student protest leaders, Valerie C. Johnson, chair of the political-science department, received a barrage of hateful messages “that made my life a living hell,” she says. “It’s not every day that you come to work and you’re being called ‘nigger’ through your institutional voicemail and email.”

Ms. Johnson, who says she was not aware of the Yiannopoulos event until after it happened, is not impressed with the university’s race and speech action plan. “You have this flurry of activity that creates this feeling that something is happening when it’s not.” She would like to see DePaul become a leader for diversity and equity, yet students and professors remain in their silos, she says, not talking across boundaries. “How do we sort of break down these walls and try to forge a common understanding of where we are and how we got here and what we need to do from here? That’s the missing element.”

Many people at DePaul say this may be the greatest challenge the campus faces. The vitriol of the presidential race, combined with continuing debates about immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement, has trickled down into campus. Students seek to provoke each other, especially through social media. “We’re trying to figure out, Are we going to embrace what could become a new normal?” says Linda Blakley, vice president for public relations and communications. “Do we want to talk like that? Do we want to talk without being mindful of the ability to hurt?”

DePaul has already made clear that it is willing to draw lines. Its “Guiding Principles on Speech and Expression” champion both an openness to a broad range of ideas as well as a respect for human dignity. “When those values come into conflict, yes, we are forced to make some choices,” says Mr. Zdziarski. The goal of the free-speech task force will be to articulate how DePaul will make those choices. Among the questions it will consider: Is there anyone DePaul would not permit to speak on campus? What would the criteria be? And who would decide?

As for the complex issues surrounding race and speech, the administration hopes to get discussions rolling with the Race and Free Speech Speaker Series. But that has also drawn criticism, with those on both the left and right saying that flying in familiar faces on the speaking circuit, like Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown sociology professor whose work covers race and politics, won’t have any effect on the campus climate.

“The speaker series is a great idea, but I don’t think the university has done anything to promote conversation among the groups on campus,” says Hope Herten, a senior and treasurer for the DePaul College Democrats. “That’s been really left to the student organizations, which is difficult.”

Father Holtschneider paints a different picture. Student-affairs staff members, he says, have been regularly talking to students in what he says is an often-exhausting effort to bridge divides. “Student affairs has a real challenge in trying to sit with student groups asking about the fairness of the questions they’re raising. They see themselves as victims of the other.”

One event that has drawn positive reaction was a daylong teach-in for students and professors in the Theatre School. Panel sessions focused on diversity challenges in society and in the theater community, says Ben Gates-Utter, a senior who helped organize the event. “It’s not that we were solving any problems, that’s impossible,” he says. “But our goal is to set them up with the conversations to make them feel a bit more informed about the conflicts that are happening and diversity at DePaul.”

Whether DePaul’s action plan has the ability to foster such conversations on a broader scale remains to be seen. Just recently the College Republicans were told to redesign a poster titled “Unborn Lives Matter.” In a letter to the campus, Father Holtschneider asked people to “respect the difference between a reasoned discussion and words whose primary purpose is to wound.”

Mario L. Morrow Jr, a senior and president of the Black Student Union, says he’s concerned that the action plan is “a lot of words that go in a circle but don’t really hit the target.” He wants to see equity in how student groups are treated and thinks the creation of a black student center is important. As for how to bring about more substantive change, he says, “that’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

Michael Lynch, a senior and senator for intercultural awareness in the Student Government Association, said he thought the Milo Yiannopoulos speech acted as a catalyst to bring the administration’s attention to the challenges facing many people on campus, including Muslim students, women, and the LGBTQ community. “Now the conversation is stepping into, OK, we understand,” he says. “Now we have to move forward.”