The Free-Speech Stronghold

The booming voice of Brother Max, a street preacher, rang out: “Women with short hair and those who wear slacks are all whores! And they’re bound to burn in hell!”

His words were clearly meant to provoke. How would the students passing by respond?

One female student was so hurt that she told her friend she wanted to return to her dorm room and not go to class. A male student suggested, “We should go beat his ass for spreading that hate speech!” He was restrained by his companions.

Others decided to engage the preacher in a conversation. “If we stand up to him and show up what we feel and how ridiculous his ideas are,” one student said, “maybe we can bring attention to this campus’s true values.”

“Brother Max” was actually a character played by a student actor, who starred in the first skit of Purdue University’s freshman orientation session on freedom of speech. But the scenario was based in reality.

At the start of each academic year, a wave of new students complains to Purdue administrators about street preachers like Brother Max who attack their appearance or identity. The skit is supposed to help explain to freshmen that, while university leaders don’t endorse the preachers’ point of view, they also won’t kick them off the campus.

Last year Purdue became what is believed to be the first institution to create an orientation program focused solely on the First Amendment. It’s part of a campaign of sorts that’s materialized here over the last three years that promotes an unfettered embrace of the vast majority of speech.

At a time when colleges have faced criticism for disinviting controversial speakers and allegedly shutting down constitutionally protected expression, Purdue has cast itself as an exemplar of institutional support for open and robust debate.

“Our basic rule of thumb at Purdue is that we will consider punishing conduct but never mere words,” said Mitch Daniels, Purdue’s president, in a 2016 interview with the George W. Bush Institute. “We may condemn or disassociate, but we won’t punish let alone try to prevent speech from occurring in the first place.”

Purdue’s free-speech push gained steam in 2015 and 2016 as dozens of colleges faced student protests against racism and demands for “safe spaces,” and a letter to freshmen from a University of Chicago dean sparked further debate about trigger warnings and students’ desire for safety.

Around that time, critics of how colleges were handling speech controversies sounded a common theme: Institutions were enabling coddled students to be sheltered from ideas they didn’t agree with. But recently, white supremacists and other members of the so-called alt-right have altered the nature of the debate. Some of them have appeared on campuses. And things have gotten violent.

Just days before Purdue’s orientation last month, a white-supremacist rally rocked Charlottesville, where the University of Virginia is located. Suddenly the consequences of allowing everyone to speak freely seem less like intellectual abstractions. Such a posture now carries more-urgent implications involving safety and risk, life and death.

Purdue has secured a reputation as a free-speech stronghold. But in a climate where white supremacists are targeting colleges, the university is being forced to wrestle with thorny questions about what that posture really means.

Three years ago, Purdue was no poster child for free speech. At least not in the eyes of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.

The free-speech advocacy group annually rates hundreds of colleges as green, yellow, or red based on its interpretation of their speech policies. Purdue’s rating was yellow. That meant some of its policies were vague, according to FIRE, and “could too easily be used to restrict protected expression.”

Things might have stayed that way if it weren’t for an accidental free-speech activist named Andrew K. Zeller, a Ph.D. student in mathematics.

In the spring of 2013, Mr. Zeller was pitching an idea for a debate club to members of a political student group on campus. After their meeting was over, a few of them planned to attend a lecture given by Greg Lukianoff, president of FIRE, and they invited Mr. Zeller to tag along. He hadn’t heard of Mr. Lukianoff, but he didn’t have much work to do that night, he reasoned. Why not?

During his talk, Mr. Lukianoff discussed what he saw as the discouraging speech trends on many campuses. He told the story of a student at Valdosta State University who was expelled after protesting the construction of two campus parking garages. (After the student filed suit, with FIRE’s support, the university reinstated him.)

Mr. Zeller hadn’t witnessed such problems at his institution. “The culture of Purdue is one that lends itself to respect the rights of people to speak,” he said in a recent interview. But the fact that a student anywhere could be severely punished for a peaceful demonstration shocked him.

The following year, when he was elected vice president of the graduate-student government, he knew he wanted to secure FIRE’s highest rating, a “green light,” and ensure that Purdue’s policies aligned with its culture. He contacted FIRE’s lawyers, who explained which policies they found problematic and why.

Progress came swiftly at first. In the fall of 2014, both the undergraduate and graduate student governments passed resolutions urging the university to revise the five policies FIRE had flagged, like one that the group thought defined threats too broadly. But soon their efforts seemed to stall. Then, in April, Mr. Zeller was elected president of the graduate-student body, and he had a conversation with Mr. Daniels.

When Mr. Daniels came to Purdue in January of 2013, he was already tuned into debates around campus free speech and perceived liberal bias in higher education. In his 2011 book, Keeping the Republic, he wrote: “There has been enough research done on the political slant on college campuses for us to conclude with confidence that many students are offered a one-sided view of the world when in college.” One of the first speakers he helped bring to Purdue was Mr. Lukianoff.

Mr. Daniels, a former governor of Indiana, is also a savvy politician. Getting off of FIRE’s naughty list and formally embracing the University of Chicago’s landmark statement on free expression — something no public university had done at the time — would put Purdue on the map.

“I think he saw an opportunity to get out in front of what was clearly a looming and difficult issue over the question of safe spaces and trigger warnings,” said David C. Atkinson, an associate professor of history at Purdue.

Within weeks, the deed was done. With Mr. Daniels’s blessing, Purdue’s Board of Trustees signed off on the policy changes that student leaders had asked for. The board also endorsed the Chicago principles.

Since then, Purdue has received adulatory coverage from conservative outlets like Fox News, the National Review, and The Weekly Standard that have seized onto the campus-culture-war narrative. They framed the story as a contrast: Purdue stands up for free expression, while other colleges, with their focus on diversity, inclusion, and political correctness, chill speech.

Mr. Daniels doesn’t seem to see it in such black-and-white terms. He has made references to his support for diversity right alongside his emphasis on free speech. (He declined multiple requests to be interviewed for this article, referring all questions about Purdue’s stance on the First Amendment to Steven R. Schultz, Purdue’s legal counsel.)

Still, Mr. Daniels hasn’t hesitated to cast his institution as an outlier in higher education’s free-speech battles. Soon after the board endorsed the Chicago principles, he drew attention to that fact during his spring commencement speech. “If you absorbed anything of our Constitution, you know that it contains no right not to be offended,” he said. “If anything, by protecting speech of all kinds, it guarantees that you will be able to, as they say, ‘Deal with it.’”

Katie Sermersheim, dean of students, was interviewing for her job at Purdue around that time and remembers being both perplexed and pleased by the university’s stance. “There’s question after question on free speech, and that Purdue has embraced the Chicago principles, and we’re a free-speech campus,” she said. “And I’m thinking, How could you not be before? What does that mean?”

“But all in all,” she continued, “it sent a very positive and powerful message to me that we welcome, we celebrate, we embrace free speech in all forms.”

Later that year, when protests by black students and demands for safe spaces were roiling other colleges nationwide, Mr. Daniels took the opportunity to tout his institution’s bona fides as a protector of free expression.

“What a proud contrast,” he wrote in an email to the campus community, “to the environments that appear to prevail at places like Missouri and Yale.” A glowing editorial in The Wall Street Journal called him “an adult on campus.” Some Purdue students called on him to apologize. One put it this way: “I felt like his letter reinforced the silence put upon the black experience at universities.”

On a Wednesday morning in late November, people at Purdue woke up to find striking posters scattered across campus.

“We have a right to exist,” read one, accompanied by a stylized drawing of the faces of a white woman and white man. Another featured an illustration of a man wielding his fists, the phrase “white guilt,” and an invitation to “free yourself from cultural Marxism.” At the bottom of the fliers were an innocuous sounding name — American Vanguard — and a URL directing passers-by to a website that explained how the group “fights for white America.”

Concerned students, professors, and staff members quickly mobilized, calling and emailing Mr. Daniels’s office and demanding that he forcefully condemn the posters.

The faculty senate’s equity-and-diversity committee had tried to nudge him along on similar issues in the past; it had created an email template to use whenever its members felt the administration should speak up, said Heather L. Servaty-Seib, a professor of counseling psychology and member of the group.

Mr. Daniels responded to requests for a statement with this: “Reading the dozen or so words on the posters in question, it’s not at all clear what they mean. But if one looks behind them, as I did, to the organization’s website, there are views expressed there that are obviously inconsistent with the values and principles we believe in here at Purdue.”

He added: “This is a transparent effort to bait people into overreacting, thereby giving a minuscule fringe group attention it does not deserve, and that we decline to do.”

Many professors and students argued that the white-supremacist message of the posters was very clear. While Mr. Daniels had seemed eager to use his presidential platform to comment on the national debate about safe spaces a year earlier, to critics, he seemed less interested in condemning a hateful incident unfolding on his own campus.

They asked him to try again.

“My condemnation of the apparent motives behind the posters at issue wasn’t sufficiently strident for some, and that’s fair enough,” he wrote in a subsequent statement. “Each person can choose the language he or she thinks best meets an occasion like this. But Purdue University’s opposition to racism in all its forms couldn’t be more clear, both from yesterday’s statement and a host of others that preceded it.”

Ms. Servaty-Seib still wasn’t satisfied. “I don’t think,” she said, “he would’ve responded at all to the fliers if we hadn’t said something.”

Some students were so angry about what they saw as Mr. Daniels’s complacence that they formed a coalition called Occupy Purdue, drew up a list of demands related to diversity, and staged a three-month sit-in at the administration building this spring. The provost eventually agreed to some of their requests, but the students said Mr. Daniels refused to work with them.

“There aren’t many universities where presidents have turned a blind eye to fascist posters,” said Bill V. Mullen, a professor of American studies. “There are still people who feel less secure and less safe because Daniels didn’t take a clear stand.” One of fascism’s inherent goals is to do physical harm to one’s enemies, Mr. Mullen said. “Any attempt to mask that under a banner of free speech is extraordinarily dangerous.”

Faculty skepticism of Mr. Daniels is nothing new. When he arrived at Purdue, he spearheaded a $40-million budget reduction before figuring out where exactly those cuts would come from. His plan to purchase Kaplan University, a for-profit institution, and launch a separate online university under the Purdue banner has prompted faculty members to decry their lack of involvement in the process.

Mr. Daniels also bypassed the faculty when he went straight to the Board of Trustees with a request to endorse the Chicago principles, Ms. Servaty-Seib said. The board voted to do so after the spring semester had ended.

The faculty agreed with the content, she said. “The issue was really process.”

Members of the faculty’s equity-and-diversity committee eventually sat down and talked about how they could contribute to the new policy. A free-speech session at freshman orientation was one of their recommendations. Mr. Daniels loved the idea.

“Students don’t learn about freedom of expression through osmosis — they need to be taught,” Ms. Servaty-Seib said. “If we’re going to have this statement, then they need to understand what it really means.”

The recommendations also implored the university’s administration to take a clear stand. Senior administrators “need to issue clear, strong, and direct statements emphasizing the critical nature of mutual respect and civility and speaking out against hateful, racist, sexist, and discriminatory expressions.” The committee also initially recommended that the orientation program include “personal appearance by the president,” though that wasn’t part of the final document.

Mr. Daniels did not personally come to the session last year or this year. Instead, a video of part of his 2015 commencement address was shown. It was a 45-second clip that includes him saying, “Deal with it.”

When the subject of speech is uncontroversial, being told to “deal with it” sounds easy enough. It’s when the ideas trigger people’s emotions and imperil their sense of safety that it can become more difficult for them to detach.

It’s one thing to understand intellectually that everyone should be allowed to say just about anything. But what about when that language targets the vulnerable? Purdue’s free-speech orientation, perhaps unwittingly, reflects this tension.

Last year the session featured a mock protest of Laverne Cox, the transgender actress. The student actors imitated what had sometimes occurred when Ms. Cox traveled to campuses, said Dan Carpenter, executive director of student success. But the orientation staff got a call from the LGBTQ Center. Some students complained that the skit targeted the LGBT community.

The redesigned scenario featured a controversial speaker from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, or PETA.

In the skit, two animal-science researchers decided to engage with the PETA activists by talking about their scholarly work. A student organization, “The Collegiate Beef-Growers Alliance,” organized a protest against the group.

The last group, three concerned female students, wanted to target a particular aspect of PETA’s activism: the “lettuce ladies,” women wearing string bikinis covered with lettuce leaves who try to promote the benefits of a vegan diet. One student pulled three heads of lettuce out of her backpack, one for each of them. “We can use these to protest the lettuce ladies,” she said, “and give them a piece of our minds.”

One of her peers was on board, but the third student balked. “Whoa, wait, guys,” she said. “Didn’t we agree that we would keep this protest in bounds? You know, let them do their thing?”

The other two students brushed her off — and promptly threw the lettuce heads at the imaginary activists.

The audience laughed. It was the final skit of the session, and it was supposed to be funny. But the topic at hand was serious: the point at which speech becomes violence or a true threat, and how a university should react when it does.

In this case, said Ms. Sermersheim, the dean of students, the two “lettuce launchers” would probably face discipline under the code of conduct. “The lettuce heads are projectiles, the projectiles are weapons, weapons are violence, and violence is not free speech,” she told the thousands of new students in attendance.

By having a freshman orientation session, Ms. Sermersheim said, Purdue officials hope to establish clear guidelines around free speech: Here’s what is allowed; here’s what isn’t. We will intervene only when the speech meets these rare conditions. When an outside speaker is invited to campus, don’t infringe on his or her right to speak.

Administrators also hope to lay out the three basic options students have when they encounter expression they don’t agree with: ignore it, engage with the person or group, or organize a counterprotest.

Navigating ugly words can be difficult, Ms. Sermersheim said, and some students might come to Purdue with “limited coping skills.” Purdue should help those students, Ms. Servaty-Seib said, and simultaneously make clear that free speech can’t be disassociated from values like civility, diversity, and inclusion. “We don’t want them to leave the session thinking, If I’m offended, something is wrong with me.”

When Mr. Daniels talks about free speech, his strong language sometimes carries less nuance. For instance, he has said that Purdue’s rule of thumb is to punish conduct, never speech. The lettuce-launcher scene at orientation portrayed clear-cut violent actions — even if they were unlikely to cause harm — in which punishment was a relatively easy call to make.

But the line between speech and violence can become blurry, like when extremist speakers come to campus advocating harassment and violence.

Universities are increasingly being forced to figure out whether to give a platform to firebrands and white supremacists, and whether their very rhetoric can be equivalent to harassment or violence. There’s no playbook for what colleges should do. Purdue’s “free speech over everything” stance appears to make that decision simple, but it might actually make things more complicated.

“When you adopt principles on free speech as Purdue did,” said Mr. Atkinson, the history professor, “you’ve established a context in which it’s very difficult to walk that back.”

Hate speech is undoubtedly legal, said Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of educational history at the University of Pennsylvania. What isn’t legal, he wrote in an email, is threatening someone with direct and physical harm. “Some of the racist protesters have surely done that; most haven’t; and the difference between the two is what we need to talk about,” he said.

The presence of extremists “certainly complicates the conversation,” said Mr. Schultz, Purdue’s legal counsel.

Protecting free speech means that ideas that most people find abhorrent will appear on campus, he said. “The price of freedom of expression is that we have to be ready for that to occur in our midst,” he said, “and then we have to be prepared to respond.”

That perspective suggests that white supremacists and other members of the so-called alt-right are not materially different from other controversial speakers. In February, Robert J. Zimmer, president of the University of Chicago, said as much. If Richard Spencer, a prominent white supremacist, was invited to his campus, Mr. Zimmer told The Wall Street Journal, “it would be fine if he came to speak, just like if anyone else came to speak.”

But after the protests and violence in Charlottesville, Mr. Zimmer issued a statement that drew new distinctions. “It is a travesty,” he wrote, “to label as free speech the combination of brandished weapons, the killing of an innocent person, threats, and the symbols that represent destruction to so many.”

After Charlottesville, several public universities received requests from Mr. Spencer to speak on campus. At least four institutions initially denied the requests, and some of these decisions were followed by threatened or actual lawsuits. College leaders said that while they are committed to free speech, the likelihood of violence associated with such an event made allowing the speeches impossible. (The University of Florida has since cleared the way for Mr. Spencer to speak, though a date hasn’t been set.)

Mr. Schultz said that as far as he knew, Purdue hadn’t received a request from Mr. Spencer. But it might only be a matter of time. For white supremacists, said Mr. Mullen, the American-studies professor, the torchlit march across UVa’s campus last month “was the first day of school for them. They were announcing, We are here in fall 2017 to try to take over university spaces.”

The University of California at Berkeley, meanwhile, is hosting a “free speech week” this month featuring Milo Yiannopoulos, Steve Bannon, and other controversial speakers. In a letter, some professors said they are so concerned about “the violence that their followers bring in response” that they’re calling for classes to be canceled and students to stay off campus.

Mr. Daniels did discuss what happened in Charlottesville in a letter that many professors saw as an improvement from his response to the white-supremacist posters. “Ours is a community of respect in which we can all live, learn, work, and grow, and each of you is a valued member of that community,” he and Jay Akridge, the interim provost, wrote. “Racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry, and violence like that demonstrated in Charlottesville are the antithesis of those values and have no place on our campus.” Then they stressed the importance of “free and open inquiry in all matters.”

In the future, said David A. Sanders, an associate professor of biology, “I hope that he sees what is the consequence of silence.”

But silence might also be the best possible response. Ignoring the supremacists deprives them of the negative attention that fuels their cause. Then again, perhaps the only way to fight speech you abhor is with an alternative. Or maybe, as one Purdue professor argued, Mr. Spencer isn’t really engaging in free and open dialogue, and his efforts to deceive have no place on a college campus.

As long as a student organization was bringing in the speaker in question, the students followed university guidelines, and “violence isn’t presumed to be a part of it,” Purdue probably wouldn’t intervene, Ms. Sermersheim said. “It’s important to look at the totality of the situation,” she said, “but purely based on the speech, it’s unlikely that there would be a reason why it wouldn’t be allowed to continue.”

If anything, said Mr. Zeller, the graduate student, college campuses are the sorts of places where people like Mr. Spencer should speak. Members of the campus can come together to figure out how to create a world where less of that ideology exists. “If we’re going to combat people like Richard Spencer, we need to listen to him and understand his ideas,” he said. “Simply plugging our ears doesn’t help us.”

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.