Free Speech Is Challenged
A growing number of colleges are overhauling their speech policies in response to controversial protests about the Israel-Hamas war.
At December’s congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses, the presidents of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faced a barrage of questions from Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Republican of New York, about whether calling for the genocide of any group would violate campus policy. The presidents said that it would depend on the “context” of the situation. Elizabeth Magill and Claudine Gay, presidents of Penn and Harvard, resigned shortly after.
The hearing caused dozens of politicians, donors, alumni, and board members to scrutinize college leaders across the country. The Department of Education opened investigations into multiple colleges for accusations of antisemitism on campus.
Some colleges, including Stanford, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, and Syracuse Universities, announced on social media and in campuswide statements that calling for genocide would go against campus policy, no matter the circumstances. Others went further, revising, changing, or adding new speech policies, according to campus statements.
Public colleges are required to abide by the First Amendment, which protects most speech aside from a few specific categories, like true threats. On the other hand, except for a few state regulations, private colleges can impose restrictions on the content of speech as well as where and when protests or other activities can occur. Experts say most private colleges still try to create policies that mirror the First Amendment to keep their colleges open places for inquiry and discussion.
On January 25 American University administrators imposed new free-expression guidelines. The guidelines are an “interpretation” of the university’s free-speech policies and are only in place for the spring semester, said Matt Bennett, a university spokesperson. They may extend beyond the semester, though, depending on feedback from the campus community, he said.
According to the new guidelines, protests can no longer occur in university buildings. Another provision restricts postings on university-owned spaces to event promotions that follow the guidelines. And such postings must be “welcoming and build community.”
Lehigh University revised its posting policy on January 22, prohibiting anyone from posting flyers on painted, finished, or wallpapered surfaces, glass surfaces, windows, doors, the exterior of buildings, utility poles, trees, car windshields, or on bulletin boards reserved for departmental use. In the places where posters can hang, they must advertise an event, activity, program, service, or opportunity on campus, and include the name of the sponsoring person or group as well as their contact information.
Faculty and staff members who have access to university-owned websites at Barnard College can’t post political messages on those sites, according to policy the college issued on November 13. They also can’t use other campus resources to promote political activity. The clarifications came after administrators removed a pro-Palestinian message from the department of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies’ website. Since then, faculty members have been asked to remove pro-Palestinian posters from their office doors, according to reporting from The New York Times.
According to Cornell University’s new Expressive Activity Policy, amplified sound can only be used in two outdoor areas on campus between 12 p.m. and 1 p.m. Community members must get prior permission to host an event with amplified sound at any other time in any other location. The policy also requires campus community members to receive approval before hosting events with more than 50 people in any of the eight mentioned areas on the university’s main campus.
It feels to me like a real reduction in the vibrancy of the college as a place for growth, for debate, for persuasion, for education.
During a February 8 protest at Cornell, students from the university’s Coalition for Mutual Liberation were referred to the Office of Student Conduct and Community Standards. About 100 students walked out of their classes and gathered in a campus library where they read the names of Palestinians who have died in the war. They also chanted “Cornell is complicit in genocide.”
In a campuswide statement, a university official said the students had “disrupted university business.” They violated the new university policy, which encourages protesters to plan their demonstrations “wisely to avoid disrupting classrooms, libraries, auditoriums, laboratories, living units, administrative offices, and special-event venues.”
Pro-Palestinian student organizations have called the changes restrictive and vague. They worry the policies could limit controversial speech on campus or eliminate it altogether.
Some of the restrictions, like prohibiting protests in dorms or other private areas, could reasonably protect the normal operations of the university, said Genevieve Lakier, a law professor at the University of Chicago. But speech restrictions that are “content specific” and prohibit a theme or topic, such as genocide, would prevent essential conversations from happening simply because they are contentious.
Some policies “look very much like an effort to, in the face of too much controversial speech, just crack down on speech and just make it difficult for students to speak at all,” Lakier said. “It feels to me like a real reduction in the vibrancy of the college as a place for growth, for debate, for persuasion, for education, for all of these things that we think are really important.”
Big Donors Turn Up the Pressure on Colleges They Support
Millionaires and billionaires have long held sway on the campuses they patronize. They influence the type of research colleges pursue when they endow chairs or their foundations award generous grants to fight diseases and spur technological advances. Campus buildings are named after them, and their children get a leg up in some admissions processes. Sometimes they join governing boards to wield even more influence. This dynamic is a reality in higher education.
But at a handful of campuses, some donors have recently aspired to a level of influence that goes even further.
Since the October 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent invasion of Gaza, some donors have openly protested the leadership of some Ivy League campuses. One of the most visible is Bill Ackman, founder of the hedge fund Pershing Square Capital and a Harvard graduate and donor. His activism started after he learned that student groups signed a statement soon after Hamas’s attack saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Ackman wrote on X that the students’ names should be made public.
His pressure intensified until, a couple months later, Gay of Harvard, Magill of Penn, and Sally Kornbluth, president of MIT, were grilled before Congress over how they would discipline students who call for the genocide of Jews. Ackman posted a video of the exchanges, which caused many across the political spectrum to condemn the presidents, and publicly criticized Harvard’s selection of Gay as president.
He also told The New York Times that he had tried to call Gay. “It would have been smart for her to listen, or to at least pick up the phone,” he told the newspaper. Gay ultimately resigned amid plagiarism allegations that were publicized after the hearing, and Ackman rejoiced.
Meanwhile, before the outbreak of war, a group of Penn donors asked Magill to cancel a Palestinian literary conference, which she did not do. Several were dismayed a few weeks later when she did not respond immediately to Hamas’s attack. The angst crested after her appearance before Congress. Ross Stevens, a hedge-fund manager, said he would withdraw a $100-million donation; a group of business leaders who advise Penn’s Wharton School pushed for her to resign. A few days later, she did.
Whether donors will be emboldened by these high-profile examples remains to be seen. The president of Concordia University, in St. Paul, Minn., told The Chronicle in January that a donor to the campus had warned that he wouldn’t donate to the university if students protested the Gaza war in a way he found objectionable. Similar examples seem few and far between — at least for now.
Only a few years ago, Mackenzie Scott’s major, no-strings-attached gifts to colleges and other organizations seemed like they might signal a new trend in giving that was less about donor reputation and more about institutional autonomy. These more recent calls for changes at the top — should they persist and spread — might be a sign that donors expect their money to speak even louder than it already does.
The Future of Legacy Admissions Looks Shaky
In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision last year to ban race-conscious admissions, the legal and political battles over who gets into college have brought intense scrutiny to the use of legacy preferences. And now those battles are playing out in multiple arenas, including statehouses and even Congress.
Bills to ban legacy preferences were making their way through the legislative process in mid-February in at least four states, including Connecticut, Maryland, Massachusetts, and New York. Virginia’s governor is soon expected to sign into law a bill prohibiting legacy admissions at the state’s public colleges, which means Virginia would join Colorado, which banned the practice in 2021, as states that have forbidden the consideration of an applicant’s relationship to alumni of public institutions.
Meanwhile, a Department of Education investigation into legacy admissions at Harvard is still underway, sparked by a complaint filed by a nonprofit group last year. And members of Congress recently proposed two bills that would ban the consideration of family ties in college admissions on a national level.
The concerted push for colleges to ban legacy admissions marks a change in public opinion about a practice known to overwhelmingly benefit white, affluent students. According to the Pew Research Center, three out of four Americans in 2022 were against legacy admissions, up from 68 percent in 2019.
While ending legacy admissions offers no guarantee that college access will become more equitable, at least a dozen colleges — most of them private — have dropped the practice since the court’s decision was announced. Wesleyan University was the first, and others, like Carleton and Occidental Colleges and Virginia Tech followed.
“We believe our goal of expanding access makes this the right time to discontinue legacy preferences,” wrote Carleton’s president in a message announcing the change to the college’s admissions policy last year.
A new Department of Education requirement may drive more colleges to follow suit. For the first time, in 2022, colleges were asked to provide data on whether or not they consider an applicants’ legacy status during admission. The federal data, released late last year, show how widespread legacy preferences are in higher education — several hundred colleges said they used them, although most of them were not very selective.
Critics of legacy admissions, however, want even more transparency. Last year, a coalition of civil-rights groups, college-access advocates, and academic researchers urged the Department of Education to require colleges to report how many applicants are legacies, how many of them are admitted, and how many enroll — disaggregated by race, ethnicity, gender, and, if possible, Pell Grant eligibility.
A policy brief on legacy admissions released in December by Education Reform Now, a nonpartisan think tank and advocacy group, said “that exposure, combined with state and federal legislation and civil-rights complaints, could finally bring a shameful chapter in college admissions to a close.”
