Seven out of 10 students nationwide want policies against slurs

Enough bad feelings had come to a head that some 200 people felt a need to gather at the University of Northern Iowa on a November night to talk. The topic was diversity.

The catalyst was the kind of language students were hearing around campus.

'I mean, when I hand out a flyer for the Baile,' freshman elementary education major Chloey Arispe said at the time, referring to a Hispanic Latino Student Union dance, 'and someone goes, 'Oh, this is just a beaner thing.' I can't control what's coming out of their mouth. But I want to control what happens when I report it — when I say, 'Hey, I'm not feeling comfortable.''

Encounters such as that on campuses across the country are prompting an examination of whether limits on speech and expression should exist at a college or university. And if it's a controversial topic, raising this sticky question: If limits are added, where do you place them?

An IowaWatch college media journalism project in late winter and early spring revealed a general aversion to limiting speech and expression on several Iowa campuses but willingness among to regulate speech — hate speech, for example — that threatens someone.

That informal conclusion paired with results of a national study released in April. A Gallup Poll for the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation and the Newseum Institute showed that seven of 10 college students nationally favored policies against slurs and other intentionally offensive language.

'You can be violent with someone without using your body,' Sarah Clark, 21, a Cornell College senior from Salt Lake City, said. 'Basically saying to anyone that you don't have the right to exist in this space is hateful. It is hate speech.'

James Hampton, chairman and professor of biology at Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, said college campuses should promote the exchange of free ideas, and restricting what you can talk about on those campuses doesn't make sense.

'But I do think it makes sense that, if you are trying to convince somebody that your idea is the correct one, that you use language that lets them hear you,' Hampton said. 'If you're using hateful language they're not going to hear your ideas. They're going to hear your hatred.'

Iowa has had a number of recent instances in which First Amendment free speech rights were challenged:

l University of Iowa officials washed away depictions of hearts that abortion opponents drew in chalk on university sidewalks in mid-April. It was one of many incidents nationally involving university policies on what can and cannot be written in chalk.

l The UI came under fire from free-speech advocates when administrators asked in December 2014 that a statue of a Ku Klux Klansman be removed from the Pentacrest. An adjunct art professor said he placed it there as a piece of art, covered as it was with news articles reporting on racial issues and designed to make people uncomfortable and critical of the Klan.

Some students and others said it did make them uncomfortable — and angry in some instances — and the message did not connect with many.

UI officials said they sought the removal because the artist did not have a permit to display at the Pentacrest. But university officials also apologized for any offense the statue caused.

l A Des Moines Area Community College student sued in federal court after college officials stopped him in 2013 from passing leaflets expressing what he said was his religiously based opposition to giving state funds to a conference for gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and questioning youth.

A campus security officer took the leafleting student to the student activities office, where the student was told to abide by the college's solicitation and recruitment policy. The college later backtracked, settled the case and changed its free speech zone policy for students.

l Iowa State University's student government rejected a measure calling for expanding free speech zones on campus. Unable to agree on the topic, student leaders opted instead to support a generic call for advocating free speech and asked Iowa State administration to clarify university policy on free speech zones.

l Meanwhile, ISU is appealing a federal court ruling that said the pro-marijuana group, NORML, may use ISU logos on T-shirts.

l Students at Cornell College in Mount Vernon are involved in a spring battle of words over how to talk about minorities on campus. College administrators stepped in with public forums to calm nerves while promoting open speech, but the words continued to fly into late April.

l Students at UNI report that routinely used racially charged language and attitudes on campus create an unwelcoming atmosphere. Consistent low-level behavior and comments, called micro-aggressions, poison the atmosphere for blacks and Latinos but also bisexual and transgendered people, students said in IowaWatch interviews and reports in the campus paper, the Northern Iowan.

'I'll be walking around campus and just be thinking, glancing at people and thinking, 'what do they think of me?' or 'are they racist?' or, just things like that,' Alfred O'Brien, 23, a black who graduated from Northern Iowa in December with a degree in marketing management and ethics, said.

Mariah Dawson, a UI junior from Chicago studying chemistry said she hears the slurs. Dawson, 21, said she viewed the controversial KKK statue in December 2014 in that context of being a black.

'If a black person sees the KKK we are alarmed, it's a threat. That situation was more alarming than if someone is saying n----' to me at Brothers,' she said, referring to a downtown Iowa City bar that is popular with students.

Samantha Harris, director of policy research for the Philadelphia-based Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE, was critical of the UI for having the KKK statue taken down and for apologizing for it.

'Perfect example of how this subjective determination is an issue,' Harris said. 'You shut down speech that is making a contribution to the marketplace of ideas.'

The UI set out at the beginning of this year to establish a bias assessment response team that can respond to complaints about racially based comments or incidents that could violate student policy or a crime.

Sarah Hansen, UI vice president for student life, said the initiative's focus should not be on punishing people. Rather, the team, using the acronym BART, should provide a meaningful way to address the needs of people hurt or offended by something another student did that is illegal or which breaks the university's student code of conduct, she said.

'My focus is much more on creating an atmosphere where we can encourage discourse about issues that we disagree about,' Hansen said.

CAMPUS SPEECH ON THE NATIONAL STAGE

The Newseum Institute and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation have embarked on an effort to create suggestions later this year on whether or not acceptable boundaries for speech can exist at a college or university. They invited 42 students — three from Iowa State — to an April 2 conference in Washington, D.C., to share experiences.

IowaWatch gave a presentation about its college media project at that conference. Two of the three ISU students were part of the IowaWatch project.

Gene Policinski, the Washington, D.C.-based Newseum's chief operating officer, said he hoped to start a multiyear project to find a way to protect speech on campuses.

'Is there any real point any more to having free speech zones or a free speech location? First of all, my view, all of America is a free speech zone,' Policinski said. 'But when I can reach the planet with a tweet from my dorm room, is there really any point now for universities to establish these zones of free speech?

'But there also are issues of intimidation. We see these Twitter campaigns where a person's reputation can be attacked very easily.'

The national Gallup Poll, delivered at that conference and released publicly two days later, showed that eight of every 10 students surveyed said they think it is more important for colleges to allow offensive speech than to prohibit certain speech. Seven of every 10 adults agreed with that, the survey showed.

The Gallup Poll survey, conducted March 5-8, 2016, for the Knight Foundation and Newseum, was based on 3,072 responding college students ages 18 to 24 who are enrolled full-time at four-year colleges and 2,031 adults ages 18 and older. No Iowa students were surveyed. The margin of error for a 95 percent confidence level was plus or minus 3 percentage points for students and for adults.

MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS CHALLENGED

The context for all of this is the long-held notion that college is a place to explore new ideas, including uncomfortable ones that challenge what you believe to be true.

'I hope we are always stretching the boundaries of free speech so we are allowing our students and other college students to learn something new or view an issue differently,' Mount Mercy University President Laurie Hamen said.

Mount Mercy is a private, Catholic university. The First Amendment protects speech from government regulation, but private institutions may have codes for behavior. Hamen said her university in Cedar Rapids encourages a variety of expression.

Yet faculty members interviewed for the IowaWatch college media project said they feel a need to govern what they say in classrooms, especially when dealing with students who say something during class that not only could be offensive, but wrong.

Shannon Reed, associate professor and director of English at Cornell College, shared one example in which a student in a past class said some people deserve to be slaves and that people in some specific racial groups were superior to others.

'That was really difficult to respond to as a professor because, as someone who is in a position of power in that classroom and as someone who has the responsibility to facilitate engaged conversation, I can't just turn around and say, 'That's so offensive.' I don't even know how to respond to it,' Reed said.

'Fortunately, in that situation, while I sat there and tried to think of what to say, some other students started asking questions. And that gave me the space to sort of reframe and to talk about the implications of those kinds of sentiments, and that sort of thing. So, absolutely I think students have the right to say things that are totally offensive. And that wasn't hate speech.'

A growing practice is the use of trigger warnings. These are warnings ahead of time that warn that speech or expression that is about to come may offend you or making you uncomfortable.

'Boy, I've read so much about this,' UNI Provost Jim Wohlpart said.

'The individual who first came up with the concept was trying to engage faculty in thinking deeply about the way in which they offer materials in a classroom, recognizing that we have a certain student body that perhaps has had traumatic experiences in their life in the past,' Wohlpart said. 'And how do we make certain that when we are engaging very complex, uncomfortable materials we are doing so in a way that allows for growth?'

First Amendment rights advocates are quick to point out that freedom of speech does not remove accountability for what you say. 'You know, the price I pay for having freedom of speech is that all those other idiots out there get it, too,' Andrew Pritchard, ISU assistant professor of journalism and communication and expert on communication law, said. Pritchard is a member of the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch board of directors.

Even speech that is not critical of a person or institution can provoke controversy. Kendall Hazel, 22, a Buena Vista University senior from Sergeant Bluff, Iowa, told of how he wrote an opinion column that praised that Storm Lake-based university's dining provider, Sedexo. The column, published in February by the student-run newspaper, The Tack, drew a strong response online from one anonymous writer who called the column disgusting and juvenile.

'What I learned from that moment was like, I wrote an opinion piece and someone commented on my opinion piece with their opinion piece,' Hazel, who is graduating with a biology major, said. 'And I had the ability to comment back and say, 'Hey, that's fine.''

l This story was produced by the Iowa Center for Public Affairs Journalism-IowaWatch.org, a non-profit, online news website that collaborates with Iowa news organizations to produce explanatory and investigative reporting. IowaWatch college media journalists contributing to this story were Christina Rueth and Clare McCarthy at Cornell College; Ian Schmidt at the University of Iowa; Taylor Zumbach at Mount Mercy University; Christie Smith and Makayla Tendall at Iowa State University; and Tiffany Brauckman, Brittany Poeppe and Kyle Wiebers at Buena Vista University.