Williams: VCU's protest rules stifle dissent (2024)

MICHAEL PAUL WILLIAMSRichmond Times-Dispatch

Yes, I’m the guy who still wears a face mask in crowded indoor spaces, not unlike other folks who either have a compromised immune system or are protecting a loved one who does.

At Virginia Commonwealth University, this precaution could get me detained by an official demanding to check my ID, if I’m to take the school’s interim concealment of identity policy at face value. Any individual on VCU property who wears a mask, hood or otherwise covers a substantial portion of their face must present identification.

This is but one of the overbearing attempts by VCU to regulate protest in a nation where elected and appointed officials are putting the squeeze on the First Amendment, particularly on college campuses.

The rules on tents and encampments are one overreaction compounding another — a busload of officers from VCU, Virginia State Police and the Richmond Police Department, in riot gear using chemical irritants, storming a peaceful pro-Palestinian encampment on the lawn by the James Branch Cabell Library last April and arresting 13 people.

The new rules, designated as interim, require final approval within one year.

“VCU is dedicated to creating a campus culture that embraces the richness of diverse perspectives, encouraging all members of our community — students, faculty, staff, and visitors — to engage in discussions, debates, and expressions that are the hallmark of a dynamic educational institution,” VCU said in announcing the interim policy.

“Honoring this campus culture also means acknowledging that it can be uncomfortable and sometimes painful to encounter ideas and perspectives that contradict one’s own. Nonetheless, we encourage our community to engage in a respectful and constructive exchange of ideas that reflects our values as an inclusive and supportive community.”

Engagement and inclusivity were sorely lacking in the crafting and release of these rules.

Or as former VCU dean Bob Holsworth points out, “there should be a specific commitment to traditional shared governance processes that engage faculty, students, staff and administrators in developing the university’s policies about the exercise of free speech. At the moment, this appears to be a response to a political directive from the Youngkin administration that bypasses the university’s standard policy-making procedures.”

Approving this sort of top-down policy in early August is the antithesis of inclusion. And dictating the rules of dissent to the micro-level of sign size is anathema to freedom of expression.

“We’ve been concerned to see a number of college and university administrations hastily enact overly restrictive policies that impose severe limits on speech and assembly,” said Mary Bauer, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. “It’s universities’ jobs to protect — not suppress — student speech, and we urge Virginia’s institutions of higher education to carefully distinguish between real danger and mere controversy as they carry out their responsibility to protect students’ civil rights and civil liberties.”

Don’t get me wrong: A university, like any institution, has a right to set policies.

But some of the rules literally don’t pass the eye test.

Could VCU board members, even if they squint, read protests signs written on an 8½-by-11-inch sheet of paper held in the back of a meeting room? That’s a rule more befitting an eye exam in an optometrist office than a demonstration by concerned students opposing policies that affect them, such as a tuition hike or the unilateral killing of a racial literacy requirement by the board of visitors.

Also, is hassling students with face coverings wise during a still-active pandemic? And does the school, in doing so, dare risk a twofer in attacking both free speech and religious freedom?

“It is reasonable for the university to set policies for demonstrations that guarantee student safety, prohibit the destruction of property, and enable classes and clinical practice to proceed unimpeded. But this interim policy contains elements that go far beyond this,” Holsworth says.

“The requirement, for example, that anyone wearing a mask on campus needs to show ID makes no sense and it is impossible to imagine how it can be enforced fairly and evenly. If a student wears a mask because of COVID or a weakened immune system, how many times a day can be they be asked for ID?” he asks. When he was a professor, he had Muslim women students who covered their entire face except for their eyes, he said. “Will they be provided a religious exemption from the policy?”

Moreover, he points out, while some demonstrations are planned in advance, others are spontaneous — a response to a specific incident — and should not be subject to an advance permission requirement, Holsworth says.

The rules reflect a national trend to silence or stifle dissent amid an outbreak of pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses — a turn of events that has led to the high-profile resignations under pressure of college presidents at Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. The larger context is a right-wing assault on academic freedom, from K-12 through college, in the censoring of books and classroom discussions and curriculums.

In an Aug. 19 article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Sereen Haddad, a student who led pro-Palestine demonstrations at VCU last year, called the rule changes a “desperate attempt to suppress our voices and the movement as a whole.” She said students will continue demonstrating this fall.

To Bauer’s point about distinguishing between danger and controversy, it must be noted that protest has rarely been politically popular in America.

Asked in a May 1964 Gallup survey, “Do you think mass demonstrations by Negroes are more likely to HELP or more likely to HURT the Negro’s cause for racial equality?” 74% of the respondents answered “hurt.” This was nine months after the March on Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. The point of a demonstration is to create a climate of unease that makes the status quo untenable and moves people to action. Our universities, a clearinghouse of ideas populated by inquiring and idealistic minds, are a natural place for the spirit of protest to flourish.

If the result is unsettling, so be it. Agitation sustains a free society.

“We have to challenge ideas,” said Shawn Utsey, a psychology professor at VCU. “We have to get uncomfortable. That’s democracy.”

As such, he looks askance at these interim policies.

“I think that what they’re proposing is trying to make people comfortable with things we shouldn’t be comfortable with. Why else would you make it harder to protest?” Utsey said.

“How can we applaud brother John Lewis? ... How can we applaud that ‘good trouble’ statement and enact policies that say you can’t cause good trouble?”

These policies are bad trouble for free speech. VCU has given its students yet another reason to protest.