Written Testimony Submitted to Virginia State Senator Hashmi and the Senate Education and Health Committee, September 13, 2024
Our rights to free speech and free assembly do not stop at the campus gates. In fact, the very concept of the university itself – as a vital space of free inquiry and fearless research – is built upon these foundational rights.
The Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors (VA-AAUP) is the leading statewide organization representing all faculty members and graduate students engaged in teaching and research at universities and colleges in the Commonwealth. We are writing today to urge Virginia legislators to resist all efforts to restrict the rights of students and faculty to engage in political speech and participate in protests at Virginia’s public universities. Our rights to free speech and free assembly do not stop at the campus gates. In fact, the very concept of the university itself – as a vital space of free inquiry and fearless research – is built upon these foundational rights. We implore you to protect free speech and assembly at Virginia’s universities and colleges.
It is a sign of our fraught times that we must write this letter at all. After all, these are basic rights in all free societies. Yet in recent months, college and university administrators have faced unrelenting pressure from external interest groups to crack down on students protesting Israel’s invasion of Gaza and the mass killings of Palestinian civilians.
Such external pressures are to be expected. Yet last Spring we were shocked to observe that many university administrators in Virginia seemed willing, even eager, to abandon their responsibility to protect the free speech rights of students in favor of the violent and coercive responses demanded by external political actors.
VA-AAUP implores all parties–including the Virginia legislature–to step back from the brink and recommit to protecting the free speech, academic freedom, and assembly rights of university students and faculty.
We turn now to the recent statement of the national American Association of University Professors on the deep and interwoven connections between free speech, free assembly, academic freedom, and fearless scholarly inquiry within American colleges and universities. We quote the national AAUP’s statement now in its entirety.
“As an apparent reaction to student protests since last October, a number of college and university administrations have hastily enacted overly restrictive policies dealing with the rights to assemble and protest on campus. These policies, which go beyond reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions, impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression. For example, these policies often require registration for demonstrations or protests, which, because they take place spontaneously or with little planning time, is tantamount to forbidding them. Requiring registration also enables surveillance of protest plans, which can discourage protests by groups with minority viewpoints. Many of the latest expressive activity policies strictly limit the locations where demonstrations may take place, whether amplified sound can be used, and types of postings permitted. With harsh sanctions for violations, the policies broadly chill students and faculty from engaging in protests and demonstrations.
Those who care about higher education and democracy should be alarmed for a number of reasons.
First and foremost, these policies severely undermine the academic freedom and freedom of speech and expression that are fundamental to higher education. Free inquiry and free expression are indispensable for the transmission of knowledge, the development of students, and the well-being of democracy. Our colleges and universities should encourage, not suppress, open and vigorous dialogue and debate even on the most deeply held beliefs.
Second, these new policies trample on the rights of students. In 1967, during another wave of student protests, the AAUP and other groups, including the Association of American Colleges (now the American Association of Colleges and Universities) and the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, issued the Joint Statement on Rights and Freedoms of Students. The principles and standards set forth in the statement are germane to current efforts to suppress student speech and conduct.
College and university students are both citizens and members of the academic community. As citizens, students should enjoy the same freedom of speech, peaceful assembly, and right of petition that other citizens enjoy and, as members of the academic community, they are subject to the obligations that accrue to them by virtue of this membership. Faculty members and administration officials should ensure that institutional powers are not employed to inhibit such intellectual and personal development of students as is often promoted by their exercise of the rights of citizenship both on and off campus. (emphasis added)
Third, many of these new campus policies are being imposed with little to no faculty input, which is essential to developing policies that affect academic freedom of faculty and students. Such top-down edicts by university administrators bypass the central role of elected faculty bodies, such as faculty senates, in university governance. Under the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, the faculty has “primary responsibility” over teaching content and methods and “those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process,” and faculty play an instrumental role in determining general educational policy.
Fourth, the policies curtail the rights of faculty, who are entitled to freedom from institutional censorship or discipline when speaking or writing as citizens. Institutions of higher learning should aim to foster an environment in which faculty, graduate employees, students, and other members of the campus community are free to discuss and debate difficult topics, inside and outside the classroom. The new policies are likely to disproportionately affect contingent and full-time non-tenure-track faculty members, and graduate student employees, especially people of color in these groups.
The recent proliferation of these new restrictive policies seems to be an attempt to appease politicians who are calling for university administrators to use a heavy hand against faculty and student protestors. We must reiterate, as we said in our November 2023 statement Polarizing Times Demand Robust Academic Freedom, “By acceding to external political pressures and demands for political censorship instead of encouraging the utmost freedom of discussion, college and university administrations abandon their own responsibility for protecting the academic community’s central mission of education, research, and service to the broader society and to the public good.” Administrators who claim that “expressive activity” policies protect academic freedom and student learning, even as they severely restrict its exercise, risk destroying the very freedoms of speech and expression they claim to protect.”
We at the Virginia Conference of the AAUP strongly endorse our national AAUP’s position and call on Virginia’s legislators to protect, not violate or erode, the rights of faculty and students to free speech and assembly on campus.
On behalf of all AAUP members in Virginia and the executive board of the VA-AAUP, I thank you for your time and consideration.
Timothy Gibson, President, Virginia Conference of the American Association of University Professors
