Opinion | Campus Free Speech Protection Act must be upheld at UT

This past weekend, President Donald Trump proposed an executive order to protect free speech on college campuses, threatening to revoke federal funding from universities that don’t comply. In Tennessee, state statutes already address this issue. Two years ago, the Tennessee General Assembly passed the Campus Free Speech Protection Act. This law, applauded by free speech advocates across the political spectrum, asserts that that universities should be “a marketplace of ideas,” and that “the free exchange of ideas is not to be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the institution’s community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, indecent, disagreeable, conservative, liberal, traditional, radical, or wrong-headed.”

Making sure our universities are places where a variety of perspectives may be presented and tested is essential to the university’s teaching and discovery mission. Students and faculty are mutually responsible for creating this marketplace of ideas. When academic freedom or student speech is restricted — as took place in 1923, when seven professors were fired for the teaching of evolution, or in 1968, when Chancellor Charles Weaver disinvited the political comedian Dick Gregory to campus— institutional policies must be challenged and reformed. 

When students come to a university, it is often from a K-12 educational system that frequently stresses standardization. In contrast, a first-rate university education seeks to challenge students to take on questions with non-obvious answers and to initiate and maintain a creative, scholarly or research investigation, while also developing a capacity to interpret the results of these efforts. In business, science and the arts, a commitment to process is critical, and one needs to be able to risk failure, incorporate the lessons learned and develop the tenacity to persist. These are among the creative competencies we strive to give our students.

It is from this perspective that I am very concerned about the recent decision by the UT Board of Trustees to create a new funding model for student-focused co-curricular programming, removing student participation in the funding allocation process in response to a report from the State Comptroller of the Treasury. The funding process we have been using on the Knoxville campus involves a request for proposals from student organizations using a published set of 14 criteria that include the quality, need, cost and feasibility of the proposed program. This funding allocation system gives student organizations an opportunity to develop a submission that addresses the program criteria, defend that proposal in front of a committee that includes faculty and staff, in addition to their peers, and learn and exercise leadership and organization skills to create and implement relevant campus programming. As a faculty adviser to a student arts organization, I have seen how this process supports our campus educational mission.  

In addition to the 14 criteria, the policy that has been in use states that: “[t]he viewpoint of a registered student organization or of any speakers included in a proposed program is not considered in funding decisions.” This principle is consistent with the federal and state constitutions and the Campus Free Speech Protection Act. The funding proposal adopted last week by the UT Board of Trustees is designed to placate state legislators who continue to demand that campus free speech be censored while remaining facially compliant with these important free speech protections. It ignores, however, the overall rationale for and value of campus free speech.

The approach taken by the UT Board of Trustees denies students valuable co-curricular learning opportunities and a voice — one that other institutions of higher learning continue to afford their students — in the allocation of fees paid with their tuition that are specifically earmarked for student programming. In short, the board’s actions throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater. It seems unfortunate, at best, that legislative pressure has instigated bad educational policy.

It is important to note that the university and campus administrations have pledged to create a new system that would involve consultation with students. However, the new allocation system, which places decision-making in the hands of a single campus administrator, is likely to lack the procedural clarity and transparency of the system it replaces. The funding process adopted by the UT Board of Trustees is completely silent on student input, providing no guidance to campus officials in designing the campus procedures necessary to implementation of student participation.

In essence, the newly adopted funding allocation system is a thinly veiled form of censorship. There is no illusion of pretext here; the university expressly admits that its policy change directly responds to legislative objections to the exercise of free speech by a single student organization. To the extent the campus administration’s actions in adopting or implementing a policy for student input results in funding decisions that are biased, it would seem to invite a future constitutional or statutory challenge. No doubt, this is and will continue to be a valuable learning opportunity on free speech and the First Amendment for our students, the faculty, campus and system administrators, board members and legislators alike.

Beauvais Lyons is a UTK Chancellor’s Professor, Immediate Past President of the UTK Faculty Senate, and was a faculty representative on the UT Board of Trustees in June 2018.