Earlier this year, pro-Palestinian protests on the University of South Florida Tampa campus led to multiple arrests and academic consequences for students involved.
Now, administrators are putting forth changes to school policy about how, when and why students can hold events — including protests — on campus.
READ MORE: Jewish group applauds USF while protesters say admin has 'ignored' concerns
Ryan Ansloan is senior program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). He spoke with WUSF's Tyler Luginski about what the changes could mean for free speech on campus.
I want to start by asking you about some of the big takeaways of this policy, (particularly) the idea that all planned activities and modifications to campus space must be pre-approved by the university. Are these policies common for public universities?
Policies that implicate freedom of expression are the reason that FIRE exists. Speech codes in general have been proliferating for a long time. A lot of schools have drafted policies that veer too far one way or the other; (and) generally tended to veer more in terms of restricting student's ability to demonstrate. We're aware of the policy and we are figuring out all the details, figuring out how we think, based on the language, it's going to work.
The policy is placing new restrictions on when groups can host activities, how groups can distribute information like flyers and banners, and ultimately, who can be involved, essentially prohibiting non-USF entities from being on campus unless explicitly approved and monitored.
How big a cause of concern should some of these restrictions be for grassroots student organizations?
USF's proposed policy does go a little bit further than some of the others that we've seen. I think we're seeing a little bit more, given the current campus climate, of requiring registered student organizations to basically co-sign if any outside organization wants to host a demonstration. I think that is something where the university could benefit from clarifying as it goes through what we hope to see as a revision process.
Why is it important for students to have opportunities to exercise political expression, and what can it mean when universities seek to change how students are allowed to gather?
I completely understand why some student organizations would look at this and say that it is very pointed and targeted. At the same time, I think a lot of the demonstrations took forms that we hadn't really seen for a couple of decades, in terms of specific encampments, that sort of thing. And so I think one thing that we've seen is that a lot of schools were unprepared for that, unprepared for how to handle that in a way that respected student free speech rights while also dealing with a slightly unique demonstration style.
And so a lot of the policies that we're seeing nationwide are attempts to respond to that and make sure that they do a better job in the future. What you hope is that it's done in a way that prioritizes students' free speech rights and respects them. I think too often we're seeing policies that go the other direction of potentially clamping down when they should be finding a way to balance them.
FIRE ranks universities in terms of free speech practices. Based on surveys from June 2023, USF was ranked 12th best out of around 250. How big a hit do you think that the university might take as well as other schools that are potentially cracking down on student protests?
Across the country, the consequences of how schools handled their responses to the encampments and the student protests that we've seen unfold over the last six months or so is going to be hugely important in how their students view their respect for free speech.
USF receives a "green light" rating from us currently, they have in their policies — really up until now — have maintained no speech codes that unduly restrict student expression in our annual reviews. We hope that they continue down that road and that they are receptive to our outreach, our comments and others' comments, raising concerns with the potential policy that we're talking about.
