I didn’t think I’d need to hang a press badge around my neck last week when I headed to a faculty senate meeting at Northeastern Illinois University, about a proposed policy that would restrict free speech on campus. I just threw a pen and notebook in a bag and caught a ride to the northwest-side campus, where I’d been a student myself back in the late 1960s—when free speech was erupting all over and federal agents were infiltrating student clubs.
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It was a striking indication of the lines that have been drawn at NEIU, where some of the school’s unionized faculty are increasingly concerned about a top-down administration seeking a buttoned-down campus, and one professor is suing university officials over alleged retaliation after she spoke out in defense of minority rights and against the Iraq war.
Proposed by university president Sharon K. Hahs, the Policy Concerning Demonstrations on Campus, Distribution and Display of Visual Communications and Solicitation of Signatures on Campus—dubbed DDS for short—was submitted last month to the faculty senate and three other campus groups representing students and employees, with a request that they buy in. Opening with a statement that posits an opposition between “constitutionally guaranteed liberties” and “the duty to educate,” it requires an advance “reservation request” for any person or group planning to hold a demonstration, hand out flyers, display posters, or gather signatures on a petition. The request would have to be submitted no later than one week in advance for students and employees (two for everyone else), and include copies of any visual communications that would be used. Although there’s an “exception” procedure for “spontaneous” demonstrations—involving on-the-spot approval by a representative of the dean’s office—they’d clearly be discouraged.
NEIU is seeking dismissal of the suit, arguing that it’s not a free speech issue but an employment matter.
