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Anisa Khalifa: For much of the past two years, campus free speech has been front and center in America. With a lot of the focus on the protests and punishments happening at private, Ivy League universities. But public schools have been grappling with the issue as well. Including the oldest public university in America– the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill… where student activists are feeling the squeeze…
Laura Saavedra Ferero: I know there's a lot of people who are not willing or able or just experience a lot more fear when participating in any sort of protest on campus, any sort of rally
Anisa Khalifa: I'm Anisa Khalifa. This is The Broadside, where we tell stories from our home at the crossroads of the South. This week, we look at the right to protest at public universities and find out why everyone should be paying attention to what happens next.
Anisa Khalifa: In April of last year, groups of student protestors put up tents at colleges around the US
Unidentified Anchor: students at schools that include Columbia University and New York. Yale and Harvard have been demonstrating in solidarity with Gaza. Many have formed encampments. And hundreds.
Gaby del Valle: One of the students' big demands at universities across the country was that their universities divest from companies that are based in Israel, but also from military contractors that are profiting off the war.
Anisa Khalifa: Gabby del Valle is a policy reporter at The Verge and has been covering pro-Palestine protests on college campuses since they ramped up the beginning of the war on Gaza. She's based in New York, so her reporting has mostly been focused on Columbia University and other private institutions in the northeast.
Gaby del Valle: Generally speaking, the dynamics were to say the least tense in some cases actively adversarial, even in the case of Columbia. Um, a university that, you know, touts its tradition and history as a kind of student activist university.
Anisa Khalifa: But Gabby said that what's unique about this moment is the way that students are being penalized for acts of protests, like camping overnight on school grounds, or posting on social media actions that in the past were largely recognized as expressions of free speech.
Gaby del Valle: And the way that the university administrators and also the Trump administration are framing it, is that it's actually not speech. It's actually discrimination. It's actually harassment.
Anisa Khalifa: She said this argument that protests for Palestine are not constitutionally protected speech because they violate the Civil Rights Act, is the core justification that both universities and the Trump administration are making for their actions against student activists, all on the basis that the speech of pro-Palestinian protestors threatens and harasses Jewish students on campus.
Gaby del Valle: It seems like there's this kind of one-sided focus on discrimination and harassment that is kind of being weaponized against these student protestors, and then their own speech is also being weaponized against 'em.
Anisa Khalifa: And Gabby points out that it sets a dangerous precedent for anyone who wants to raise their voice in support of any cause.
Gaby del Valle: The Israel Palestine issue is the one that is. So contentious and so polarizing that it's almost easy to go after those students first because there is like this massive opposition to their political project. The way that universities and the government are responding to these pro-Palestine students is a litmus test for how they respond to other types of speech, and it does not bode well. Who's to say that won't be expanded to an anti-ICE protest or an anti-Trump protest, or an anti tariff protest?
Anisa Khalifa: Or say a protest in my home state of North Carolina.
Brianna Atkinson: Hi, I'm Brianna Atkinson and I cover higher education for ÃÛÌÒ´«Ã½.
Anisa Khalifa: Brianna covered the fallout of last year's student protests here, which centered on a public square at the heart of UNC Chapel Hill called Polk Place.
Brianna Atkinson: Yeah, so it's Polk Place. It's super public. Um, I've actually went to UNC as a student and I've seen students gathered there. They'll have picnics when it's warm outside. Um, people, community members will come and like give information. From all different swaths and sides of issues, but it's completely open to the public, just like UNC Chapel Hill is. That's how their outdoor spaces work.
Anisa Khalifa: I just wanna note that Brianna and I both work for WNC, which is licensed by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. However, we are completely editorially independent.
Brianna Atkinson: The encampment started on April 26th. Um, students and community members came on campus. Uh, they erected tents. Um, there were people with posters, signs. They were chanting, essentially asking the university to divest from Israel. Um, this encampment stretched out for multiple days,
Anisa Khalifa: but early in the morning on April 30th, UNC administrators warned students to clear the area or risk arrest.
Brianna Atkinson: And there were some protesters that remained in the space, uh, about.
30 people that day were detained. Um, from what I've heard from students, it was a pretty aggressive situation with police trying to forcibly remove people from the area.
Anisa Khalifa: And while this effectively ended the protests, Brena said that UNCs reaction to all of this has continued to play a unique role in the national conversation around campus free speech.
Brianna Atkinson: Even though the Ivy Leagues are kind of in the national headlines as as far as targeting, um, the Trump administration has also singled out UNC Chapel Hill. They were on a list of campuses that they felt like had anti-Semitic activity. The Trump administration is equating that to pro-Palestinian protests on campus.
Anisa Khalifa: That matters because unlike Columbia or Harvard, UNC, chapel Hill is a public school that's part of a statewide university system, and the site of the protest Poke Place has famously been a forum for public protest in the past.
Brianna Atkinson: One thing that stands out to people is like a public university is supposed to be for the people and the people are supposed to be able to go on campus to spread their voice. That's historically what public universities have been used for. Um, and now people are essentially being villainized as outsiders, um, for a university that they pay taxes to.
Anisa Khalifa: In response, some of these folks are taking their universities to court, and the question at the heart of all these cases is the constitutional right to free speech.
Reem Subei: It is unacceptable for government actors to remove individuals. And groups who are engaged in nonviolent activity from a public forum because they disagree with their viewpoints.
Anisa Khalifa: This is Reem ve, a senior attorney at Muslim Advocates, along with Emancipate NC and the ACLU of North Carolina. They've filed a suit against a mix of university administrators and police officers on behalf of a group of protestors, UNC Chancellor Lee Roberts is a lead defendant in the case and unsurprisingly. Polk place features prominently in the arguments.
Reem Subei: There have been countless protests in the history of UNC Chapel Hill at Polk Place, protests against the Vietnam War, the protests against the South African Apartheid and protests against Confederate statues. I. All of these protests did not face the same repressive actions that UN UNC Chapel Hill took against those who engaged in the encampments in support of Palestinian lives.
Anisa Khalifa: And when it comes to a public space on the campus of a public university, Reem said that those constitutional rights to free speech are particularly sacred.
Reem Subei: So public universities are unique in that the right to free speech. On public campuses stems from the United States Constitution, and in that, um, the precedent that comes from those cases is one that applies to the entirety of space that we all have access to across the country, such as public sidewalks and streets. And so the implications are much wider. There's just something very unique about public entities and public spaces because if we allow those rights to be curtailed, then we have allowed the rights of folks in the country to be curtailed everywhere that's public.
Anisa Khalifa: During the reporting of this story, I reached out to UNC for comment, but did not receive a response, but this is not the first time the university system has been embroiled in a controversial. Free speech case coming up after the break, we look back to a time when one type of speech was banned completely at North Carolina's public universities and what it means for us today.
Bill Link: The thread here, I think that's important is that the presence of the university were able to keep political interference away from the campus.
Anisa Khalifa: If you wanna know anything about the history of higher education in the South, bill Link is your guy. The former UNC Greensboro and University of Florida professor is a wealth of knowledge Right off the bat, he hit me with a stat that I wasn't expecting.
Bill Link: The problem of State of North Carolina was in the beginning of the 20th century. It was one of the poorest states in the union, either the second or third highest illiteracy rate in the country.
Anisa Khalifa: Oh wow.
Bill Link: And it was massively underdeveloped.
Anisa Khalifa: And this is really important because Bill said it led to a grand bargain.
Bill Link: So in a sense, the political leadership of North Carolina, which was very conservative all the way through the 20th century, I. Made a deal with the university leadership that they would support. The university provided some degree of independence in exchange for making the university an engine of social growth and economic development.
Anisa Khalifa: Now, this may sound simple now, but it was a new and kind of radical idea at the time. This unwritten agreement between lawmakers and the university system was often tenuous and it needed champions. Like UNC President Frank Graham, who oversaw the system in the 1930s,
Bill Link: Graham was a great believer in academic freedom and free speech. His notion was that any idea if it was freely aired would either stand or fall and didn't need to interfere in that process.
Anisa Khalifa: But that doctrine was challenged pretty early on. In 1931, the legendary poet and social activist, Langston Hughes was invited to speak at UNC about a controversial court case.
Bill Link: Just to begin with, having a black person speak on campus had never occurred before. Graham came under extraordinary political pressure to ban that, uh, he did not, and he followed consistently a policy of making the university a sort of an island of free speech.
Anisa Khalifa: And that tension continued for decades until. The speaker ban crisis.
Bill Link: The speaker ban was a law that was passed by the legislature in 1963. It prohibited speech of any, any known communist, that's the, the word that was used, or anyone who had taken the Fifth Amendment before a congressional committee. It was rushed through. There was no opportunity for discussion.
University, um, officials weren't consulted.
Anisa Khalifa: Bill said the ban was a response to the wave of civil rights activism sparked by the Greensboro sit-ins in 1960. And by 1963, it had spread all across North Carolina,
Bill Link: that outraged legislators, uh, this is a one party state, so they're all Democratic party, but they were absolutely outraged at this and they, they believed that. The protests were engineered by liberals at Chapel Hill.
Anisa Khalifa: The eventual effort to overturn that law was led by students, and what Bill said was really the first time students on UNCs campus had mobilized for a cause.
Bill Link: And in 1966, an organized movement arose to test the law and then challenge it in court. So at UNC, they invited, deliberately invited two people.
Anisa Khalifa: Herbert Apthecker, who was a historian at the University of Massachusetts and an actual card carrying Communist and Frank Wilkerson, who had appeared before the House un American Activities Committee in the 1950s and had refused to testify invoking the Fifth Amendment.
Bill Link: So they covered both ends of what the law said here. They did not engage in civil disobedience, so that's, there's an important distinction to be made. They attempted to have the speakers, uh, speak on UNC campus that was banned, and they then went to the front of the campus, the north side of campus on Franklin Street and there at Thacker for Wilkerson. Spoke right on the wall.
Anisa Khalifa: Mm-hmm.
Bill Link: So it was very effective and the students were actually the litigants in the case that eventually struck the law down.
Anisa Khalifa: Do you think there are long-term ramifications to the speaker ban?
Bill Link: It was a question really of a couple of things. One is, was the university going to be a place where you could have free ideas? And secondly, was the university gonna be subjected to political interference? The fact that the law was struck down in 1968 was a major step in protecting the independence of the university in a very trying period, and I think that it was a victory in the sense of the Frank Graham vision of the university being a laboratory of ideas. I. You know, where you could test out things and people could see one side and see the other and make up their minds about things.
Anisa Khalifa: How do you think that's going now?
Bill Link: Uh, uh, I don't think it's going so well, and that's not just UNC to be honest. Right now there's a general attack on higher education and the massive political intervention in higher education. So how much do does the leadership of UNC protect against that? Uh, I would say not as effectively as it was done earlier, but they're, they're, they're facing different challenges.
Anisa Khalifa: The challenges might be different. But Bill Link said the stakes today are the same.
Bill Link: You can't have a great university if it's run by political impulse or by the shifting winds of politics. It's just you can't have a great university unless you have free inquiry. That's just a basic principle of, of academic freedom, but it's why academic freedom is important.
Anisa Khalifa: In 2025, the University of North Carolina has chosen to respond to the challenges of this moment with new restrictions on protests,
Brianna Atkinson: the UNC system. Um, they actually instituted a protest policy across campuses as a result of the pro-Palestinian protests that took place.
Anisa Khalifa: My colleague Brianna Atkinson again.
Brianna Atkinson: The policy requires if people wanna have like a large gathering, they essentially have to check in with the school first. It has a caveat for spontaneous expression, but still it says that if people interfere with, you know, students trying to learn or like a school's regular normal operations, then they're gonna face. Getting arrested and getting detained on campus.
Anisa Khalifa: And recently she saw the impact of this new policy at North Carolina Central University in Durham. WRAL was on the ground.
Unidentified Anchor: A two hour protest over housing crisscrossing NC Central's campus. Wednesday afternoon ended with five arrests.
Brianna Atkinson: There were several people that were arrested when they were doing a demonstration, um, about housing access. So it's already, uh, affecting people and campuses.
Unidentified Anchor: See, NC Central students weren't protesting foreign wars or politics. They weren't appealing to the White House or demanding enormous change to culture or the world order. These students have a problem with something very specific and right in front of them. Housing and they want the university to do something about it.
Brianna Atkinson: There were massive protests as we know last year around this time. I haven't seen protests on that same scale. I'm not saying that the protest policy did lead to this happening, but there hasn't been. As much protesting as there was last year before it was enacted.
Anisa Khalifa: You can find links to the work of reporters, Gabby de Valle and Brianna Atkinson in our show notes. And a special thanks goes out this week to Ellen Schrecker, the historian of McCarthyism, whose insight was invaluable for this story. The quote you heard at the top of the episode is from a student who was heavily involved in the protests at UNC last year, Laura Saavedra Ferero.
This episode of The Broadside was produced by me. Anisa Khalifa and our editor, Jerad Walker. The rest of our team includes producer Charlie Shelton Ormond, and executive producer Wilson sere. The Broadside is a production of w UNC North Carolina Public Radio and is part of the NPR R Network. If you have feedback or a story idea, you can email us at broadside@wunc.org. If you enjoyed the show, leave us a rating, a review, or share it with a friend. Thanks for listening, y'all. We'll be back next week.