EXCLUSIVE — A campus free speech organization filed a complaint on Tuesday against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for its treatment of the school’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine after a recent outburst disrupting a lecture event.
The Speech First complaint, obtained by the Washington Examiner, was filed with the UNC Board of Trustees and comes after the group shouted down journalist Bari Weiss, who was invited to campus for the Abbey Speaker Series to talk about “objectivity in journalism.”
“If the Board of Trustees takes UNC’s free speech policies seriously they will urge the campus to enforce them. Up to this point, UNC has rewarded the SJP chapter by giving them exactly what they wanted — letting them carry out a heckler’s veto by shouting down a speaker, violating UNC policy and state law, and then walking out,” Cherise Trump, executive director at Speech First, told the Washington Examiner. “UNC is doing nothing to deter them from doing this again.”
“It’s pretty simple. The SJP chapter violated state and campus policies. Therefore, they should lose club status,” she added.
The group’s complaint on Tuesday was not the first it has filed with UNC leadership about the Jan. 22 incident. As the Washington Examiner reported, a similar complaint was filed with Senior Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Success and Administration Jonathan Sauls.
Trump said her organization has not heard anything from UNC in response.
The new complaint accuses the UNC Students for Justice in Palestine chapter of violating a campus free speech policy that “prohibits students and student organizations from ‘substantially disrupt[ing]’ or ‘substantially interfer[ing]’ with ‘the rights of others to engage in and listen to expressive activity.'”
Students for Justice in Palestine members allegedly shouted down Weiss and staged a walkout of the event, citing Weiss’s “attempt to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism” as their motivation. The students were removed by campus security but faced no subsequent consequences, which Speech First said is required by North Carolina law.
“Does UNC really wish to set the precedent that it is perfectly fine to shout and carry on for several minutes in the middle of a serious lecture or class meeting, so long as you leave after a few minutes?” Speech First asked in the complaint. “What would the university do if, instead of shouting in unison, each student had shouted individually for three minutes in succession, and then left as each had said their piece? Have our standards sunk so low that this is what we consider reasonable conduct?”
It also questioned the motivations of the school’s lack of disciplinary action based on the content of the protesters’ demands, noting if a lecture on racism were shouted down by a group of white nationalists, the response would likely have been different.
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“It beggars belief to think that UNC’s leadership would shrug their shoulders and say, ‘Well, at least they only disrupted the event for a little while,'” the letter stated. “There would be consequences for the individuals and the organization involved. The double standard in this instance is palpable.”
The Washington Examiner reached out to the UNC Board of Trustees for comment.
Read the full letter here:
