Speech First, a campus free speech advocacy group, filed a complaint on Wednesday against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill‘s Students for Justice in Palestine chapter for staging a walkout during a recent speaker event.
On Jan. 22, members of the UNC SJP organized a protest against a speaker series featuring journalist Bari Weiss, disagreeing with her “attempt to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism,” according to a post from the school’s SJP chapter on X.
In the complaint filed with Senior Associate Vice Chancellor of Student Success and Administration Jonathan Sauls, Speech First alleged the walkout violated campus speech codes and state law by “‘substantially disrupt[ing]’ or ‘substantially interfer[ing]’ with ‘the rights of others to engage in and listen to expressive activity.'”
“The right to free speech does not mean the right to silence others. What good are campus policies and state laws protecting free speech if there is no intention of enforcing them?” Speech First Executive Director Cherise Trump said in a press release. “Regardless of whether you’re a student, administrator, or professor, accountability should not be some distant boogeyman that never materializes.”
According to the complaint, roughly 25 minutes into the discussion on “objectivity in journalism,” students stood in the aisles of the auditorium and began shouting down speakers. The students were removed after several minutes by campus security, after having been warned that their actions violated UNC’s Campus Free Speech Act.
Citing university policy on actions Speech First referred to as the “heckler’s veto,” the organization pointed out that “[a]ny University student, faculty member, or staff employee who is found
to have … substantially interfered with the protected free expression rights of others shall be subject
to a full range of disciplinary sanctions.”
“The regularity with which shouting down conservative, or even moderate speakers occurs on campuses is causing a decline in student morale and intellectual stimulation,” Trump said. “Furthermore, the normalization of speaker shout downs is evidence of a serious dereliction of the universities’ responsibility to educate students on not only the law, but on the fundamental principles that undergird American society.”
Trump’s organization is asking for the school to investigate whether the UNC SJP “conspired” to prevent speech from an invited speaker, and to remove the group’s recognition by the university as a legitimate organization.
Several universities have disciplined or suspended their SJP chapters since the Oct. 7 Hamas-led terrorist attack in Israel. School administrators at Columbia University, George Washington University, and others have accused the pro-Palestinian student organization of violating university codes of conduct.
In a press release about its complaint this week, Speech First also pointed out that UNC has several anti-speech policies, including bias response teams and other systems in place that they argue suppress student speech through threats of discipline for “offending” others.
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“What we are seeing on campuses today is evidence of a hypersensitivity to opposing ideas which has been stoked by politically interested campus administrators and a university system that has abandoned the tenets of reason, critical thought, and the dialectic,” Trump said.
The Washington Examiner contacted the UNC SJP for comment.
