A crude drawing on a “free speech ball” has a campus group at the University of Delaware facing scrutiny from anti-harassment rules.
Young Americans for Liberty at UD had a giant beach ball on campus for students to write whatever they’d like to promote a free speech documentary they were screening, according to Inside Higher Ed.
After a student wrote “penis” on it, then added a visual aid in case students didn’t understand, however, it caught the attention of a campus police officer.
“The officer informed students that a drawing of a penis and the word ‘penis’ on the ball could violate the university’s sexual misconduct policy,” according to a press release from the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, an organization that focuses on free speech on college campuses.
“The officer, relying upon UD’s overly broad definition of sexual harassment, told students to cover words and drawings on a ‘free speech ball’ intended to promote freedom of speech and also told them to self-censor further writings by other students to avoid offensive or upsetting messages,” FIRE noted in a letter sent to the university.
The University of Delaware has been criticized by FIRE before, in 2007, for an “ideological reeducation program” that was dropped after controversy. The program wanted students “to adopt highly specific university-approved views on politics, race, sexuality, sociology, moral philosophy, and environmentalism.”
The free speech ball is less common than free speech walls, but the vulgarity problem remains. Give Delaware students empty space, and they’ll draw a penis, as will students in Wisconsin. Or ballots for Canadian students and snow for Michigan students. It isn’t the first time, either, that lewd images have been removed from free speech walls and generated concern about constitutional protections on speech.
The police office, when confronting students, told them that he acted as a “mediator.” “We also gotta, you know, keep in the back of our mind that everything that people say may be, you know, offensive to other people,” he said.
That argument remains a slippery slope for the restriction of free expression that students have as a right on public college campuses. A penis might not further a political conversation on campus, but it’s protected by the same legal rules that protect a discussion of whom students should support in an election, or criticism of the college administration.
Recently, Ohio State University used similar rhetoric to shut down a campus protest. The police officer might have seen himself as a mediator, but when students and administrators capitulate to concerns about speech being offensive, it weakens the protections students have for serious and deep discussion.
