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The Indiana University Robert H. McKinney School of Law will host an Indiana Law Review symposium on free speech on Feb. 14 in Indianapolis.
Titled “Raise Your Hand, Not Your Voice: Freedom of Speech in Higher Education,” the symposium will examine free speech on college campuses in 2025 and how new policies impact student and faculty rights.
The discussion comes at a time when friction over these rights have risen substantially on college campuses across the country.
“Just based off of new stories about campus protests and the presidential election, I decided that freedom of speech, specifically within the higher education classroom, was a relevant, timely, little bit of a controversial topic,” said Caitlyn Fields, Executive Symposium Editor of the Indiana Law Review and student at IU McKinney. “And I thought the symposium was a great opportunity to bring a lot of different perspectives to campus to kind of discuss what’s going on and where we go from here.”
Campus protests
Speakers and panelists at Friday’s event will bring both local and national perspectives to the free speech discussion.
Stevie Pactor, staff attorney for the ACLU of Indiana and adjunct professor at IU McKinney, will speak on Indiana-specific free speech policy during a panel with Steve Sanders, associate dean of academic affairs and professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law.
One of the topics Pactor and Sanders plan to discuss is Indiana University’s updated expressive activity policy, which regulates how and when members of the community can hold protests on campus.
Pactor said the symposium is timely for discussions on how these regulations impact students and the wider community.
“This is just one of those moments in history where there’s a lot of activity on this front, sort of at the same time,” she said.
She said pushback from universities against these protests and laws attempting to control professors’ freedom of speech is particularly notable.
“It seems like a multi-sided assault on the First Amendment in the campus setting, and so I think it’s really sort of a perfect moment to be talking about that, particularly in an academic setting,” Pactor said.
IU’s expressive activity policy was updated in August and prohibits protesting, making speeches, circulating petitions and any other expressive activities from happening between 11 p.m. and 6 a.m. It also prohibits camping on university grounds at any time.
In response to the change, the ACLU of Indiana sued the university, alleging that its language prohibiting “expressive activity” during the overnight hours is too broad and violates the First Amendment.
The updated policy follows controversy over IU leadership’s handling of encampment protests in Bloomington and Indianapolis last April in response to the war in Gaza.
The encampment at IU Bloomington’s Dunn Meadow gained particular attention, with nearly 60 arrests made during the first few days of the encampment.
The operative expressive policy on campus prior to the 2024 encampment prohibited “uncarried” signs, symbols, and structures from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. without advance permission. But as protests unfolded on campuses across the country, IU leaders made a last-minute policy change to effectively prevent any encampment from being established in the first place, relying on the logic that once tents were up, they would be more difficult and dangerous to take down.
The old policy was more accessible on IU’s website, however, despite the distribution of new policy fliers and signs on campus, and many protestors continued referencing what the old policy claimed, leading to confusion.
An independent review of IU’s response to the protests by international law firm Cooley LLP confirmed university leaders acted within legal standards and university policy when calling off the protests when they did.
While the symposium’s topics are widely seen as divisive, presenters are not looking to debate. Instead, they want to better understand the landscape of free speech rights and help legal professionals do the same.
“The First Amendment is a viewpoint neutral document. So, it just says Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech. It doesn’t say good speech, bad speech, left speech, right speech,” said Clay Calvert, professor emeritus at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and speaker at the symposium. “When universities started cracking down on sides, that some groups can protest and others can’t, that type of thing, that’s when they got into trouble.”
Faculty rights in higher education
Another topic the event will focus on free speech rights for college faculty both in and out of the classroom.
Locally, this ties back to the IU protests but also relates to a new state law.
Senate Enrolled Act 202 was signed into law last March and calls for the implementation of “intellectual diversity” programming at state-funded universities.
The law requires faculty members at public universities to teach scholarly works “from a variety of political or ideological frameworks” or risk disciplinary action. But many professors at state universities have said it is unclear what intellectual diversity means in the context of the law. Some have feared the law would require them to teach works promoting generally dangerous viewpoints, like Holocaust denial.
The ACLU also filed a lawsuit last May against the implementation of the law, but it was dismissed by the U.S. District Court for Southern Indiana for lacking subject-matter jurisdiction. A second lawsuit was filed in August and argues that policies enacted under the law at IU and Purdue University violate the First and Fourteenth Amendments.
Calvert will bring a national perspective to the discussion.
Under the Public Employee Speech Doctrine, public employees have a First Amendment right that must be balanced with their employers’ right to restrict some speech. But Calvert said the doctrine is not very clear when it comes to professors.
To illustrate his point, Calvert will be referring to a couple of cases involving free speech arguments on college campuses. In one case, a professor was sued for using certain language in his class to try to make a point.
“These questions pop up all the time, you know, are they relevant to the subject matter? Are they germane to what I’m teaching? Versus, you’ve got to balance that against the student’s ability to learn in a non-hostile environment,” he said.
Speakers and event organizers alike are hopeful that attendees at Friday’s symposium will walk away with their questions answered and voices heard on a topic that will continue to impact them and their peers across the state.
“Our goal is always to encourage the free exchange of different opinions and ideas, and so having an opportunity like this, specifically with the symposium and then with the networking lunch to follow, it essentially gives, not necessarily an open mic, but a forum to people who this issue is important to,” Fields said.
Registration is required and will be open until the event starts. No walk-ins are accepted. Those interested in attending this year’s symposium can register online.
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