Chancellor Kent Syverud has pushed to protect campus free speech at Syracuse University years after former chancellor Nancy Cantor faced criticism from free speech advocates.

Syverud said SU must expose students to a “true range of views” in order to be a “real university” during a University Senate meeting in September. The chancellor later announced the creation of a Free Speech Working Group in October tasked with reviewing SU’s free speech and civil discourse policies.

The kind of discussion Syverud has facilitated wasn’t as present under Cantor, said Roy Gutterman, director of the Tully Center for Free Speech and a member of the working group.

“I think the current administration actually fosters discussion,” Gutterman said. “There’s deliberation and serious consideration of all the issues that have been coming up. And I think that’s a little different than how it was under any previous administration.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a free speech advocacy group that, according to the New York Times, receives much of its funding from conservative groups, criticized SU’s free speech stance on several occasions under Cantor. FIRE named SU the worst school for free speech in 2011, three years before Syverud took office.

Cantor’s administration took disciplinary action in 2010 after a School of Education student made racist comments on Facebook. A FIRE press release said the disciplinary action against the student violated SU’s commitment to free speech.

That same year, former Department of Public Safety Chief Tony Callisto said DPS officers required students to remove offensive Halloween costumes and file judicial complaints. FIRE said in a letter addressed to Cantor that SU has diminished students’ rights and autonomy and urged SU to tell students they will not face prosecution for their costumes.

“I hope you understand how disrespectfully Syracuse has acted toward its own students,” FIRE’s letter reads. “Please spare Syracuse the embarrassment of another fight against students’ rights.”

Gutterman cited SU’s response to recent campus protest movements, such as #NotAgainSU, as evidence of the Syverud’s commitment to free speech.

#NotAgainSU, a black student-led movement, held a sit-in at the Barnes Center at The Arch for eight days in protest of a series of hate crimes and bias incidents that occurred on or near SU. Syverud condemned the incidents as hate speech and reiterated his support of free speech in a campus-wide video message.

“I think the administration takes these issues seriously and tries to deal with these touchy topics in ways that address the complexity,” Gutterman said. “We’ve seen a couple of serious protests in the past few years, and I think the administration has done a pretty good job letting people express themselves.”

Syverud’s administration has also not entirely avoided accusations of infringing on free speech.

The Atlantic published a story in 2016 about an Israeli filmmaker who was disinvited to SU after professor Gail Hamner, who gave the invitation, began to fear controversy over the filmmaker’s work that focused on Israeli settlements in the West Bank.

The filmmaker was eventually reinvited, but did not ultimately visit SU, said Matthew Cleary, a member of the University Senate’s committee on Academic Freedom, Tenure and Professional Ethics.

FIRE also criticized SU in February for initially refusing to recognize a university chapter of Young Americans for Freedom, a conservative student group. SU cited YAF’s lack of a faculty adviser and the group’s requirement for prospective members to acknowledge the “superiority” of the U.S. constitution.

YAF received official recognition from SU in September.

FIRE named SU one of its ten worst colleges for free speech in 2019, citing the university’s expulsion of the Theta Tau engineering fraternity. Fraternity members were involved in creating a video Syverud called “extremely racist, anti-Semitic, homophobic, sexist and hostile to people with disabilities.”

Cleary said that comparing Syverud and Cantor’s administrations is difficult, as both chancellors have faced different challenges in interpreting or enforcing SU’s speech policies.

“There can be a gray area in the types of speech that are appropriate, so the university administration has to make judgement calls,” Cleary said.  “And usually when something like that happens, there are really difficult decisions that have to be made.”

Published on January 21, 2020 at 10:37 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu