Campus notebook: Weekly free speech vigil at IU Bloomington, long-time activist hosts Sunday edition

For the third week in a row, at 11 p.m. on Sunday night (Sept. 8), a crowd gathered for a candlelight vigil at Indiana University’s Sample Gates, where Kirkwood Avenue dead ends at the western edge of the Bloomington campus.

The vigil has been organized to protest a new “expressive activities” policy enacted by the IU board of trustees, effective Aug. 1.

The choice of 11 p.m. as a start time and the location on campus was a deliberate violation of the policy.

On the university campus, during the 7-hour window from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., the policy prohibits expressive activities like vigils.

There was at least one difference between Sunday’s gathering and the previous week’s event: A couple of pointed verbal exchanges unfolded between university officials and vigil attendees before the vigil started. They did not escalate.

The vigil included remarks from several speakers, some planned, and some delivered impromptu.

Starting off Sunday night’s vigil was Guy Loftman, a former attorney who practiced law in Bloomington for 40 years. Loftman recalled how he’d arrived at the IU campus in 1963 and two years later helped organize the first anti-Vietnam War protest on campus. He told the crowd helped form the IU chapter of Students for a Democratic Society.

Loftman told the crowd: “I believe the university’s new policies are unconstitutional—thus I disobey them tonight, and I do so in a civil manner, without disturbance or violence.”

In an email message sent four days earlier, Loftman had notified IU president Pamela Whitten and chair of IU’s board of trustees, Quinn Buckner, of his intent to commit an act of civil disobedience that night.

Loftman continued, “I am standing on the Indiana University campus after 11 o’clock and expressing my view that the trustees’ 1969 free speech policy should be reinstated and that President Whitten should be fired.”

Following Loftman was 86-year-old Barbara Child, a retired Unitarian Universalist minister, and former attorney, who described herself as the survivor of the shootings by the Ohio National Guard at Kent State on May 4, 1970.

Child said, “It is my opinion, based on my legal education and my years in the practice and the teaching of law, that not only is the policy contrary to the best interests of the university, but it is also unconstitutional.”

A lawsuit over the policy was filed on Aug. 29 by the ACLU. The defendants in the case are the IU board of trustees and IU president Pamela Whitten.

The key point of the ACLU lawsuit is that the policy violates the First Amendment, because the time period from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. is “substantially overbroad and is not appropriately tailored.”

The lawsuit also highlights the fact that the punishments for violating the policy can include immediate actions of “citation, trespass, and/or interim suspension from campus.” The policy can also ultimately result in “suspension or exclusion from the University” or “suspension or termination of University employment.”

The ACLU filed the suit on behalf of ten plaintiffs—all of whom joined a protest in Dunn Meadow against the war in Gaza on April 25, or in the following days, according to the filed complaint.

The enactment of the “expressive activities” policy came about three months after two days of arrests of Dunn Meadow demonstrators in late April.

The idea that the “expressive activities” policy had targeted speech in support of Gaza was highlighted in some of the remarks given at Sunday’s vigil.

Professor folklore and ethnomusicology David McDonald told vigil attendees that he’d recently loaded up 50 undergrads in a bus, to make a four-and-a-half-hour bus ride to East Lansing, Michigan, to see an exhibit of art by Samia Halaby, a Palestinian-American visual artist and IU alum.

A planned exhibit of Halaby’s work at IU’s Eskenazi Museum of Ara in February of this year was canceled due to what were described as security concerns.

McDonald told vigil attendees about the East Lansing exhibit: “In case you were wondering, there wasn’t a single security presence there. None of the paintings…in the least bit posed a security issue to any of us or any of the visitors, and that exhibition has been on full display for now two months.”

McDonald asked: “What was the reason then, that we could not engage with and experience Samia Halaby’s amazing work [on IU’s campus]?” McDonald answered his own question: “She’s a Palestinian woman.”

Before the vigil started, two IU officials answered questions from vigil attendees about where they could stand relative to the sidewalk and street, and some of the exchanges grew sharp, when vigil attendees started heading onto the plaza that is clearly part of campus.

Benjamin Hunter, who is associate vice president and superintendent for public safety, said, “We’re asking you to stay on the sidewalk.” Responded one attendee: “But we all have a right to be here!” Hunter replied, “Until we tell you to leave.”

Vicka Bell-Robinson, who is associate vice provost for involvement and belonging, was asked by a white woman, who was among the vigil goers: “As a Black woman, how does it make you feel to suppress constitutional rights when people of your race died for these constitutional rights, fought and died. How do you think Martin Luther King Jr. would feel about you being here?”

Bell-Robinson replied: “How do you think it makes me feel as a Black woman, to be out here at 11 o’clock at night on a Sunday, surrounded by white people?”

Loftman lent some support to Bell-Robinson’s perspective: “Hostile white people, when you get right down to it.”

There was pushback from a couple of voices: “We’re not all white!”

Later, McDonald would wrap up his remarks by saying, “I’m here because IU is worth fighting for. This campus is worth fighting for—its 200-year history is worth fighting for. Free speech is worth fighting for.”

McDonald added, “That’s why I’m here, and that’s why I hope that we keep doing this, until this policy gets thrown into the dustbin of history, where it belongs.”

Vigils are planned for the indefinite future on Sundays at Sample Gates, starting at 11 p.m.