Week 7: A call for kindness at IU Bloomington free speech protest, filings complete for prelim injunction

Starting around 10:30 p.m. on Sunday night was the weekly protest at Sample Gates in Bloomington against Indiana University’s new “expressive activities” policy, which was effective Aug. 1.

Sample Gates is the spot where Kirkwood Avenue dead ends at the western edge of the Bloomington campus.

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

Highlights of Sunday’s event included a poem, read aloud by Heather Akou, who is one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit the ACLU has filed in federal court, over the constitutionality of the policy.

The filings by both sides are now complete on the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction against the policy. That sets the stage for a ruling on the preliminary injunction.

Akou is a professor in IU’s Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture + Design.

The poem read aloud by Akou was “Kindness”  written by Naomi Shihab Nye, whose mother was an American, whose father was a Palestinian refugee from the West Bank. The idea in the poem is that before you can know what kindness is, you have to know what sorrow is. From the poem:

Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside,
you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
You must wake up with sorrow.
You must speak to it till your voice
catches the thread of all sorrows
and you see the size of the cloth.

Among the sorrows that the Sunday night protesters count this year are the two days in late April, when the university used state police in riot gear to break up a protest encampment on Dunn Meadow in support of Gaza.

Akou was one of those who was arrested earlier in the year.

At previous Sunday night Sample Gates protests, the expressive activities policy has been placed in the context of recent firings of the top leaders at WFIU/WTIU, and the shutdown of the Intensive First-Year Seminars (IFS) program, which ran for 30 years.

Akou put it like this: “We have known a lot of sorrows this year, not just in the world, but here on this campus— it seems like every week there’s another loss or two.” She continued: “I maintain a little bit of hope that in all of this sorrow, we have a capacity to come out of it with an enhanced sense of passion for one another and greater kindness than ever.”

At 10:59 p.m., the alarm that Akou had set went off—she then crossed from the campus to the public sidewalk. Akou has been warned by the administration already, and threatened with termination if she again violates the new policy on expressive activities.

Not moving to the public sidewalk on Sunday night was retired attorney Guy Loftman, who is an IU alum, and who has no current affiliation with the university. But Loftman has been given a formal warning letter from IU general counsel Anthony Prather that says, “[A]ny subsequent violations of UA-10 could lead to immediate action by Indiana University including but not limited to citation and/or trespass.”

On Sunday, Loftman addressed members of the IU administration, who were watching the protest from the campus side: “It’s after 11 o’clock. I’m on campus. I’m making a speech. My name is Guy Loftman! Take me, I’m yours!”

The ACLU filed its lawsuit on Aug. 29. The defendants in the case are the IU board of trustees and IU president Pamela Whitten.

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

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.”

A brief in support of the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction was filed on Sept. 16.

On Oct. 1, the university filed its response to the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction. On Oct. 7, the ACLU filed its reply to the  university’s response.

That means all the briefs are now filed in connection with the motion for a preliminary injunction, under the case management plan.