On Thursday afternoon, Carnegie Mellon University unveiled new interim content and governance guidelines for its free-speech campus tradition dubbed the Fence. The announcement attempts to curtail further controversies surrounding the oft-painted concrete barrier after a string of challenges since last year.
Farnam Jahanian, the school’s president, said in a campuswide message the new rules outline a “clear, predictable and viewpoint-neutral framework for decisions related to the Fence — one that honors the student-centered tradition of this landmark while recognizing the university’s legal responsibilities and our shared community values and standards.”
He mentioned the rules were crafted using recommendations from the university’s student government and from a Fence Working Group he commissioned last fall. Some students, though, said they were concerned about any encroachment on the Fence’s free speech tradition.
While the Fence previously had some unwritten conventions, such as it being entirely student-run, there was no set policy. The new rules make it clear that the university administration and student government will share oversight of the Fence.
Any content or behavior concerning the Fence that runs afoul of “university policy or laws, or creates legal liability for the university” can now be subject to one of three kinds of responses: procedural, joint or emergency interventions.
Procedural interventions occur if “time, place and manner stipulations” are violated and seemingly invoke only student government response. A person painting the Fence outside of designated hours would prompt a procedural intervention, for example.
Joint interventions are needed when Fence content is flagged for potentially falling under prohibited categories including obscenity, threats, harassment, vandalism, personal attacks or violations of “other applicable” policies or laws. Both university administration and student government must confer to determine whether the Fence should be repainted.
Emergency interventions take place when the university administration feels content has violated school policy, laws, creates legal liability for the school, or “creates an immediate risk of physical harm.” The Fence will be repainted without consulting student government. This kind of intervention is expected to happen in only “rare and extreme cases,” according to CMU’s website.
All interventions will be recorded in a database maintained by student government and university administration, detailing, among other things, why an intervention took place and who made the decision.
‘Just paint it over’
Grad student Aleena Siddiqui sat on the Fence Working Group last year as one of six students. She said the idea of interventions, particularly the emergency kind, concerns her.
“It should be concerning for any student whether you are actively painting the fence or not — the fact that the university is saying, ‘Oh, in any case, we’ll just paint it over,’” she said. “I hope that people … will hopefully inquire more and … be able to continue to engage in the ways that they want to on campus and feel like they can express themselves freely.”
Charlotte Arneson, a campus rights advocacy program officer for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Public Source that giving administration the ability to unilaterally remove messages undercuts the creation of an intervention database. She said the “rare and extreme cases” disclaimer for emergency interventions isn’t a “meaningful limit.”
“It is unlikely that anything here would have changed a single removal from the past year,” Arneson said.
A CMU spokesperson pointed Public Source to Jahanian’s Thursday message in response to a request for comment on what would constitute an emergency intervention.
In his message, Jahanian said the university isn’t trying to limit Fence expression, but the reality of the barrier being a “highly visible and limited medium” required weighing both expression and safety.
Jahanian has publicly cited safety concerns to explain the shutdown of the Fence last summer as well as several removals of Fence statements in the last year. Most recently, phrases like “Free Palestine by any means necessary” and “Death to Zionism” were painted over in June and July after CMU police and administrators determined the language was threatening.
Ten community members — nine of whom were CMU students — were banned and investigated for painting the messages. The removal reinvigorated censorship concerns on campus, and a collection of national higher ed groups, including the American Association of University Professors, condemned the investigations.
According to Palestine Legal, which represented the students, eight of the nine had their cases dismissed and are no longer banned. One student, Rosalyn Tosh, remains under investigation and can’t be on campus except to attend classes. Tosh, who is risking expulsion, said she hasn’t received a hearing date.
On the new Fence rules, Tosh said she dislikes that only students can paint messages. She said she’s organized more than 20 Fence paintings, and most of them had faculty, staff and alumni participation.
“The Fence can still be student-centered without barring non-student guests from painting. The point of student traditions is to strengthen our campus community, not to rigidly divide it according to the roles on our ID cards,” she said.
Can civil discourse and censorship coexist?
For others, the vagueness of the interim policy is a sticking point.
Jack Hebert, president of the CMU Young Americans for Liberty chapter — which was formed in response to the Fence challenges — questioned what exactly the policy means when it says painters should avoid speaking “explicitly or implicitly” on the university’s behalf.
The policy cautions painters not to use phrases such as “CMU thinks” or “CMU believes,” or “any other group or individual.”
Hebert said this distinction gives the administration “sweeping grounds” for censorship, because it implies to him that CMU believes messages on the Fence are meant to speak for more than the people involved in the actual painting.
“If we at YAL were to go and paint the Fence, ‘CMU hates free speech,’ in response to this, that would ironically enough … be censored under this aspect of the interim guidelines,” he said.
Hebert said the chapter plans to focus on raising campus awareness of the rules and mobilizing other student organizations to put pressure on university administrators as they weigh the final version of these rules.
It is unclear when the final version will be adopted, and who will be involved in the process.
Siddiqui said she’s intrigued to see how the campus conversation will shift in the coming weeks, especially considering CMU’s reputation as an apolitical campus.
“I really believe that the average student on campus is not thinking about the Fence on a daily basis, even if they’re walking past it every day,” she said.
But Siddiqui hopes that those in the politically and socially active pockets continue to be vocal, even with the new rules.
“The university wants this idea of civil discourse … this is the civil discourse we’re trying to have,” Siddiqui said. “Trying to censor that is going against what you’re asking students to do.”
Maddy Franklin reports on higher ed for Pittsburgh’s Public Source, in partnership with Open Campus, and can be reached at madison@publicsource.org.
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