A few months ago we had Uh oh Barnard . . .
And now there’s more:
Barnard is mandating that students remove any items affixed to room or suite doors by Feb. 28, after which point the college will begin removing any remaining items, Barnard College Dean Leslie Grinage announced in a Friday email to the Barnard community. . . .
“We know that you have been hearing often lately about our community rules and policies. And we know it may feel like a lot,” Grinage wrote. “The goal is to be as clear as possible about the guardrails, and, meeting the current moment, do what we can to support and foster the respect, empathy and kindness that must guide all of our behavior on campus.”
According to the student newspaper, here’s the full email from the Barnard dean:
Dear Residential Students,
The residential experience is an integral part of the Barnard education. Our small campus is a home away from home for most of you, and we rely on each other to help foster an environment where everyone feels welcome and safe. This is especially important in our residential spaces. We encourage debate and discussion and the free exchange of ideas, while upholding our commitment to treating one another with respect, consideration and kindness. In that spirit, I’m writing to remind you of the guardrails that guide our residential community — our Residential Life and Housing Student Guide.
While many decorations and fixtures on doors serve as a means of helpful communication amongst peers, we are also aware that some may have the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs. So, we are asking everyone to remove any items affixed to your room and/or suite doors (e.g. dry-erase boards, decorations, messaging) by Wednesday, February 28 at noon; the College will remove any remaining items starting Thursday, February 29. The only permissible items on doors are official items placed by the College (e.g. resident name tags). (Those requesting an exemption for religious or other reasons should contact Residential Life and Housing by emailing [email protected].)
We know that you have been hearing often lately about our community rules and policies. And we know it may feel like a lot. The goal is to be as clear as possible about the guardrails, and, meeting the current moment, do what we can to support and foster the respect, empathy and kindness that must guide all of our behavior on campus.
The Residential Life and Housing team is always here to support you, and you should feel free to reach out to them with any questions you may have.
Please take care of yourselves and of each other. Together we can build an even stronger Barnard community.
Sincerely,
Leslie Grinage
Vice President for Campus Life and Student Experience and Dean of the College
The dean’s letter links to this Residential Life and Housing Student Guide, which I took a look at. It’s pretty reasonable, actually. All I saw regarding doors was this mild restriction:
While students are encouraged to personalize their living space, they may not alter the physical space of the room, drill or nail holes into any surface, or affix tapestries and similar decorations to the ceiling, light fixtures, or doorways. Painting any part of the living space or college-supplied furniture is also prohibited.
The only thing in the entire document that seemed objectionable was the no-sleeping-in-the-lounges policy, but I can’t imagine they would enforce that rule unless someone was really abusing the privilege. They’re not gonna send the campus police to wake up a napper.
So, yeah, they had a perfectly reasonable rulebook and then decided to mess it all up by not letting the students decorate their doors. So much for New York, center of free expression.
I assume what’s going on here is that Barnard wants to avoid the bad publicity that comes from clashes between groups of students with opposing political views. And now they’re getting bad publicity because they’re censoring students’ political expression.
The endgame seems to be to turn the college to some sort of centrally-controlled corporate office park. But that wouldn’t be fair. In a corporate office, they let you decorate your own cubicle, right?
I object to people decorating doors on aesthetic grounds:)
All joking aside, a ban on decorating a door is a fairly minor infringement of free speech. In my experience, such rules are usually created because of some ugly incident or another, and are aimed at preventing a recurrence. Perhaps the severity of an incident we have not heard of justifies the means. I would generally oppose such a rule, but there might be a reasonable argument as to why clearing the doors is actually reasonable.
The policy seems to be motivated by the notion that if you’re a college student you should be shielded from the knowledge that other people have views that you might find offensive, on the basis that some of these views might make you feel that you are not “welcome and safe.” I agree with Clyde Schechter, below, who points out that in the real world — outside of college, I mean — you are going to encounter expressions of beliefs you disagree with, so you may as well get used to it.
Also, preventing people from expressing their views doesn’t mean they don’t hold those views. Your neighbor in the dorm will still think whatever they think, whether they say so on their door or not. I don’t think preventing people from advertising their beliefs on their doors is the right response, certainly not as a general rule.
But…what if you’re a black student and the white student in the next room puts up a Confederate flag, or a swastika (gotta get Godwin’s Law out of the way early)? Your Jewish and the Palestinian next door puts up a poster that says “From the River to the Sea, Palestine Shall Be Free”? Your Palestinian and the Jew next door posts “Palestinians: may your villages burn”? Do I really think that should be allowed? Hmmm. Yeah, I think I do, although I’m not 100% sure of my ground here. But I certainly feel that such issues should be judged case-by-case — maybe you wouldn’t allow a Confederate flag but you’d allow a photo of the car from the old Dukes of Hazzard TV show (the car was painted with a big Confederate flag).
I disagree that this is a ‘fairly minor infringement of free speech’. College is supposed to be a place to discuss and explore ideas!
Ok I’m blaming autocorrect for changing you’re to your. Twice. wtf.
I do think there’s something different about having controversial politics in your face in your place of *residence* compared to other places. Time+place+manner restrictions are a thing.
Most offices these days don’t have cubicles.
While I can understand that at the end of a day, a student might want to find sanctuary from the day’s debates in her dormitory corridor, these rules are poor preparation for life in the real world. Every time I leave or return to my house I pass by many neighbors. Some fly pride flags. Some fly Trump flats. Some fly blue lives matter flags. (Interestingly, I have seen neither Israeli nor Palestinian flags on display even though both Jews and Arab Muslims are present in my area.) During the electoral season, there is a profusion of lawn signs in favor of various candidates. If I were so inclined, I would feel offended and agitated by anyone with either a Trump or a Biden sign on their lawns–I strongly despise them both (for different reasons). But we are supposedly living in a liberal democracy, and we are called upon to tolerate differences of all kinds, non-violently expressed. And I am able to be friends with neighbors from all parts of the political arena, despite our differences.
The students would be better served by policies that expose them to opinions they disagree with strongly and learn to make peace with the fact that they will have to deal with this as long as they live.
When I was an undergrad (long ago last century) I nailed an old shoe to my dormitory door with a sign below it saying “The Meaning of Life”. I have no idea what I was thinking – there was certainly no grand plan.
One night I was woken by several inebriated people outside the door having a strong debate about “Do you think he is serious?”
So I say: long live poorly conceptualized dormitory door art.
To be sure, although I was an undergraduate at a place “just up the street” from Barnard College, I never really paid any attention to Barnard’s connection to Columbia University. Google, as is true of most of the contributors to this blog, did not exist back then but it does now, so I found this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barnard_College
I suggest reading the above wiki and then this:
https://c250.columbia.edu/c250_events/symposia/history_women_timeline.html
After I read both of the above, I confess I am more confused than when I began regarding the connection between Barnard and Columbia. The entities seem to be both distinct and connected. Not mentioned at all is whether statistics is taught at Barnard. If so, how is this distinct from that which is taught at Columbia?
Paul:
Barnard College, Columbia College, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences are three of the many schools within Columbia University. Students in one of the schools can typically take courses at the others.
I should also say that I appreciate Columbia University’s general support for free speech. For example, here I am at a Columbia University website, criticizing a division of Columbia University, and I think that’s just fine with the institution. Criticism is a central part of the scholarly endeavor.
Even if Barnard students can take courses in other parts of Columbia, is Barnard strictly for females only? Does Columbia College, and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences admit females as well as males? At most institutions in the U.S., I thought that a particular subdivision such as engineering, liberal arts, fine arts, humanities, law, med school, etc., would not (openly in this century) be restricted to one gender only.
Just up the street from Columbia is CCNY where females were, as the story I was told, admitted through a historical quirk. CCNY had several divisions where it was expressly written that these divisions were male only. No one bothered to include that restriction in its school of engineering because it was assumed that females would not be drawn to engineering. Some female did apply, was admitted and thus, the rest of the walls came tumbling down. Is what I just wrote apocryphal? At my age, it is difficult to distinguish truth from a good story I vaguely recall.
Paul:
Yes, Barnard is for women only. The other schools at Columbia admit both men and women.
I would add to your list Columbia’s School of General Studies, which also participates extensively in cross-enrollment with those other schools mentioned, and follows the same core curriculum requirements as the College and the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. It differs from the other three in that it is the venue for students who begin their Columbia studies more than 2 years after high school graduation.
Actually, we lost our cubicles and, in fact, any permanent seating. We moved to a purely “hot” seating arrangement on a first-come-first served basis. Any items we left at a seat after business hours would be disposed of by the janitorial staff. Of course, management was magnanimous and allowed us to apply for cubbies where we could store some personal items that we could then arrange around our workspace during the workday, as long as we put them back when we were done. And we all hail our benevolent corporate overlords.
do you work for Southwest Airlines? lol
And the college, after creating increasingly impersonal environments, will wonder why students feel increasingly isolated and lonely. But don’t worry, there will be a new Associate Dean to ponder that.
One of the main tasks of administrators is to guard time and to prevent its being wasted. IF they are any good, administrators guard not just their own time but the time of others. So, administrators often strongly prefer making rules that are easy to understand and enforce. (I realize that some administrators are known mainly as thieves of time. New administrators often behave in a time-wasting way in attempting to justify their positions and salaries.)
The new Barnard policy has at least the virtues of being easily understood and enforced, viewpoint-neutral, and of a commonly accepted kind of “time and place” restriction on expression. Even at a pubic university, dorm hallways are not, I would think, public fora, and if they are not public fora, such no-posting restrictions should be legally acceptable. At a public university, large open quads are typically public fora and a wide range of expressive activities must be allowed there. So, even if Barnard wants to bind itself to free speech requirements like those that should be met by US public universities, it could prohibit dorm door postings.(Columbia closes the College Walk at 116th Street, between Broadway and Amsterdam Aves – where, I was told, I learned to walk – for one day a year to maintain its private status. Maybe contiguous or overlapping Barnard is similarly careful if it needs to be.)
Dealing with the assaults that could well result when, e.g., someone who has door-posted tries to stop another from removing material from the the poster’s door, would be very, very time-consuming. I think that it is reasonable to expect such assaults.
Also, Codes of Student Conduct typically do impose restrictions beyond what laws may require, and as long as the enforcement of those restrictions does not violate any laws, courts will accept the restrictions. Often some such additional Code of Student Conduct restrictions are presented as ‘promoting civility’ and not just as prohibiting harassing or assaultive behavior.
If however too little is being done at a school to educate students about how to argue productively over deep disagreements, then students should demand a tuition refund or discount. (That will of course require being able to quote – that is mention, as opposed to use – hate speech.) It is clear that there are people at opposite poles who are profoundly ignorant of crucial facts concerning history and the conduct of warfare, and schools should be working to remedy the ignorance. Based on reported Barnard student behavior, it seems that some Barnard students don’t know as much as they think they know about the war in Gaza or about the attitudes of others towards that war. But forcing all students to become more knowledgeable about the present issues would backfire and engender plenty of criticism.
Perhaps Barnard should do more to educate those who need it. Or it may already have done all that it reasonably can. It is very tough to make someone think if they really don’t want to. I dealt with thousands of students who were raised to regard some of the most important questions human beings ever face as best approached with a tightly closed mind. It always seemed odd to me – an inversion of rational standards – to advise someone to take their minds out of gear when the stakes are highest. But it rarely seemed at all odd to the closed-minded students.
At the end of the “Introduction” to his _Lectures on Physics_ (1970), Feynman quotes Gibbon:
“But the power of instruction is seldom of much efficacy, except in those happy dispositions where it is almost superfluous.” https://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap4.htm.
Whatever Feynman’s reason for choosing the quote, I am afraid that Gibbon was right.
David:
You write, “The new Barnard policy has at least the virtues of being easily understood and enforced, viewpoint-neutral, and of a commonly accepted kind of ‘time and place’ restriction on expression. . . . Also, Codes of Student Conduct typically do impose restrictions beyond what laws may require, and as long as the enforcement of those restrictions does not violate any laws, courts will accept the restrictions.”
Sure. But Barnard already had a code of conduct in its Residential Life and Housing Student Guide, and there was nothing about restricting what was on students’ doors. I think that was just fine. This new door restriction seems stupid to me.
Suppose through the door restriction a riot involving the death of 3 students and injury of 20 others was prevented. Would it still seem stupid?
I’m not saying that’s what’s the reality, just that there are reasons for time place and manner restrictions and one of them is to avoid things spilling over into violence, and this kind of thing can plausibly be a part of that goal.
Daniel:
I find it highly implausible that through the door restriction a riot involving the death of 3 students and injury of 20 others was prevented, just as I find it highly implausible that the door restriction would cause a riot involving the death of 3 students and injury of 20 others was prevented.
Another stupid thing here is this sentence from the dean’s letter: “While many decorations and fixtures on doors serve as a means of helpful communication amongst peers, we are also aware that some may have the unintended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs.” To the extent that people are putting strong messages on their doors, they may well have the intended effect of isolating those who have different views and beliefs. That’s part of the point too, right? Why assume that negative effects are unintended?
I honestly know zero background about this topic. I haven’t been following news about Barnard college in any way, but I could certainly imagine cases where what’s really going on is harassment… like people moving in across from people who are members of group X to put messages promoting violence against group X on their doors to harass the group X members, who then have to deal with that every time they go in or out of their residence. If you let that go on long enough, words get exchanged in hallways, fists fly, then student groups get involved en-mass, clashes occur in other dorm areas, then marches in public quads and the most extreme portions of those groups wind up bringing weapons like clubs to marches, then police are brought in with batons, crowds form and panic, people get trampled to death…
Is it a specific series of events that would have to occur which might not be overall super likely? Sure. Is it a sequence of events similar enough to real events we’ve seen before during the Vietnam era, or in protests in Portland or other areas during 2020? With incidents like Kyle Rittenhouse, or Kent State leading to deaths? Yes.
If a time place and manner restriction prevents harassment in living quarters and in the process reduces the risk of violence from say p = 0.01 to p = 0.0003 is the cost (no aggravation allowed in place of residence) worth it for the reduced risk (expected number of deaths goes from .03 to .0009)?
All I’m saying is that an across the board crackdown on talking about or displaying certain kinds of speech anywhere is very different from a crackdown on speech within the halls of a residence in relatively close quarters.
Yes Clyde mentions having to deal with his neighbors having Trump yard signs or whatever, but I’m guessing his neighbors front door isn’t facing his own door and 8 feet away, so that they have to literally rub elbows to both go in or out of their houses at the same time.
Also remember that in the US police killed 1329 people in 2023 (https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/4413518-police-killings-record-2023/). Situations in which police need to be called lead to higher risk of death.
Like so many things now, the potential danger door adornments can truly cause harm to others. But there is, as always, issues of free speech and a purpose of a university to promote alternative views and discussion of them. That tension seems to have no easy solution – hence the knee jerk reaction to either permit everything or nothing, rather than grappling with the difficult issue of what expressions are permitted and which are not. These days that is the third rail of university discussion, so I understand administrators avoiding it by passing extreme policies. But it is a cowardly way to deal with it. If you want to be a university administrator then I think you should have to deal with these difficult situations and not attempt to avoid them by simply banning all adornment of doors (a strategy also not likely to be successful).
I think banning adornment of doors is more a part of a long history of time-place-manner restrictions. A year ago or so some Stanford law students tried to shout down what they considered to be an offensive speaker. https://www.popehat.com/ did a series of discussions about how the students were free to protest quietly in the hall outside the lecture or loudly on other more public campus locations but that it was a normal restriction on free speech to not allow people into a meeting room where a lecture was being given if they would be disruptive of the lecture.
To me this is a similar kind of restriction. You can’t put stuff in a place that people are incapable of avoiding because *they reside there*. There’s an expectation of having some access to your own residence free of close-in protest. For example people were protesting outside I think Kavanaugh’s house, but they had to be on the opposite side of the street? I remember something like that.
I think protests which are public and not targeting specific people or targeting political pressure on them rather than the threat of potential physical violence are all legitimate. Protest statements about me and people like me, particularly condoning violence against people like me, and placed on the door across a 6 foot wide hall from the entrance to my house seems unacceptable.
Daniel:
It sounds like a new policy to me. Recall that Barnard already had a rulebook which included a Community Standards section which points to their official Policy against Discrimination and Harassment, which I think would already cover your case of “Protest statements about me and people like me, particularly condoning violence against people like me, and placed on the door across a 6 foot wide hall from the entrance to my house.”
Come on, Daniel. It’s not that “Protest statements about me and people like me, particularly condoning violence against people like me, and placed on the door across a 6 foot wide hall from the entrance to my house” was acceptable under prior policies. The alternatives are not the binary “anything goes on doors” and “nothing can be on doors,” but rather that the dorm is a community of people who can express themselves subject to some community standards. Uncharacteristically for you, you’re adopting rigid rules (like NHST and p-values) rather than application based on the dynamics of the place.
Many good thoughts! May I add two thoughts:
1. From a legal and ethical perspective, it makes a big difference whether we consider the outside of a dormitory door to be public ground (like a street lamp) or private ground. If it is a public space, the university’s commitment to neutrality may outweigh the individual’s interest in ‘enhancing’ the public space with a message. If the outside of the door is private space, it is similar to the lawn signs described by Clyde Schechter. In an earlier comment, I considered the door to be public space – prohibiting messages in certain sensitive public areas is a minor infringement of rights. But if the outside of the door is actually private space, it would be a major infringement of the tenants’ right to express themselves in their homes. I am not a lawyer, so I am not sure which case applies.
2. If I were to make a suggestion, I would make the ‘no decoration rule’ a temporary rule. I would argue: ‘At the moment, the right to express oneself freely through door decorations is being abused too often and the limits are being tested too often. Therefore, all door decorations will be banned for the next two months. We stand by the principle of free expression and look forward to a return to courteous debate in the halls of our dormitories.’ A temporary restriction would be an olive branch to people who feel that the violation of their right to free expression is a big deal. It would also be easy to understand and enforce. An expiry date could even be added later, now that the rule is in place! Parents use temporary restrictions all the time (‘No sweets for you today!’), but oddly enough they seem far less popular at an institutional level.
Raghu, I’m not defending this specific policy, just saying that it’s not clearly wrong in the way that Andrew seems to think it is. Because it’s a time-place-and-manner restriction that is at least in the vicinity of an appropriate type (ie. regarding protecting people from being forced to confront confrontational messages at their place of residence where they are unable to escape it).
I think this policy could be fine in the case where escalating confrontation and counter confrontation seem to be occurring. As I say, I have no information regarding the actual situation at Barnard.
I’m willing to entertain the idea that the door restriction could prevent a riot that would lead to people getting killed. Someone posts something on their door, someone else takes offense, they get into a fight, someone rips off the offensive poster or flag, someone else hits them, suddenly you’ve got a riot like the one at the end of Do The Right Thing. Could happen, somewhere sometime.
But that’s true of _any_ ‘speech’ (very broadly defined) that some people find offensive. Someone cuts you off in the car, you give them the finger, and they pull out a gun and shoot you. This is America, shit like that happens every day. Our solution is not, and should not be, stopping people from expressing their opinions.
As is often the case I find Dale to be the voice of reason here. Yes, there are some things that someone could put on their door that would cross the line, being judged too disturbing or hateful or threatening to be tolerated, especially in a dormitory. It doesn’t have to be a free-for-all. But the bar should be set pretty high and the administration should do the hard work of deciding borderline cases one at a time. Saying you can’t hang your favorite Escher print on your door, because that’s a slippery slope that will lead to people posting swastikas, is indeed stupid.
Whenever college administrators use the word “safe”, they should specify what, exactly, students should be safe from.
Peter:
I assume that the administrators’ goal is to be safe from bad publicity. In this case, it seems to have backfired!
The thing college administrators fear most is student suicide.
I suspect that that fear drives much of their willingness to support “safe” this and “safe” that.
Not that said fear is misplaced, wrong, or problematic in any way. But it can be seriously intense. If you are an undergrad, even slightly hinting at suicidal thoughts can get you packed off to the nearest psychiatric care facility. (I was a graduate resident in an undergrad dorm for a year, and this message from administration came through loud and clear.)
Surely some enterprising student will cover their door in something that is an image…..of another door: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/star-trek-tng-corridor-door-cover–458733912040831463/
Would this violate the policy?
+1 Recursion, as in
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recursion
“Recursion is sometimes used humorously in computer science, programming, philosophy, or mathematics textbooks, generally by giving a circular definition or self-reference, in which the putative recursive step does not get closer to a base case, but instead leads to an infinite regress. It is not unusual for such books to include a joke entry in their glossary along the lines of:
Recursion, see Recursion.”
To iterate is human, to recurse divine.
If you don’t understand this definition, go back to the top and read it again.
There is what appears to be a coordinated campaign to get alumni to pressure Ivy (and similar) institutions to restrict speech under the pretend moniker of “free speech”. Search for “$IVY free speech alliance”, you’ll find them. The instances that I’m familiar with are pushing Rufo-flavored intolerance while pretending to be for free speech.