I used to walk by a storefront preacher who also had a sidewalk routine. He certainly thought I was going to hell in a handbasket but I can’t say I found his message any more offensive than the hundred other ways I was put in my sex-class place every day. In the public square I have the opportunity to dissent. On billboards, not so much.

Oh man. The one thing could get your ass kicked off campus for sure and quick was lighting candles in your room in Parrish Hall. The place had already burned down twice. Deal drugs? No problem until the state police picked you up in West Philly. Be a drunk townie h.s. kid who snuck into a party and drank wayyyyy too much? Get escorted to the phone to call your folks and pay the cleaning bill when you threw up all over the cruiser (I swear I threw that kid out of the party three times before I finally called security to haul his sorry drunk ass away), need a ride to the hospital for emergency appendectomy? Got it covered. But light one fucking candle in the flammable dorm and poof… your ass was gone.

The great thing about my campus is that these guys are rarely permitted to go unchallenged, especially when they start preaching against homosexuality. Baa Ram U. students of all political stripes are just not into hatin’ on the gays, which I think speaks well of their generation.

Genuine conviction calls people to do all manner of things without regard to consequence.

Street preachers go where there is an audience and where the likelihood of being run off is low. The sidewalk is public space regulated by regional government and I suppose whether or not the mayor sends the police after the skinny guy yelling “blessed are the peacemakers” depends on who is complaining. I used to engage in amplified free expression on the public right-of-way and was quite ready to go to court to defend my right to do so (though it never came to that). The time may come when I feel the need to do so again and central to my thinking will certainly be where I can find an audience.

Exercising your first amendment rights in the public square is an important component of retaining those rights. This is, imho, part of what is essential in the Occupy movement. All the grumpy old people telling the occupiers that they need to stop camping and get a message seem to be missing this point. And those street preachers, whether we like their particular message or not, are by claiming them, defending those same rights.

http://www.uab.edu/handbook/f-policies-procedures/f-sidewalk-chalk

http://www.swosu.edu/resources/pubforms/DisplayMedia.aspx?pid=110

(sorry, this opens a word doc and I can’t change that)

Other universities have this sort of sketch-your-design application, too, I just thought you’d like this one since it’s from the libertarian West.

FYI, sidewalk chalk is expressly permitted (and regulated) on most college campuses, making them like city streets – you can deface in the time, place, and manner the authorities permit, such as to impermanently announce a community festival.

I do want to protect university property as a space with free speech and without policing. It’s simply vital.

I just can’t help but marvel that only the people who are of university social status have any access to this. Meanwhile, an entire generation of public K-12 students has been raised with the expectation that having armed cops inside their schools is normal and desirable and even safe.

And seemingly nobody else, anywhere else, has a meaningful right to assembly or speech.

Then again, we are one of the quieter provincial institutions. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a much greater security presence at, say, Nottingham or the London universities.

Also, Historiann’s anecdote about the student arrested for ‘drunk walking’ is frankly disturbing. Unless someone is committing acts of violence, vandalism or serious public disorder, I can’t see how simply being inebriated on campus qualifies as a criminal offence. If such a policy was enforced here, I imagine there’d be at least a hundred arrests every night.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the issue of campus space versus non-campus space, and the ways in which those of us on campuses as well as off-campus see campus space as different from non-campus public space. On the one hand, I take your point that “It’s not okay to beat or spray students or bust them for small drugs or drunk walking. But I’m not sure why the rest of us are supposed to put up with that, either.” On the other, it’s clear that campus space *is* different, in part because it’s dedicated non-commercial space.

For example, at my university on sunny afternoons (which is pretty much every afternoon), we have at least one if not 2 or 3 of the local religious crazies and storefront church pastors standing on boulders in the central plaza preaching to the students, attracting onlookers, and engaging in debates with the passers-by. Because we’re a university, we believe in an open exchange of ideas, so we let them scream and harangue us. I don’t know for sure, but I’m pretty sure that attempting to preach in a mall or in a public space surrounded by commercial development, shops, and businesses would get shut down pretty quickly.

Another argument that people see campus space is different: students regularly use sidewalk chalk to advertise student events. Now off campus, that would be considered vandalism, I’m pretty sure, and the offending chalk would be washed away and the offending chalkers at least ticketed if not arrested.

So, I guess I’m arguing here that people both on- and off-campus recognize that campus space *is* different. These nutty “pastors” come to Baa Ram U. because they recognize that they can preach without incident, and the students chalk the walks because they can. So I understand why most people–students and non-students–have different expectations for sitting on a campus sidewalk (as in the UCD pepper spray incident) versus sitting on a public sidewalk off-campus. Whether or not it’s an appropriate difference is another question, I guess, but I can understand quite well why UCD students felt a proprietary interest in their own campus, and I think the reason that video went viral is that most people recognize that campus-space is just different from non-campus public space.

http://www.salon.com/2011/11/20/the_roots_of_the_uc_davis_pepper_spraying/

Greenwald’s is a fairly cogent explanation of how UC Davis came to be: it’s not unrelated to our wars, and it’s no worse than what’s happening on the street.

He gives a special shoutout to an untenured prof, whose courage your readers may admire.