Free Speech, Law Schools, Racism

At Harvard Law, The Fight To Affix A Poster Is Real

An epic battle of forms would be far more productive for race relations at Harvard Law.

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Reclaim Harvard LawIf you are not familiar with the “Reclaim Harvard Law” movement, let me explain it to you in the quickest and most reductive way possible: pissed-off non-white students have “occupied” the student center for months in protest against systemic racism at the law school.

It’s more complicated than that. And if you care there is a lot of information out there on what they are doing and why. But even if all you know is that non-white students are grouping together in some kind of public way, then you will anticipate that there are some white students who oppose the movement because… well, you basically can’t have three black people standing together on a street corner for 15 minutes before some white person walks by and objects to what they’re doing.

Any protest of this nature was bound to draw strong, negative criticisms from some part of the Harvard Law campus. The protest has been going on since the fall, but I almost only hear about Reclaim Harvard when somebody is bitching about it in my inbox. Today, we have a white student who decided to do something about it. We’ll call him “Wendy” because, like in The Shining, our Wendy has “some very definite ideas about what should be done with the Harvard Law student center.”

Wendy informs us that he has been a “very vocal critic” of Reclaim Harvard, as he feels they impinge on academic freedom. He is also “deeply disturbed” by what he calls the “motivating ideology” of the Reclaim movement: Critical Race Theory. For those scoring at home, that’s: academic freedom = good; critical race theory = deeply disturbing; and cognitive dissonance = depths unknown.

Like all committed opponents, Wendy made a sign. Hold on, let me check that… yes, it’s 2016 and Wendy expressed his displeasure through signage. Okay… anyway, he explains (tipsters sent us a “timeline of events”) that his first set of signs equated Reclaim with Donald Trump “because of their support of censorship.” He posted these signs in the student center, which the Reclaim people have renamed “Belinda Hall” in honor of a slave who later petitioned to be repaid for her years of work for Issac Royall (the slaveholder’s whose seal was, until recently, the crest of Harvard Law School).

The signs were promptly ripped down and Wendy was called into the principal’s office. There, he claims that Dean of Students Marcia Sells told him that the Trump signs might be viewed as offensive, as Jews might view Hitler signs as offensive (it was an analogy, not an equivalency), and anyway, candidate signs could violate Harvard’s 501(c)(3) exemptions.

Hewing closely to the letter, if not the spirit of Dean Sells’s objections, Wendy comes back with another set of signs, this time removing any mention of “Trump,” but keeping with the same theme. The signs are once again taken down, and this time Reclaim informs him that movement has come up with some process for determining which signs can go up in the student center, and that the signs are being taken down because Wendy didn’t go through the process.

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The cycle repeats itself, a number of times. Signs go up, signs come down, Wendy bitches. Wendy makes another sign that includes a reference to Trump, Wendy gets called into the principal’s office for a light reprimand.

On paper, it might read that the Reclaim students are the ones being overly aggressive here. After all, many of them are black and I know how some readers tend to act like everything black people do is showy and scary, while everything white people do is calm and reasonable. But try to visualize what’s going on here. You’ve turned one room, one lounge area, in a giant building big enough to contain all of Yale Law School’s campus, into your “stronghold.” You and your friends are conducting what amounts to a rolling sit-in there. You are trying to make a point, but, as protests go, you’re not really bothering anybody. You are just kind of existing there, in this public space, and by your very existence you are forcing anybody who comes into that space to deal with your issues.

I do that with my desk. I don’t own the building I work in or even my desk at work. But anybody who comes by my desk is going to have to deal with what I want to talk about. Don’t come by Elie’s desk without being prepared to talk about black people or tacos because one of those two things is coming up.

Into that space, Wendy comes by with his little print-outs that say, essentially, “I think you guys are a**holes and should leave this space.” He puts these bon mots on the walls, in the act of free speech, he says. Then he leaves. But then, amazingly, Wendy is the one who gets pissy when he comes back to see that the protesters have exercised their free-speech rights by tearing down the signs plastered all over the place. Who you think the aggressor is depends on your point of view.

Free speech cuts both ways, man. Wendy has every right to put those posters up in the public student center. Reclaim has every right to tear them down. And the HLS administration — beyond preventing electioneering (to the extent they care about that), and making sure nothing threatening is posted — has every right to look the other way.

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But, while I think both sides are entitled to the same rights to free speech, if it were me, I would encourage Reclaim to do a little bit better than merely tearing down Wendy’s posters. Tearing things down is simply not their best argument. It’s not their best protest. You’re not supposed to rip up arguments you don’t like, you are supposed to best them. The world is full of Wendy’s, and you can’t destroy all of the papers they produce. There is no safe space.

Put a different poster on top of Wendy’s. If he comes back and puts one on top of yours, you respond by putting one on top of his. We’re talking about young, would-be lawyers — at the very least, they should be prepared to engage in an epic “battle of the forms.”

As for Wendy, if he really wants to see his posters up, he might just need to sit in “Belinda Hall” and be ready to protect or re-post them. I think that would be good. Having to just sit there in the middle of all those black and brown people for hours and hours, nobody talking to him while he just has to sit there and listen… you never know. He might learn something.

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