Story by Clay B. Morris
Photos by Ronan Brown
Graphic by Liza Park
CHAPEL HILL, N.C.— Lewis Nazarian, a UNC-Chapel Hill student, says he’s been spit on for wearing a pro-life shirt while on his university’s campus.
“I’ve lost friendships,” he said about other UNC students’ reaction to him being pro-life. “And I don’t tell people, because when people find out, they stop being friends with me.”
Nazarian said that on an institutional level, or as it pertains to UNC’s Board of Trustees and the UNC system’s Board of Governors, both of which are largely conservative, there is no issue with students having diverse viewpoints.
On a peer-to-peer level, he feels the opposite is true.
“I think that there’s a lot of scenarios where people with certain views do not feel comfortable speaking their minds on issues—even in class,” Nazarian said about students sharing conservative views at UNC.
However, recent developments surrounding free speech policy at the university reveal conflicting conclusions about the state of dialogue at UNC and the validity of decisions made to stop conservative students from self-censoring.
In July, following the presentation of the results of a survey on student expression across the UNC system, UNC’s Board of Trustees passed two resolutions related to free speech on UNC campuses. In the spring of 2022, Frank Hill, a conservative opinion columnist and UNC alum, helped found a non-profit, the UNC Alumni Free Speech Alliance, dedicated to preserving viewpoint diversity at Chapel Hill. And in September, UNC’s faculty council passed a resolution to protect faculty’s First Amendment rights.
But despite this influx of free speech policy: few are quick to say UNC is in a dialogue crisis.
“This is something that people have been talking about for 20, 25 years,” Hill said. “Things that make it to the public that are probably more visible are when people are invited to campus and disinvited to come for whatever reason, mostly on the conservative side lately.”
Hill cited protests surrounding former congressman Tom Tancredo coming to speak at UNC in April 2009 and April 2010, as well as the May 2021 vandalization of distribution boxes for the Carolina Review, a student-run conservative newspaper, as the most recent examples of conservative voices receiving backlash at UNC. The Carolina Review did not respond to requests for comment for this article.
Similarly, Jonathan Sauls, senior associate vice chancellor of student success and administration at UNC-Chapel Hill, said the situation is not more dire than usual, but that there has been more curiosity about free speech at UNC in recent years.
“I think we are of course in an era where there is far more opportunity to express themselves in a variety of media,” Sauls said. “That, I think, has added some new flavor to the discussion, but I don’t think I would necessarily characterize it as ‘better’ or ‘worse.’”
Hill said there was no particular impetus in the past few years for starting the UNC chapter of the Alumni Free Speech Alliance recently (there are also chapters at other universities around the nation), but that he’s simply concerned about civil discourse. He referred to David Duke, former grand wizard of Ku Klux Klan, not being allowed to speak at UNC during his time at UNC in the 1970s, as well as communists being barred from speaking on campus before he enrolled.
Julia Clark, president of UNC’s Black Student Movement, said she doesn’t think the recent changes and new group have anything to do with free speech. Instead, she said, conservatives are becoming fearful of being unable to express views others have labeled as harmful.
“I think the issue is that they can no longer say offensive statements and offensive phrases without pushback,” Clark said. “I believe that this discourse about free speech amongst conservatives is a last ditch effort to preserve their power in a space that is moving away from their political rhetoric.”
Fear versus reality
The survey on student expression presented to UNC’s Board of Trustees by four UNC system professors had a 7.9% response rate across the eight UNC system schools surveyed. Students with conservative views are more concerned with how they will be perceived by their peers than faculty, according to the survey.
Cho Nikoi, a fellow at UNC’s program for public discourse, said that though she would never deny the validity of self-censorship, the research connected to the survey didn’t seem particularly sound to her.
“I don’t think that people are acting from a place of empirical evidence that this is what will happen if they say something,” Nikoi said. “No one goes to some sort of diversity board that they don’t even know how to get into contact with about someone being pro-life in class. The worst thing they do is go to their friends after class and say ‘Oh, this person said this really annoying thing in class today.’”
To Nikoi, those who claim that they cannot safely share conservative viewpoints on campus for fear of retaliation are diluting how serious the consequences of sharing unpopular viewpoints has been in the past for those at UNC and beyond.
Recently, a student who writes for The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at UNC, wrote an opinion column that was pro-Palestine and received death threats for the views shared in the editorial. The harassment was so intense that the DTH decided to unpublish the column.
“You being scared that people aren’t going to like you is different than people reporting you to potential employers, people sending you death threats and people actually harming you,” Nikoi said. “It’s not the same.”
Mark McNeilly, one of the authors of the survey, disagrees, and says that students and faculty that self-censor do so based off of the consequences others have faced for sharing specific views.
“The key question is: is self-censorship happening to such an extent that it negatively affects the conversation in the classroom,” McNeilly said. “And I mean if you go look at the data of how liberals perceive conservatives, you know, some 70% perceive them as either racist or sexist. Why would you out yourself as conservative?”
Nazarian said he’s never been told to censor himself in a classroom, but that he does so anyway because of particular experiences he’s had outside of the classroom, such as being told he “hated women” when canvassing for Students for Life at UNC.
Nikoi said she feels the discourse space across the nation is often very white and that that should be seen as a potential motivating factor in some assertions of stigmatization related to viewpoints.
“I don’t think it’s necessarily limited to white people, in theory, but if you look at the people who are most vocal and feel most affected by it: they are white conservatives,” Nikoi said. “Unless you’re poor, unless they are other unprotected categories, there is this need to make your conservative-ness your marginalization.”
Power and the past
Frank Hill said those who would consider UNC to be institutionally conservative despite a liberal student population are “living in an alternative universe.”
Even despite how controversies such as the system’s handling of Nikole Hannah-Jones’ tenure offer, or decisions made regarding the Confederate statue once on campus have nationally painted the school as conservative, Hill doesn’t think the views of the administration have any impact on the state of free speech at the university.
Molly Worthen, faculty director for the program for public discourse at UNC, thinks there is an ideological difference between the school’s administration and its students, but that that alone isn’t impacting the state of free speech on UNC’s campus.
“The big problem is the complete lack of good faith on both sides, which precludes honest and productive conversation,” Worthen said. “Conservatives in the state assembly can certainly weaken UNC as an institution, and very occasionally they do something extreme like shut down the poverty center, and these attacks on the institution hurt everyone. But these are blunt instruments, rather than tools of strategic control.”
Clark, the Black Student Movement president, said she feels the power of UNC’s administration is too strong to ignore how it disproportionately protects specific groups, while increasing the potential of hazards for minority groups.
“The reality is, conservative students, people who hold conservative views, are not unsafe. They have never been unsafe at this university,” she said. “Because you have the support of the Board of Trustees, you have to support the administration, you have Confederates that hold conservative views coming on campus, fully armed, at least once a month.”
For Clark, UNC’s past is inherently its future, and because of that conservatives’ idea of discourse is very particular.
“Productive discourse in their view is being able to say whatever they want to say, offend whoever they want to offend, and be met with ‘Thank you for sharing,’” she said. “If you say something that is attacking our communities, or any communities that are marginalized: you have to be prepared to be met with pushback.”
To McNeilly, that the university has made many recent changes to its free speech policy is “a new step” away from things it may have done to harm discourse or certain groups in the past, and should be rewarded as such.
“I mean you can either take this as this is a positive step, and something we can leverage to move forward, or you can continue talking about the past,” McNeilly said. “You can’t always look at the past and say it’s a predictor of the future.”
