Jim Dey: Free-speech protections don't give protesters blank check

May 14—Weather conditions and the academic schedule make for short protest seasons in Illinois.

That's why all the excitement on the University of Illinois campus has come to an end.

Now that the atmosphere is more relaxed, perhaps it's time to reflect on what the issues involving free speech/campus protests really are as they relate to the "time, place and manner" regulations.

That's why former UI College of Law Dean Vikram Amar and University of California-Davis law Professor Alan Brownstein addressed the issue of why campus "encampments" across the country are "not immune from restrictions under the First Amendment" of the U.S. Constitution.

In other words, protesters who take over campus spaces do not have the unfettered right to protest. But where do their rights stop and a university's rights begin?

The issue is not one of violence and nonviolence. Amar and Brownstein stated emphatically that violent activities "are simply not protected expression." But nonviolent protest raises more complicated issues.

Universities have a special obligation, as part of their truth-seeking mission, to permit and encourage freedom of expression and to do so in a content-neutral way.

But what about the encampments, where students take up residence on university property?

One problem universities can't ignore is that the encampments "consume a lot of physical space" and can "make it difficult, if not impossible, for people to get where they need to be."

"The very act of physical obstruction means that others are prevented from getting where they want and need to go," Amar and Brownstein contended.

That's why taking over and/or blocking access to buildings is not considered "an expressive activity free from government prohibition," they said.

They asserted that "noise control is another valid (government) interest" because faculty, students and staff "need peace and quiet to conduct their research and their business."

Even as campus protests continued across the country, abortion protesters in Chicago recently were drawing fire because of the excessive intentional noise they made outside an abortion clinic.

What about the trash these encampments can generate?

Amar and Brownstein said "sanitation" is a "significant regulatory concern" because these encampments "are not generally well-equipped to deal with problems of garbage and human waste" that generate "visual blight and odor pollution" and encourage spread of disease.

Time limits also pose another problem.

When one group permanently occupies a space, another group is blocked from using the same space.

Amar and Brownstein said universities are permitted to apply time limits because a single group cannot be allowed to "exercise dominion over property that belongs to the entire community."

Then there's liability, a university's exposure to lawsuits in the event of "interpersonal problems" that pop up when too many people are in too small a space.

Amar and Brownstein said a university's liability is a "legitimate, indeed significant" interest that cannot be ignored.

Rules, however, are one thing. Real life is quite another.

News reports have described how university officials across the country — some craven and gutless, others resolute and determined — dealt with the varying degrees of protests.

Some allowed protesters to violate the rules with impunity for fear that enforcing them would make the situation worse.

Others took strong initial action, made the rules clear and enforced them, putting the protest problems to an end.

Others took middle-course actions — threatening one day, negotiating the next — spinning like weather vanes in search of a solution to a problem that they were neither prepared for nor had the stomach to confront.

Things worked out relatively well at the UI compared with the worst-case scenario at Columbia University in New York City.

Perhaps that's because the overwhelming majority of UI students, faculty and staff had little interest in the political theater that animated and degraded so many other prestigious colleges and universities.