Politics
It was a week filled with hypocrites. But Texas Gov. Greg Abbott came close to winning the crown.
Free speech for me but not for thee!
Photo illustration by Slate. Photos by Susanne Cordeiro/AFP via Getty Images.
This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Some colleges are banning free speech on college campuses. Well, no more. Because I’m about to sign a law that protects free speech on college campuses in Texas. Shouldn’t have to do it. First Amendment guarantees it.”—Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, in a 2019 video and tweet
On Wednesday, the University of Texas at Austin added its name to the top of a lengthy and ignominious list when university president Jay Hartzell called in a mounted, multi-agency show of force to crack down on a student and faculty–led protest on campus. The programming of the protest day included guest speakers, study breaks, and an art workshop. Right around the time of the scheduled (and very menacing-sounding!) 6 p.m. pizza break, Hartzell unleashed not just the Austin Police Department but also Texas state troopers on his own students—one-upping Columbia University president Nemat Shafik in a standard-setting display of excessive retaliation against student demonstrations in a week chock full of it.
The raid at UT resulted in 57 arrests, including of a photojournalist for the local Fox affiliate who spent the night in jail.
The aggressive retribution of university administrations—unleashing police forces on their students, faculty, and department chairs gathering peacefully—has made for a low moment in the history of American education. And while Texas’ sweep was no more petty, tyrannical, dubious, or unnecessary than ones at Emory, Columbia, or USC, it takes the cake because of how annoying Texas politicians have been over the past few years, bleating about a commitment to free speech that they disposed of the instant a few kids voiced discomfort with the ongoing war in Gaza.
So, let’s quickly run down some of the most hypocritical actors in this whole display, and check out their pitiable explanations.
First up is Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, whose shamelessness requires no editorializing. Here’s a famous Greg Abbott tweet from 2019, replete with front-facing video dispatch: “I just signed a law protecting free speech on college campuses,” he brags. Now, here’s Abbott on this week’s particular display of free speech on a Texas campus: Student protesters “belong in jail” and “should be expelled.”
Here’s UT president Jay Hartzell, stating that the justification for the military-infused crackdown on college kids and faculty this week was not the breaking of rules by the student protesters but the expectation that rules would be broken: “The group that led this protest stated it was going to violate Institutional Rules. Our rules matter, and they will be enforced,” Hartzell said.
Usually you have to commit a crime before getting arrested; here, per Hartzell, the crime was the possibility! Suffice to say, this must be a lesser coda to the common refrain of the free speech warrior. I left my travel-sized Constitution at home, but perhaps someone could point me to this famed caveat of the First Amendment.
Finally, here’s a university statement claiming that protests were overrun by outsiders, who made up half of the arrests: “There was significant participation by outside groups present on our campus yesterday. This outside group presence is what we’ve seen from the affiliated national organization’s efforts to disrupt and create disorder.” All of the charges have already been dropped, a good indicator of just how criminal these actions were; UT has since reverted to another constitutional doozy of a solution: The administration has circulated guidance claiming that anyone arrested for trespassing is now barred from campus, even if those charges have been dropped.
Set aside, for a moment, the fact that part of the reason there were “outsiders” arrested on campus was because the police decided to arrest members of another constitutionally protected class, the media. UT itself hosts an annual Free Speech Week in which outside influence is encouraged on campus—and is specifically outlined as protected, provisioned for, and celebrated.
“State law in Texas actually allows members of the public just like our university community to come onto campus and use our common outdoor areas for speech activity,” Amanda Cochran-McCall, the school’s vice president for legal affairs and general counsel, said on a Free Speech Week panel just last year, in 2023. “I think that surprises a lot of students, they show up here and think, ‘who is this random stranger setting up a table talking about this thing I find upsetting?’ But that’s protected by state law.”
It’s been obvious that conservative free speech warriors don’t delight in the exercise of all free speech on campus. But what this quote and the events of this week make crystal clear is that there is a very specific sort of free speech on campus they do delight in.
It’s not the free speech of students that the governor and his jackboots wants to protect, but the free speech of outsiders that offend the pious sensibility of left-wing students. This only works for conservatives as a one-way street, and the Cheshire grin of Cochran-McCall as she says outsiders’ free speech on campus is “protected by state law”—perhaps picturing horrified undergrads having to contend with some real off-putting shit (not off-putting like a protest over the U.S. helping to fund a war that has killed 15,000 children and is starving untold thousands more but … the good kind of off-putting, like, uh, racist stuff)—says it all.
At least some of the other universities that unleashed force on their students have the humility not to host a weeklong parade celebrating a principle they have little interest in abiding by!
Of course, in Texas, as in New York, California, and Georgia, the big guns only get you so far. The very next day, there were more protesters.
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Education
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