Des Moines Register. May 30, 2024.
Editorial: University of Iowa sets the First Amendment aside when reacting to protest
Sometimes the First Amendment poses tricky problems. This isn’t one of them.
The University of Iowa is bullying people for trying to exercise their rights under the First Amendment.
When people gather to protest against the government in Iowa, the officials who are being called out can choose from numerous strategies that are fully legal. Often their simplest option is to just ignore protesters who possess no authority and limited leverage. But officials also can regulate the time, place and manner of gatherings, and they can punish anybody who breaks laws.
The utility of those tools makes it all the more vexing when the government chooses instead to overplay its hand, as it appears university police have done in ordering at least a dozen participants in a minor incident just before the end of the school year to never stop moving when on campus (the police call the orders “trespass warnings”).
A lawsuit filed by UI students and employees and others accuses the university police of violating their rights under the First Amendment. University leaders should rescind the trespass warnings and apologize — for several reasons, not least of which is that their current course threatens to waste taxpayer money on a settlement.
Brief protest near Iowa Memorial Union was wholly innocuous
Numerous protests on college campuses have criticized Israel’s conduct in Gaza since Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks. Headlines have focused on aggressive confrontations in a few places between law enforcement and people who camped out or “occupied” college buildings. Setting aside questions of police conduct, those situations — where protesters clearly and defiantly disobeyed generally applicable laws and rules over an extended period — are qualitatively different from what’s happened so far in Iowa.
In Iowa City, on May 6, as witnessed by journalists and various activists, people began to set up tents and other material in Hubbard Park, an open space near Iowa Memorial Union and the Iowa River, for an encampment that had been advertised on social media. Within minutes, officials ordered them to remove their things and leave. They complied.
In the succeeding days, University of Iowa Police officers tracked down at least a dozen people. At least one was pulled out of a final exam, according to a video posted to the social media service X. They handed out the trespass warnings, which say the protesters, for six months, are not allowed on any UI “outdoor spaces unless simply traversing the property.” Attorney Gina Messamer wrote in the lawsuit that this affects getting to school or to work for nine plaintiffs.
Police choose a show of force over a narrowly tailored response
The First Amendment, as a practical matter, requires the government to tread carefully when seeking to restrict speech, gathering and religious rights. The trespass-warning approach is the opposite of careful. As the lawsuit alleges, it’s wildly overbroad and grossly disproportionate to any supposed offense from the aborted encampment. Most importantly, it chills Iowans’ speech without good cause.
Unfortunately, it’s not an isolated mistake. Less than three years ago, the state paid $70,000 to settle claims from five protesters who had been barred from entering the State Capitol in Des Moines after their involvement in an earlier protest that ended in arrests. The settlement also required First Amendment training for Iowa State Patrol troopers.
Leaders of the University of Iowa Police seem to somehow have missed that precedent. They also overlooked the several occasions in recent years in which judges have smacked around UI administrators for trying to stifle conservatives’ political speech on campus.
Where exactly can one protest at the University of Iowa?
The trespass warnings would be a troubling response even if these protesters had disrupted the university’s operations or defied instructions. But they did neither of those things. It is of no consequence that several of the protesters were also charged after a December protest at Kinnick Stadium before reaching a plea agreement. Previous encounters with police don’t invalidate or lessen free speech rights.
A gathering at Hubbard Park might at worst detour pedestrians a couple of hundred feet to a sidewalk as they go to and from Iowa Memorial Union. If free speech isn’t permitted there, where is it allowed at the University of Iowa? It is hard to imagine what government interest was served by this crackdown — unless the interest was appeasing Republican elected officials who had loudly declared that police should respond harshly.
Even with a lawsuit already filed in Johnson County District Court, it’s not too late for the university’s leaders to admit mistakes, apologize and tell protesters they are welcome to exercise their rights on campus. Sometimes the First Amendment poses tricky problems. This isn’t one of them.
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