LGBTQ slurs found at MIT done by students protesting school’s new pro-free speech efforts

‘The point they seem to be making was that they should not have the right to say it’

 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology students behind flyers and chalkings recently found at the school that included slurs against LGBTQ people were protesting the university’s emerging policies in support of free speech.

 

The incident came in the wake of a two-month-old MIT faculty resolution that defends freedom of speech and expression — even speech some find “offensive or injurious.”

 

A Feb. 23 memo from MIT administrators stated flyers posted across campus and some chalking outside a school entrance “contained slurs directly targeting the LBGTQ+ community.”

 

MIT’s bias response team investigated, the memo added, and determined “the messages were put up by students choosing to use extreme speech to call attention to and protest what they see as the implications of” several new pro-free speech policies and efforts at the school.

 

"The chalking and flyers that carried slurs were put up as part of a much larger set of flyers, expressing a wide range of views, many framed in provocative terms. We have been told that these flyers were intended to probe the boundaries of MIT’s commitment to freedom of expression and to determine how this commitment comports with MIT policies, including those on harassment,” stated the memo, written by Dean for Student Life Suzy Nelson and Institute Community and Equity Officer John Dozier.

 

Peter Bonilla, executive director of the MIT Free Speech Alliance, said he couldn’t say for sure whether the students who posted the messages are left-leaning progressives, but added “whatever the content of the messages, whatever was being said, the point they seem to be making was that they should not have the right to say it.”

 

From the little MIT administration has released about the content of the flyers and chalkings, “that kind of protest should be protected under MIT’s policies,” Bonilla told The Fix in a telephone interview Thursday. 

 

He said meeting the legal threshold of unprotected speech categories like incitement, targeted harassment and unlawful threats probably could not be met with flyers and chalkings, that “it’s hard for a message posted in that kind of medium to meet that threshold on its own.”

 

 

Read More Here:  The College Fix