The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) published an article in mid-January calling on UT Dallas to straighten up its act. College kids had long painted three large boulders there as an outlet for expression, but the administration apparently got squeamish after messages related to the Middle East conflict began to crop up.
FIRE program officer Graham Piro said that campus speech about Israel and Palestine has been quite discordant in recent decades.
“It's always been a divisive topic,” he said. “But it's really sort of gone into overdrive in the past couple of months.”
Whether you're pro-🇮🇱 or pro-🇵🇸, be pro-free speech!
— FIRE (@TheFIREorg) January 22, 2024
Join FIRE in demanding @UT_Dallas restore the campus’s spirit rocks after they were removed because students used them to express their opinions about the Israel-Palestine conflict! ⬇️ https://t.co/m3p2NBvtji
And students really seem to want the rocks back. In a social media poll conducted by UT Dallas’ student-run paper, The Mercury, 92% of respondents disapproved of the choice to ditch the rocks.
Many participants cited the squelching of free speech as a big concern.
“Politics [were] always discussed at the Spirit Rocks,” one person said, according to The Mercury. “In reality, this is a targeted censorship.”
The latest photo on the Instagram account @utdrockwars shows that the stones had been removed from their spot. Commenters decried the absence, with one social media user writing in response: “I hate this.”
Students had adorned the Spirit Rocks with conflict-related art since Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel. Old photos show “FREE PALESTINE” emblazoned on a hulking stone; in another pic, the Star of David shines.
What’s happening at UT Dallas is only one such controversy to erupt throughout academia in recent weeks.
Three university presidents came under fire during a heated congressional hearing last month as they were pressed on whether punishments would be doled out to students who call for the genocide of Jewish people. And in November, FIRE slammed Massachusetts’ Brandeis University for banning its chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine.
A letter from FIRE to UT Dallas on Dec. 1 called on administrators to reinstall the Spirit Rocks. Their removal hampers the university’s culture of free speech and could constitute viewpoint discrimination, according to FIRE.
UT Dallas did not respond to the Observer’s request for comment.
"We think it's important for the university to restore the rocks to their original position and status." – Graham Piro, FIRE
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Since the rocks were installed on campus in 2008, students have marked them as a way to share words of congratulations and support, Piro said. But while the policy governing the spirit stones suggested that they could be used for such announcements, it did not stipulate that they be used only for those purposes.
Students had for years aired other political messages on the rocks, as reported by The Mercury. In 2009, a green stone shouted: “FREE IRAN.” In 2015, a black boulder declared: “#BLACKLIVESMATTER.” In 2020, blue text implored: “VOTE BLUE.”
It appeared that UT Dallas welcomed expression about the Israel-Palestine conflict, at least at first. In an Oct. 16 message, President Richard C. Benson applauded students’ civil discussions on the matter. Before long, though, proclamations such as “Zionism = Nazism” seemed to grate on school leaders.
The university announced the following month that the three rocks had been scrapped.
Piro views that choice as problematic on multiple levels. It sends the message that when political speech offends some on campus, it will be snuffed out.
This conflicts with the First Amendment principle that the answer to unsavory speech is more, positive speech.
“The university was allowing the rocks to be used for other forms of political expression, but it decided that the viewpoints that students were expressing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict were too much and closed down the rocks,” Piro said. “And the university can't be closing a public forum like that in viewpoint discriminatory ways.”
Piro pointed to a similar free speech controversy at the University of Connecticut. Late last year, that school opted to keep its own spirit stones after nearly stopping the tradition because of Israel-Palestine-related tags.
UT Dallas’ silence on the issue is frustrating, Piro said. As of last week, his group still hadn’t received a response.
FIRE wants the administration to instead encourage student speech and is calling on UT Dallas to “do the right thing,” Piro said.
“Clearly, it's harming the free-speech culture on campus,” he added, “and we think it's important for the university to restore the rocks to their original position and status.”
