The Weekly: Is a Flag a Sign?

Plus, sociology is officially cut from Gen Ed in Florida.

Boston University’s policies on free expression are facing scrutiny this week after the university removed a pride flag from a faculty office window. “If you have the privilege of having a window that faces campus, you don’t get the privilege of speaking for the university,” BU’s president Melissa L. Gilliam explained to WBUR. The controversy in this case rests on two questions: is a flag considered a sign? Are things visible in a faculty office assumed to be institutional speech?

The answers to both of these questions are unclear according to BU’s own policies — one of which governs event signs and the other publication distributions. As I explained to The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this week, nowhere in these policies are flags mentioned, nor is it clear that a faculty office is a special place of concern for events or “publication distribution.” The policies are far too ambiguous in this case to be of decisive use here; policies are only effective if they are clear.

A similar free expression controversy is playing out across the Charles River at Harvard. There, the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences revised its signage policy to now allow students, faculty, and staff to mount publicly visible signs in private spaces on campus — like faculty office windows — after two professors hung a “Black Lives Matter” sign across their office windows.

HxA members Jeffrey S. Flier and Steven A. Pinker penned a letter to the editorial board of the Harvard Crimson on Tuesday pointing out that such policies must be viewpoint neutral and enforced (and revised) evenly. In the Harvard case they questioned whether the policy would have been reversed if a “Make America Great Again” sign had been plastered across the faculty office windows. I question whether at BU a U.S. flag would have been interpreted as a sign and promptly removed from sight.

Cases such as these are becoming increasingly controversial at private universities because they are not bound to the same First Amendment speech protections as public institutions. The Chronicle of Higher Education explains that speech and expression “policies are increasingly dictated by college leaders’ efforts to prevent unwanted attention. Under the microscope of big donors, politicians, and trustees, private colleges are growing skittish.”

In these cases, things can get legally complex, as HxA member Nadine Stroseen expounded to The Chronicle:

First Amendment principles can be enforceable even at private colleges, said Nadine Strossen, the former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, through contracts, state statutes, and state constitutional rulings. (For example, California’s Leonard Law codifies the First Amendment at all private colleges.) Beyond that, Strossen said, private institutions are largely free to change their policies as much as they want and as often as they want — as long as they refrain from viewpoint discrimination.

An opinion piece in The Hill this week illuminates the hazy limits of faculty speech and boundaries of academic freedom. Legislation in places like Florida and Indiana have shown how the lines can be drawn differently based on legal interpretation:

We agree that universities must have some authority to evaluate and regulate faculty speech. A professor assigned to teach physics cannot be expected to teach poetry instead. But academic freedom has always rested on a simple premise: experts in their disciplines — not politicians or even administrators — are best qualified to decide the content of teaching and research.

Recent events highlight the dangers. In addition to passing laws dictating curriculum and mandating viewpoint diversity, red state governors and legislatures are increasingly shifting power from faculty to politically appointed governing boards. In Texas, for example, a statute adopted last June gives boards the power to reverse changes to the curriculum and block key academic appointments.

If courts accept the views advanced by Florida and Indiana, legislators could dictate what faculty may say in public university classrooms.

Many universities are now working to codify academic freedom definitions to get in front of potential faculty expression controversies on campus, as I explained a few weeks ago in these pages. Now, the AAUP’s Center for the Defense of Academic Freedom published a report detailing how academic freedom has been written into collective bargaining agreements across U.S. universities. This can serve as a useful resource for universities as they work to embed academic freedom protections in institutional policy.

Debates about the role of faculty expertise and academic freedom also continue to play out in the classroom, especially as questions over whether courses are viewpoint-diverse enough continue to take center stage. “Some of the critiques that conservatives have made about college curricula are sound,” Danielle S. Allen, a political theorist at Harvard, told The Chronicle of Higher Education. “We haven’t taught enough bread-and-butter basics of U.S. history, constitutionalism, and the like. Some of the critiques from Black studies, which require us to expand our horizon of what voices matter, are also sound.”

In this ongoing battle between politicians and the academy, Florida officially removed sociology from Gen Ed across the 12 state public universities on Thursday after weeks of headline-making controversies. Ray Rodrigues, chancellor of the State University System, argued during Thursday’s board meeting that “sociology as a discipline is now social and political advocacy dressed in the regalia of the academy.”

At the federal level, “area studies” and “critical studies” have taken significant funding hits under the second Trump administration, creating uncertainty around the future of these programs, majors, and centers on campuses. Inside Higher Ed this week reports on the historical federal partnership that launched many of these programs decades ago and how that relationship may ultimately be their undoing:

For years, area studies centers were funded through National Resource Center grants as part of Title VI of the Higher Education Act of 1965. Congress partially restored this funding in its most recent budget, but the damage to area studies may be irreversible. The University of Washington, home to one of the nation’s oldest area studies centers, lost $2.5 million in National Resource Center and foreign language grants — half of which went directly to student scholarships — for the 2025–26 academic year. The University of Michigan lost about $3.4 million and the University of Kansas lost $2 million. Western Washington University’s Center for Canadian-American Studies reportedly took a 70 percent hit to its budget after the Title VI funds were pulled.

These cuts — though small compared to STEM fields — represent huge proportions of funding for humanities and social sciences, as a new analysis by the American Enterprise Institute this week shows. As federal cuts occur in these disciplines, the outsized influence of private foundations will play an even bigger role.

What connects a flag in a faculty window to a sociology department in Florida and private disciplinary funding is the same question: who decides what speech belongs where in the academy and on what authority? Until institutions build clearer, viewpoint-neutral policies, these controversies won’t slow down.

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