Vanessa Guillen and the Ghosts of Sanctuary Campus: On the Schoeller Affair, Campus Protest and ‘Free Speech’

BY RACHEL IDA BUFF

Last week, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee students organized a Peaceful Protest Against Professor Betsey Schoeller. On a warm summer evening, the event drew about 250 people, most of them young, many of them people of color. Most wore masks and stood in small clusters around Spaights Plaza, a gathering place in the center of campus. Participants made signs and chalked the campus with slogans such as “Justice for Vanessa” and “Fire Betsey.”

The outcry around Dr. Schoeller’s remarks, detailed below, is indication of a growing chasm between self-righteous calls for “civility” and “free speech” and the resistant voices of protest, by mostly young people and people of color. There’s a way in which this conflict can be simplified: between a professor who spoke in ways that seemed to denigrate the murder of Private Specialist Vanessa Guillen, and the students who took offense at her words. This version of the conflict tends to lean on Dr. Schoeller’s rights to academic freedom and free speech. At worst, it tends to characterize students as the same reactive “snowflakes” Schoeller satirized—or didn’t, depending on your reading of it—in her post.

A recent letter published in Harper’s Magazine pits the forces of “democratic inclusion” against a “culture of intolerance,” cautioning against the ‘moral attitudes and political commitments” that may diminish “open debate.” It’s quite an act of hubris to scold an entire movement for the act of protest; it claims the higher ground and dismisses the many expressions of resistance because of their tone and comportment. But access to the rights of free speech is and has always been uneven: some people have to raise their voices to be heard; others have platforms in magazines like Harper’s.

In the case of the protests against Dr. Schoeller, such scoldings miss the point entirely. Constructing the issue as a conflict between supposedly uncivil protesters and Dr. Schoeller’s rights winds up obscuring the name of Vanessa Guillen: a young woman of color, murdered by white supremacist, militarist rape culture. At UWM, the “access campus” of the UW System, many of our students are veterans and people of color; many are also survivors of sexual assault. Many have financial access to a university education only as a result of their military service. The circumstances of Vanessa Guillen’s life are familiar to them. Their stakes in her death and its representation are high.

On July 3, Dr. Schoeller, a Senior Lecturer at UWM, posted a comment on a “Veteran Humor” Facebook thread about the murder of Private Specialist Vanessa Guillen. She wrote: “You guys are kidding, right? Sexual harassment is the price of admission for women into the good ole boy club. If you’re gonna cry like a snowflake about it, you’re gonna pay the price.”

A firestorm ensued. Emily Cruz, a UWM student, started a petition calling for Dr. Schoeller’s “termination,” which quickly garnered over 150,000 signatures (at this writing). In the petition Cruz explained:

As a woman, and a student at UWM I feel unsafe knowing that we have professors who think the sexual assault of women serving in the military is justified. UW–Milwaukee claims to care about the safety of their students, therefore we demand and are holding UWM accountable to take action against Professor Betsy Schoeller.

Subsequently, Dr. Schoeller published a statement in which she apologized and attempted to clarify, explaining that her initial post intended to criticize the “culture of sexual harassment and misogyny” in the military.

The UWM administration responded to the controversy by expressing sorrow about Guillen’s death and emphasizing the professor’s right to free speech: “There are legal reasons why UWM cannot fire Ms. Schoeller for her social media postings, as some have demanded. The rights granted by the First Amendment are absolute. UWM cannot regulate the private speech of its employees.”

Though incendiary to many, Dr. Schoeller’s speech is, in fact, protected, The AAUP’s Statement on Extramural Utterances protects the free speech rights of faculty off campus. Provocative social media posts are not grounds for dismissal. “Virtual mobs” have often called for the dismissal of progressive faculty, particularly around questions of race and justice, as in the cases of Steven Salaita, Johnny Williams, George Cicarello-Maher, and Joy Williams.

The UWM administration did the right thing by defending Dr. Schoeller. But by emphasizing what she said and her right to say it, their position and that of others defending her right to free speech elide the long history of inattention and neglect that UWM students like Cruz highlight.

The protest at UWM commenced by honoring Vanessa Guillen with a silence of nine minutes. Referencing as it does the agonizing death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis Police, these nine minutes also invoke the loss of many lives of young people of color.

After the rally on campus, protesters marched through the neighborhood around UWM. One of the chants was “I can’t breathe.” Emanating from protests against the murders of Eric Garner and George Floyd, this phrase has become an iconic part of contemporary Black Lives protests. It indicts a white supremacist regime that murders Black people and other people of color, that literally cannot stand to allow them to breathe.

In context of the protest at UWM, the phrase “I can’t breathe” also describes the generational suffocation taking place on campuses across the country. Austerity regimes decimate colleges and universities, resulting in soaring tuition costs and life-crippling levels of student debt. At the same time that pubic policies lay waste to higher education, draconian regimes of immigration restriction target immigrant students. The recently announced federal policy denying visas to international students is part of a long-term war on students, foreign-born and students of color in particular.

At UWM, a two-year campaign for Sanctuary Campus brought students and faculty together to ask the administration to adopt policies to create affirmative policies to shelter undocumented students. A student group, Young People’s Resistance Committee, developed a resolution asking the administration to affirm and enhance the campus’ “guiding values” on behalf of the many students, faculty and staff who are members of groups that have already been targeted for harassment and hate crimes and who fear they may be subject to repressive regulations, deportation, or forced registration: immigrants and international students, Muslims, Jews, LGBTQ people, people of color. UWM’s AAUP chapter signed on and supported this resolution.

After a two-year campaign that included a task force empaneled by the administration to look into the proposed resolution, few of the aspects of the resolution were adopted. When students showed up at the Faculty Senate to protest this lack of action, campus police were dispatched to present a show of force at the senate meeting.

Perhaps if the administration had affirmed more of the demands of student activists, there would have been more channels active to deal with the hurt and outrage generated by Schoeller’s words, intended or otherwise. As it stands, one instructor is left to contend with a long history of untended grievance.

I don’t believe Dr. Schoeller should be dismissed from her teaching position because of her comments, however injudicious they were. But, at the same time, we ignore the demands of student protesters at our collective peril. As recent graduate and co-organizer of the UWM march, Margarita Garcia-Rojas commented:

I think the university really needs to take into account the concern of its students and how they feel. This is not people being sensitive, this is a lot of trauma that people are processing. So, UWM and the higher-ups should take that into account.

The morning after the protests, all the signs posted around campus, all the elaborate chalk art, were gone. It appears the university was attentive, after all: not to the eloquent demands articulated by its students and their allies, but to the disturbance caused by their very presence on campus.

8 thoughts on “Vanessa Guillen and the Ghosts of Sanctuary Campus: On the Schoeller Affair, Campus Protest and ‘Free Speech’

  1. It’s hard for me to see what the administration did wrong in this particular case. Obviously, Schoeller should not be fired (whether she was misunderstood or not). When a protest is held with one goal, to fire Schoeller, then it should be ignored. What we need to do is intervene earlier with protesters to explain (as this essay does) why firing controversial professors is a bad idea, and to encourage them to develop a broader, better set of demands than can put pressure on the administration to enact reforms.

  2. John, the point is that the administration, by ignoring the past five years of demands from students, created the situation for rage at Dr. Schoeller. They did right to defend her position, but they had a role in creating the preconditions for righteous student rage at their longstanding concerns not being heard. Does that make sense?

  3. I appreciate this post very much. We are at an important turning point, it seems to me. And absolutist free speech positions as a way to dismiss protests designed to further equality and justice are no longer cutting it among many of the younger generation (and a few from mine as well [I’m 50]). When free speech is weaponized by forces that are insensitive to different historical traumas/histories, at best, and hostile to the acknowledging of those traumas/histories, at worse, we need some new work from AAUP on free speech and academic freedom. You are right, Rachel, in my opinion, to want to give full voice to where the protest was coming from.

  4. Why not fire the students? Whose free speech is free? The writer otherwise states that “The AAUP’s Statement on Extramural Utterances protects the free speech rights of faculty off campus.” That is surely reassuring: not only does the AAUP have your back on speech, but you can also “utter.” Does that include, “ruminate,” “harp,” grumble,” “gesture,” “imply,” “mumble,” “signal,” or even “comment?” Leave it to a trade union bureaucracy to come up with an effective ‘Committee on Utterances.’ They must report to the Ministry of Thinking (faculty in any dispute,y need a good lawyer; forget the AAUP; like most unions, they are all about collecting dues, lining their leader’s pockets, and the perpetuation and growth of their corporation. The put out wonderful memo after memo; statement after statement, but they mean little, and have no enforcement power; its busy make work for bureaucrats. Get a lawyer instead, and learn how to fight on your own; you are ultimately on your own anyway).

    She then asserts in an interesting co-mingling of issues, that “Austerity regimes decimate colleges and universities, resulting in soaring tuition costs and life-crippling levels of student debt.” No, that’s not the cause: run-away university fixed costs are, especially out-of-control labor costs, corporate debt and uncontrolled variable expenses, budgeting and lack of structured oversight.

    She goes on:

    “At the same time that pubic policies lay waste to higher education, draconian regimes of immigration restriction target immigrant students. The recently announced federal policy denying visas to international students is part of a long-term war on students, foreign-born and students of color in particular.”

    That is rather inaccurate: my kids, all at different major universities, along with their friends and some professors, tell me (and I’ve seen invariably myself) that Chinese students, for example, are not “immigrants.” They are visiting or foreign or exchange students (as to their proper classification by the university; there is no “immigrant” student status). They live in separate dorms; speak almost exclusively in Chinese; do not co-mingle socially with US students; they live literally like a foreign invading army that sets up its own closed compound and patrols the streets; they buy exotic sports cars, flash gold watches, wear expensive designer clothes, and when the semester or degree ends, they pack their Louis Vuitton suitcases, pull up their tent stakes and head immediately back to China; a few stay in the US and take graduate research positions to further penetrate US IP. They are here to appropriate industrial, scientific, economic and cultural information, methods, programs and standards; spend their parent’s or their government’s money, and then fly off. They laugh at US politics and the general ignorance of the university community as to their purpose and objectives. Surely some are not of this character, but they are in the distribution thin tail.

    This all goes back to a general faculty belief that everything else, and everyone else, are to blame for whatever problems exist on campus, or by extension, their society. They rarely take a hard look at their own culpability. This of course applies to university administration, perhaps the ultimate source of higher education troubles. .

    Regards, ’96, The University of Chicago

  5. What gets me in this particular case is how absolutely Schoeller’s comment was misunderstood. Schoeller’s comment is a bitter acknowledgement of the prevalence of sexual harassment in the military. I do not believe that her comment was injudicious. She said, basically, that women in the military are subjected to constant sexual harassment, and that women who complain are punished, murdered in this case. It is so sad that the students did not understand what she said. The sarcasm expresses Schoeller’s anger and sorrow; she’s commenting on a facebook page for veterans– where it’s likely that people express deep feeling indirectly. It’s a shame that the tense, oppositional situation on campus prevented students from understanding that Schoeller stands with them.

  6. At a UWM on-campus conference open to the public, I –a retired scholar with decades of well-received work with several American First Nations– attempted to comment upon a lecture claiming “Indigeneity” needs “Theorizing”. With an audience mostly students, I wanted to point out that American First Nations need economic opportunities untrammeled by paternalism, protection against blatant racism, etc. The conference organizers knew I might say this, because I had urged them to include some realistic discussions of the conditions suffered by our First Nations. When I stood to speak, after raising my hand, the chairperson ran to me, hissed “Shut Up!”, put her hands on my shoulders and pushed me down — a misdemeanor assault. The conference organizer stood close by, smiling, hands by his sides. My efforts to protest this denial of free speech, of academic discourse, have been ignored by the UWM administration, I was punished by the Anthropology Department’s chairman attempting to invalidate my access to UWM facilities, and upon finally asking UWM’s AAUP leaders, including Prof. Buff, to protest for me, I was told that they could do nothing for me because I wasn’t teaching a class, “academic freedom is only for faculty speaking to their classes”. I strongly support efforts to ameliorate the very stressful conditions suffered by most UWM students–I have for years provided free lodging to UWM students first in their families to attend college– but AAUP is supposed to stand up for academic freedom to speak truth as our scholarly work and personal experiences have revealed to us. If Prof. Buff is concerned for AAUP PRINCIPLES as well as students’ difficulties, she could have responded to my messages to her and to UWM’s AAUP chapter, she knows I live only two blocks from her home and four from her office.

  7. It is unfortunate that the national AAUP has become involved in an intentional disinformation campaign targeting a member of the profession for speaking truth to power, for calling out the military for its failure to address a pervasive climate of sexual harassment which led to the heart-breaking death of Vanessa Guillen. The original blog which targeted Dr. Schoeller has been rescinded at the request of the executive committee of the UWM chapter. We can only wonder at the need to keep this issue going. Who benefits?

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