Shoemaker Square lies at the heart of the University of Southern Mississippi’s Hattiesburg campus, between Cook Library and the Thad Cochran Center, two of the buildings on campus that students frequent the most. The brick-paved courtyard, through which much of USM’s student body passes every day, is the institution’s designated “free-speech zone” where anyone from the Hattiesburg community can come to promote or protest whatever cause they are passionate about. Over the years, United Campus Workers, various student groups, and even members of the satirical “Birds Aren’t Real’ Movement have held demonstrations on Shoemaker Square.
Friends CJ Clark and Gia Vainisi passed through Shoemaker Square almost every day of their freshman year. Midday on Tuesdays, in the hour that the university pauses operations for its mandated lunch break, these two students and many others attending USM at the time began to see a recurring group of familiar figures: a family of evangelical protestors who—while holding signs that displayed anti-LGBTQ+ slogans and depicted images of what were allegedly aborted fetuses—preached to students about how they would soon go to hell if they would not repent.
Like many students who attended USM in 2022, Clark and Vainisi, who both identify as non-binary members of the LGBTQ+ community, felt harassed by these protestors. When Clark was 17, they unknowingly became pregnant and subsequently miscarried—a trauma that the graphic images on these protestors’ signs immediately evoked. Vainisi, who said they grew up in an accepting household, feared for other queer students who were not allowed the freedom they were in expressing their gender and sexuality.
“If you grew up hearing those slurs and the stuff they would shout and you’re finally comfortable with yourself, just hearing that can shut you down again,” Vainisi said.
Clark and Vainisi both tried to open dialogue with these protestors on several occasions. In one instance, Clark approached the protestors and told them about their miscarriage and how the image could be potentially damaging for other students who have been through similar situations. Clark claimed that the protestors were unwilling to constructively communicate with them.
“They told me that it was my fault that I didn’t pray enough, that I was going to hell for allowing a miscarriage that I had no control over to happen,” Clark said. “It made me feel so disgusted and, honestly, disgusted at the university for allowing people like this to just be harassing us like that.”
What then should universities do about speakers like these, whose speech is vehemently pointed against the identities of students that an institution is meant to represent?
Such is the question that Sam Lim, a USM student pursuing their doctorate in higher education administration, asked during their recent presentation at the 2024 Conference on Higher Education Values, Identity, Belonging, and Purpose. Their presentation titled, “Safe Enough For Whom?: Envisioning Institutional Response Models to Anti-LGBTQIA+ Campus Hate Speech Incidents Grounded in an Ethic of Care,” called upon their experience as a graduate student at Salem State University when their campus had what Lim referred to as a “free-speech crisis.”
“A hateful speaker who had recently won a case at the Supreme Court came to our campus to preach anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, anti-women rhetoric and anti-people-of-color rhetoric,” they said.
This speaker was Chike Uzuegbunam, a former student of Georgia Gwinnett college who sued his alma mater for violating his First-Amendment rights. When his case made it to the Supreme Court of the United States, the justices ruled 8-1 in his favor. Emboldened by his victory, Uzuegbunam visited Salem State University and, as Lim said, “set up weekly for almost a year” in one of the campus’s free-speech zones.
Lim claimed that while Uzuegbunam was visiting Salem State, his speech was highly inflammatory, and he often called upon his religious beliefs to criticize the LGBTQ+ community and other demographics that students on campus fell under. Lim identified the risks that this speaker posed to the student populations he spoke about and coordinated with the university’s general counsel to do what they could to protect student wellbeing.
Their presentation used Lim’s experience as a case study to begin a conversation with other conference attendees on how they should address this pressing issue as future higher-education administrators.
“It was great to hear from scholars and practitioners and scholar-practitioners about their approaches and dilemmas,” Lim said about the conference.
Lim then continued this discussion by sharing how they addressed this situation at Salem State University. During this “free-speech crisis,” Lim was the inaugural LGBTQIA+ administrator for the university’s Center for Justice and Liberation, a center that the then-master’s student helped to found. In this administrative role, Lim organized events to display student solidarity against Uzuegbunam’s messages. These events were ones where the queer community came together to celebrate the differences that this speaker spoke against.
“We would host queer poetry readings and connect students to the LGBTQIA+ student group on campus in a separate location from where the hateful speech was happening,” Lim said. “We would also set up processing spaces in the center for folks who wanted to just come to the center while the hateful speech was happening to just hang out in the LGBTQIA+ resource space. I was really grateful to be able to use my voice and advocacy for students.”
Making Campus a More Positive Place
Sam Lim obtained their bachelor’s degree in French language from the University of Missouri in Kansas City. After college, Sam spent two years teaching in Atlanta, Ga., at Carver STEAM Academy through Teach For America, a national organization with the mission of bringing equitable education to high-need areas. Teach For America takes promising teachers who are trained in supporting marginalized students and assigns them to short-staffed and underfunded schools across the country.
“They believe that all students can achieve, and one day they hope—through their work and through their collaborations—that all students can have access to a quality education,” Lim said of the nonprofit.
After their time with Teach For America, Lim went on to earn their master’s degree in higher education and student affairs at Salem State University. All of Lim’s work focuses on their goal of becoming a scholar-practitioner who can make their campus a more positive place for all students. Lim’s professional aspirations take inspiration from their own negative college experiences.
“I faced a lot of systemic barriers and personal issues, so I wanted to go into the field as a practitioner and eventually a scholar-practitioner to help solve these sorts of issues,” they said.
With the First Amendment protecting the freedom of speech for Americans, even in cases where the speech in question is offensive to whom it is directed, college students often find themselves face-to-face with speakers whose values and beliefs directly conflict with their identities—often from far-right speakers who focus on identity-based issues. On top of this, notable far-right speakers touring college campuses in recent years like Milo Yanninopoulos, Tomi Lahren and Ben Shapiro have seemingly leaned into the provocative nature of their views to “trigger” dissenting audiences.
Dr. Danny Shaha, Penn State’s assistant vice president of student affairs and a visiting professor at USM who teaches Lim in a class on the First Amendment, noted that the students within these marginalized groups are the most vulnerable to this sort of incendiary speech.
“Oftentimes the students or the communities that are most vulnerable or most impacted are, no surprise, underrepresented, vulnerable populations,” Shaha said.
Lim’s dissertation research examines the consequences of speakers like these, specifically the effect they have on LGBTQ+ students and how higher-education administration can balance the principle of free speech with student welfare. They believe that the best avenue for preventing psychological trauma among affected students is through campus education and mental-health support.
“Institutionally, we have to find ways to inclusively and equitably educate students on the First Amendment and create holistic support resources for students who have been negatively impacted by hateful speech,” Lim said. “The idea of traumatization and retraumatization through speech is a real, documented thing.”
Lim and many other First Amendment scholars do not believe that campuses should bar speakers from appearing on campuses simply because students find offense in the content of their speech. Public universities have a federal obligation to uphold the First Amendment, and censoring a speaker based on the content of their speech would go against this since, as Lim observed, “the First Amendment has zero consideration for whether we’re offended by speech.”
“That’s something that as a younger practitioner, as someone who’s emerging in the academic space, I’ve had to accept that. Like, as a trans, non-binary person, I’ve had to wrestle with that,” Lim said.
That is not to say that the public university is a no-holds-barred public forum where any and all speech is on the table; legal and academic interpretations of the First Amendment do allow universities to bar speech that threatens, incites violence, or is in violation of Titles VI and IX. Speech that is simply offensive fails to meet this stringent criteria.
To preserve student wellbeing and to encourage student growth in the face of adversity, Lim believes that Student Affairs and the greater university body should empower students to protest and assemble alongside controversial speakers.
“What we can think about is the ways in which we advocate for students to use their voices,” Lim said. “How do we counter hateful speech? Through more speech.”
Dr. Shaha, who was recently a fellow for the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement, said that during this year-long fellowship, he learned that it is not only students who should use their voices, but faculty as well.
“One of the primary learnings from that (fellowship) was communication, communication, communication—talk to the student community, engage with the community before you’re even talking about a potential speaker coming on,” Shaha said.
If the administration intentionally engages with their student communities before a controversial speaker comes to campus and works with students to plan an appropriate student-body response (whether that is through a protest, through community-building events like those at Salem State, or through any other number of potential responses), students can be empowered to face adversity like this head-on. Penn State’s assistant vice president of student affairs believes that this growth is integral to the college experience.
“Part of Student Affairs’ goal is to help students develop skills and abilities to help them be successful citizens. Part of that is developing resiliency skills, and learning how to respond to incidents that are offensive,” Shaha said. “If we don’t help you prepare for how to respond to, manage, and then move forward from an offense that you’ve experienced, then we’re not doing our full jobs.”
The Next Generation of Queer Scholars
Now, Lim virtually attends the University of Southern Mississippi and is pursuing a doctorate in higher education administration. As a future academic administrator who is openly a member of the LGBTQ+ community, Lim believes that having a faculty body that is representative of a university’s students is important for dissuading assumptions that potential students may make about an academic space. Such was their experience when first considering the doctoral program at USM.
“Southern Miss is a place for innovation,” Lim said. “A lot of people assume because it is in Mississippi you can’t do queer research here. I was afraid of that. I almost didn’t apply. But because of the scholars and faculty here, I felt very willing to take that jump, and it was extremely successful, and I have grown so much.”
Lim and several of their mentors at USM are members of the American College Personnel Association, a nationwide organization that aims to promote inclusivity and justice in the realm of higher education through advocacy and scholarship. Lim’s academic advisor, Dr. Kaity Prieto, is the scholar in residence for ACPA’s Coalition for Sexuality and Gender Identities. Dr. Andrew Herridge, who has advised Lim on their research in the past, is also involved in the Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals.
“They are really a prime example of two scholars who are openly out and who believe in developing the next generation of queer scholars,” Lim says.
The doctoral student’s anxieties about attending a school in Mississippi were not without cause. Mississippi has a long history of conservative, identity-based legislation that infringes on the rights of transgender individuals, perhaps culminating with Gov. Tate Reeves’ recently signed a law that restricts people from using a bathroom, locker room or dormitory that does not correspond with their biological sex on university campuses—even in cases where their bodies have been altered through surgery or hormones.
Scholars such as Lim, their mentors and their colleagues believe that universities have the ability to preserve the mental health of students in minority groups so that they feel safe in spite of an increasingly inflammatory political environment. While public institutions of higher education may not have the power to make hate disappear, Lim argues that they have an obligation to support students and to empower them to fight for themselves in the face of adversity and bigotry.
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