A massive Black Lives Matter banner that’s been hoisted to the entrance to a Stanford University library every fall since 2020 will no longer be installed.
Campus leaders have decided the banner violates the university’s relatively new institutional neutrality policy, established last September.
The black banner states “Know Justice, Know Peace,” with the “no” words in the banner bolded in white. It serves as an advertisement for a permanent exhibit in the library titled “Say Their Names — No More Names,” focused on “the victims of police brutality and racist violence,” the Stanford Daily reported.
But since the exhibit is permanent and the banner, billed as an advertisement for it, goes up every fall, it was thus deemed more of a political statement by the AdHoc Committee on University Speech.
The committee “concluded that the banner would become a violation if it remained up indefinitely, as it would begin to seem less like an advertisement and more like a statement — even if the library exhibit is permanent,” the Stanford Daily reported.
Free speech expert Eugene Volokh, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, told the Daily the decision was the right one:
According to Eugene Volokh, a member of the AdHoc Committee on University Speech, Trump’s attacks on DEI had no influence on the decision reached. “I have seen no evidence that anybody was asking, ‘What would the Trump administration think about this?’” he said.
…Volokh said that if the banner became a permanent installation, it would mean the University was taking a stance on a political issue. Regardless of whether the majority of faculty members and students supported the banner’s message, he believes the institution has a responsibility to remain neutral.
“[The University] is a forum for people to express views,” Volokh said, adding, “but it is not itself something that expresses views.”
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IMAGE: My Stanford Story / YouTube screenshot
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