The shutdown of former New York City Police Commissioner Ray Kelly’s guest lecture by student and community member protesters cemented the events of Oct. 29, 2013 in Brown’s collective memory.
The discourse that followed shook the foundation of the campus, pushing many to reassess and verbally spar over what should define Brown’s character as a university.
One year later, questions about how to remember the Kelly controversy, how it has changed conversation on campus and how the University will adapt in light of the issues it raised continue to divide the Brown community.
Setting the tone
What happened in List 120 that day is a well-documented part of the public record: Various messages shouted toward the stage, followed by a collective statement from the protesters, persisted long enough that the University declared the event over. Kelly had not said more than a couple of sentences.
“The protest itself was a huge mix of emotions. It was angering; it was empowering; it was traumatizing; it was necessary,” recalled Justice Gaines ’16, one of the protesters.
“It was frustrating,” said Valerie Langberg ’14 GS, who attended the lecture. When the protesters yelled, “‘Who in the room would like to hear Ray Kelly speak?’” many people raised their hands, Langberg recalled.
Later that evening, President Christina Paxson sent a letter to the Brown community condemning the protesters’ interruption of the lecture. “Protest is welcome, but protest that infringes on the rights of others is simply unacceptable,” she wrote.
At the time, many others conveyed views similar to Paxson’s. A Herald poll the next week found that 73.2 percent of undergraduates disapproved of the protests inside the auditorium that caused the lecture to be shut down.
The Kelly lecture “was one of my worst experiences at Brown,” said Brandon Taub ’15, who attended the event. “Protesting is a good thing. … But it’s not within their right to force an event to be canceled because they don’t agree with it.”
Others see Paxson’s first response differently.
“It made a hostile environment for students who participated in the protest,” said Dakotah Rice ’16, who initially rejected the lecture’s shutdown. Rice later became a member of the Committee on the Events of October 29, the group tasked with assessing the incident and offering recommendations for the future.
For Gaines, the rest of the day after the protest was “a hell-hole.” On social media, he said, many people who interpreted the incident through the framing of Paxson’s email had a “complete misunderstanding of the reasons, the purpose or exactly what happened.”
Competing narratives create discord
Paxson’s email prompted an ongoing debate about what message to take away from the Ray Kelly affair.
While many acknowledge that issues of race, power and privilege played a role in the protest and remain important topics for discussion, the protesters and their allies assert that these issues must be the focus of dialogue about the controversy.
Others maintain that the lecture’s shutdown could set a dangerous precedent for the way freedom of expression is treated on campus and insist that the University remain vigilant in protecting the right of any person to voice any opinion at Brown.
“Since Oct. 29, I’m a big supporter of freedom of expression on (the) university campus,” Paxson told The Herald. Though she said she is pleased with the discourse on race that has followed the Kelly affair, she still “hope(s) we can get to the point where anyone who’s invited to campus will be allowed to express their ideas as well as be challenged.”
“The real question about the silencing of Kelly is this: Is this going to be a campus in which all groups — student groups, faculty groups and administrative groups — can exercise the right to invite speakers and visitors of their choice, or not?” said Ken Miller ’70 P’02, professor of biology, whose opinions columns in The Herald over the past year have made him a prominent voice against the shutdown.
But some see freedom of speech differently in the context of the protest.
“Shutting people like Ray Kelly down is not necessarily an attack on their freedom of speech, because they already are given the space and the military power to put their ideas into action,” said Eduarda Araujo ’15, one of the protesters.
And the protest aimed to amplify the often-unheard voices of those affected by policies like the stop-and-frisk policing measures pursued by Kelly when he headed the NYPD, several protesters said.
Protesters are also frustrated that a discussion on the importance of freedom of expression must accompany or overtake the discussion on why they protested in the first place, they said.
But some assert that it was the protesters who shifted the focus of dialogue from race-related issues to freedom of expression.
“The way (the protesters) handled (Ray Kelly) coming to campus turned it into a conversation on freedom of speech,” Langberg said.
The protesters are not a homogeneous group. To this day, the protesters and others who believe the University made mistakes in bringing Kelly to Brown still maintain differing opinions on what exactly those mistakes were and whether Kelly should have been invited at all.
The University “brings an officer who was involved in developing a racial profiling policy in New York City and invites a bunch of police officers in Providence. It’s like offering them a workshop on how (they) can justify (their) racist policies,” Araujo said. “That really hurts the city.”
Araujo and other protesters emphasized that the protest was an act of solidarity with Providence residents. She said she supports shutting down events in the future that students view as “harmful to them, to Providence or to the world.”
But for other protesters, shutting down the lecture may not have been the goal of the protest and does not figure into their conception of how activists should handle talks by controversial figures in the future.
Some say the Kelly lecture might have gone on if not for the laudatory way his talk was framed — the title was “Proactive Policing in America’s Biggest City” — and the police officers invited to sit in the first couple rows.
“Disagreeing with ideas wasn’t the point of the protest,” Gaines said. “Ray Kelly was a different story, … because the policies he’s created and the way they were framed disrespected people.”
Paxson said she acknowledges that the University or the Taubman Center for Public Policy and American Institutions, which organized the lecture, “should have pushed back on the title of the talk and the way it was portrayed.”
“We invite someone here — that’s not an endorsement,” she added. “It never is.”
Discipline
The disciplinary process for student protesters who interrupted the lecture has also generated contention and confusion.
On Nov. 6, 2013, Paxson sent an email to the Brown community indicating that the University would decide whether to refer students to the disciplinary process after receiving the first report from the Committee on the Events of October 29 — a shift from administrators’ prior comments.
Paxson sent the committee’s first report to the community Feb. 18, but the entire community did not get word that hearings had been conducted until she sent her response to the committee’s second report this month. The University declined to disclose which students were disciplined and what their punishments were, citing restrictions under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act.
Miller criticized the timing of the University’s decision to refer students to the disciplinary process. Had the University made the decision sooner, “people would have been aware of the fact that the University enforces its rules,” Miller said.
The disciplinary process occurred a few months after the incident and lasted no longer than three days, Gaines said, adding that students were penalized for standing up during the lecture and interrupting Kelly.
Gaines criticized the punishment as one-sided, noting that students who spoke up in the lecture hall to defend Kelly or his right to speak were not punished.
Racial fissures surface
One universally recognized element of the Kelly affair’s impact on campus is the widespread discourse it generated on race — at least in the immediate aftermath.
“What we had done was lay bare the divides that already existed on campus and make it possible for honest transformations to occur,” said Irene Rojas-Carroll ’15, a protester.
In the wake of the event, Duane Barksdale ’17, like many others, at first disapproved of halting the lecture despite personally opposing stop-and-frisk. At the time, he worried anyone outside of Brown would get the impression that “we’re a bunch of liberal students who don’t want to hear people’s opinions,” he recalled.
“Over the course of the past year, I’ve grown to understand both sides of the issue,” he said. “The actual act of him being shouted down started to make more sense to me for people who have been directly affected by stop-and-frisk.”
“It was very important for the campus community as a whole — for those of us who weren’t engaged with this issue — to learn how to be advocates for the protesters rather than be skeptics, which is what I was at first,” said Elena Saltzman ’16.
Despite this, many of the 72.3 percent of students who opposed the halting of the lecture last Nov. 4 still feel that way.
Taub said the incident represents a greater and more problematic phenomenon: “Some views are acceptable on campus while others aren’t, which stands against everything Brown stands for in terms of dialogue and freedom of expression.”
For some protesters, discourse on race proved productive but difficult after the Kelly affair.
“I think it was valuable to have this discourse emerge on campus and to have — for quite a long time — this being discussed,” Araujo said. “At the same time, it brought to the surface a lot of our community’s blind spots — ignorance — regarding race, regarding its role in Providence, its relationship to its own students of color and this very ignorance evidences the fact that we hadn’t been discussing race almost at all.”
“It was striking to see … how many of my classmates — when actually pushed to say something one way or the other — defended structural racism and repression, and/or evaded the issue by making it solely about academic freedom and abstracting away from what the demonstration was really about,” Rojas-Carroll said.
But some students doubt how widespread or enduring the discourse sparked by the Ray Kelly affair has actually been.
“I haven’t noticed people talking about race that much more,” said Sarah Jackson ’16. “Some people just never talk about it. It depends on the group of people. This campus is very self-segregated.”
“I think it was definitely temporary. Personally, I didn’t hear that much about (race) … because the freedom of speech (discussion) was so much more prevalent and in your face,” Langberg said.
Existing inequalities at Brown and beyond
Pursuant to the many discussions community members have had about race since the Kelly affair, the second report compiled by the Committee on the Events of October 29 offered suggestions on how the University can address several related issues, such as faculty diversity and strengthening ties with the Providence community.
Only 4.9 percent of full professors identify as underrepresented minorities in the current academic year, according to data obtained from the Office of Institutional Research. Underrepresented minorities account for 13.4 percent of associate professors and 12.4 percent of assistant professors.
That small proportion can be detrimental to the experience of students of color, said Armani Madison ’16.
A lack of senior administrators of color also poses a problem, Rice said, adding that a diverse administration would more easily facilitate “dynamic reactions” to certain topics.
After some called for diversity to be considered during the search processes for a new provost and dean of the College last year, the University ultimately selected white candidates for both positions.
Diversity was “absolutely” a consideration for both searches, Paxson said. “One of the most important things is to make sure every department, every administrative unit, is thinking about building a strong, diverse pool for every single search they do,” she added.
Regarding members of the wider community — who played a large role in last October’s protest — Paxson wrote in an email to The Herald that in the future “it makes sense to close the event to the public” if “there is good reason to believe that members of the community are planning to disrupt an event.”
“Although I strongly prefer keeping events open to the public,” Paxson added, “Brown is a private university with the right to make events ‘Brown-only.’”
But some protesters criticized the notion that events like the Kelly lecture might be closed to the public in the future.
“That decision highlights the University’s elitism and bitter divide with Providence rather than a real willingness to support, work with and learn with communities on the ground,” Rojas-Carroll wrote in a follow-up email to The Herald. “It’s incredibly insulting, regressive and, frankly, racist.”
U. Hall and students of color
As the disagreement over closing events to the public shows, many of last year’s protesters still harbor a great deal of doubt as to whether the University looks out for the interests they champion.
“I don’t think that the administration has the diversity makeup to be able to adequately tackle these issues,” Madison said, adding that “improving the relationship between students of color and the administration” is “a discussion that we need to have.”
“Universities like Brown, historically, have not had students of color’s backs, nor did they want to,” Araujo said. “Our university only adopted a discourse of diversity … when students actually walked out, occupied buildings, raised hell, basically. So the University is not going to have our backs unless we oblige it to.”
But this perspective on the administration may not represent that of many students of color on campus. A Herald poll conducted last week found that nearly one-third of black students approve of Paxson’s job performance, slightly higher than the percentage who disapprove.
“As an individual student of color, I feel supported more or less,” Jackson said. But, she added, “I’m not sure because I’ve never had to do anything super controversial.”
For some, mistrust of the University as an institution extends to doubt about whether it will follow through with the promises, such as increasing faculty diversity, that Paxson made in her response to the committee’s second report.
Paxson declined the committee’s recommendation to establish an ad hoc committee in charge of oversight for any planned improvements, deciding to rely instead on standing committees such as the Committee on Faculty Equity and Diversity. Paxson is currently in talks with the Faculty Executive Committee on how to improve the CFED so it can serve as the primary watchdog on improvements to faculty diversity in coming years, she said.
In acting on the committee’s recommendations, the University will play a role in molding the next chapter of the Kelly affair’s legacy. But the past year’s chain of actions and reactions indicates that no one stakeholder will shape the rest of the story alone.
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