Why Universities Are Unlikely to Heed Calls for Punishing Students at Rally

Soon after a mob of white nationalists and neo-Nazis gathered on the University of Virginia campus on Friday night, photos of the marchers began to pop up on social media. Observers quickly took on the task of identifying them by name.

Within hours, the images of unmasked protesters with faces lit by tiki-torches would make their way to social media, where internet sleuths would attempt to identify those at the rally.

In some cases, they succeeded.

That’s how the world came to know that one of the marchers was Peter Cvjetanovic, a student at the University of Nevada at Reno, or that another was James Allsup, who attends the Washington State University and was president of its College Republicans chapter until Monday.

Calls for the institutions to expel the students followed.

The identification efforts weren’t always on target. Some users misidentified Kyle P. Quinn, an assistant professor of engineering at the University of Arkansas, as having attended the gathering. He told The New York Times he hadn’t.

Demands for universities to punish or expel students who participated in the rally, though, will probably go unanswered.

“That would be a flagrant violation of the First Amendment,” said Ari Cohn, a lawyer with the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The identification of students who attended the rally, however, does present a challenge for their universities: How do they respond to the vocal corner of the internet that demands punishment of students who appear to support the hateful views of the organizers of the rally?

While public universities can’t unilaterally expel students who attend rallies, they can make statements that broadly condemn viewpoints they find abhorrent.

That happened quickly at Washington State University. After it was made public that Mr. Allsup had marched with the torch-carrying mob in Charlottesville, Va., the university’s president, Kirk H. Schulz, shared several messages on Twitter that condemned racism and Nazi viewpoints without mentioning the student.

“As vile and offensive as we find certain speech and individuals who hold those beliefs, we are committed to wrestling with, challenging, and combating racism and anti-Semitism to become the community WSU must be,” he said in a statement.

Matt Haugen, a spokesman for Washington State, said that because of privacy concerns the university couldn’t say if individual students were under investigation, but he did say Mr. Allsup is a student at the university. He also said people have been sending the university messages through social media, email and phone, and that the university had plans to review the outside correspondence it received in the recent days.

Mr. Allsup told The Daily Evergreen, the student newspaper, that he attended the rally as a member of the media and to denounce racism.

“The university should not be in the business of disavowing what their students do, what their tuition-paying students do in their professional careers,” he said.

And he posted a message on Twitter on Monday saying “leftists” were trying to get him expelled.

Later the same day, he announced he was stepping down as the head of the College Republicans chapter at Washington State.

The University of Nevada at Reno offered a similar response to messages it received about Mr. Cvjetanovic’s presence at the rally. The institution’s president, Marc Johnson, issued a statement acknowledging that one of the university’s students was at the rally while also denouncing racism and white supremacy.

“There will be clashes of beliefs and opinions, but they must be peaceful,” Mr. Johnson said in a statement. “As a community, we abhor violence and it has no place on our campus.”

Mr. Johnson wasn’t immediately available for additional comment on Monday. But in a statement, he acknowledged that Mr. Cvjetanovic had attended the rally. After consulting with law enforcement, the office of student conduct, and the university’s attorneys, he said, “there is no constitutional or legal reason to expel him from our university or to terminate his employment.”

“The First Amendment freedom of free speech requires us all to understand that sometimes support of this freedom can be uncomfortable,” Mr. Johnson said. “It is one of the most difficult freedoms we live with. It requires us to support the right of people to express views which we sometimes vehemently disagree.”

Mr. Cvjetanovic has said he attended the event and that he is a white nationalist, but that he is not "’the angry racist they see in that photo.” He added that he didn’t believe the university had the right to expel him. “I am allowed to express my political beliefs and if UNR does expel me, then it is a clear violation of my First Amendment” rights, he told a CBS affiliate.

The Chronicle’s attempts to reach Mr. Allsup and Mr. Cvjetanovic on Monday were unsuccessful.

Disciplinary action a university takes against a student typically falls under the guise of its code of conduct. Jill Creighton, the president of the Association for Student Conduct Administration, said most universities’ conduct codes avoid including language that would limit students’ abilities to express themselves politically.

“As long as they don’t participate in violence, or they don’t violate any laws, we’re not likely going to cover that under our student codes of conduct,” Ms. Creighton said.

She added that removing someone from a community fails to create the conversation necessary to deal the racism exposed at events like Charlottesville.

And Ajay Nair, an administrator who oversees campus life at Emory University, said an institution is obligated to protect the rights of students to learn, including those with racist views.

“I am not suggesting protect their ideas,” he said. “I am saying protect their ability to be a student to the degree possible. Similarly, the institution has every right — I’ll go as far as to say obligation — to speak to its values and condemn white nationalism.”

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.

Corrections (8/15/2017, 9:15 a.m.): This article initially misspelled the first name of Ajay Nair, an official at Emory University, and contained an errant first reference to the University of Nevada at Reno. The article has been updated to reflect those corrections.