BLOOMINGTON — For Guy Loftman, Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow has been a “sacred place” for free speech and protests.
He would know. Loftman, now 78, helped create the university policy approved in 1969 that made it the official area where students could peacefully assemble to voice their concerns without fear of retaliation as long as they didn’t camp overnight.
That 55-year-old policy was abruptly reversed April 24, the day before students planned to take to the meadow for a pro-Palestinian rally. The last-minute change said students could no longer erect any temporary structures unless first getting approval from the university.
Protesters ignored the new mandate. The next day, state police dressed in riot gear arrested 30 people.
By Saturday night, two raids on the camp had resulted in 57 arrests, including 37 students, four faculty members and two staff members.
Guy Loftman helped institute the free speech zone at Indiana University’s Dunn Meadow. He served as an attorney for four decades in Bloomington.
Loftman said the former policy had served students and the university well for more than 50 years. Now, the free-speech protections it provided are gone.
“I remain crushed,” he said. “I thought it was a complete violation of everything that we had worked for in the ‘60s that had been honored through the entire history of the university after that. It’s being destroyed for absolutely no good reason.”
‘NEVER AGAIN’
Loftman, who worked as an attorney in Bloomington until his retirement in 2015, was part of the first cadre of IU students to protest the Vietnam War. He helped start a chapter of the left-wing organization Students for a Democratic Society as a sophomore in 1965.
That year, Loftman and a group of about a dozen students decided to head to Dunn Meadow to speak out against the conflict. Pro-war demonstrators were also there, along with about a dozen police officers.
Loftman recalls that everyone made their speeches and then left the area without any confrontations or violence.
“We got to say what we wanted to say, and then we thought, ‘Wow, let’s do it again,’” he said. “The next time we had a couple of dozen people, and then the next time we had 50 people and then 100.”
As the number of protesters grew over that year, Loftman developed a relationship with the dean of students. He said they reached a mutual understanding that Dunn Meadow would be the unofficial place for students to protest.
“It didn’t matter what you wanted to say,” he said. “But it had to be nonviolent and it couldn’t be threatening people. It was to be the sacred place on campus.”
The need for that free-speech zone became even more imminent in 1967, when Loftman was elected student body president.
Students staged a sit-in protest against Dow Chemical, the company that made napalm, a sticky flammable substance used as a weapon, for the Vietnam War. Activists lay on the floor of a campus building where the company was recruiting students. Soon, police were called to the scene. Officers beat and arrested some of the students.
“A lot of people were injured and treated violently,” Loftman said. “I think that was probably the triggering event for administrators to say, ‘Hey, that didn’t work. That is not anything we ever want to have happen again.’”
That was the worst incident of police violence on campus — until the raid on protesters last week, Loftman argued.
‘A DIFFERENT ERA’
The Dunn Meadow policy was officially codified in 1969. That year, thousands of students occupied the area in opposition to sharp tuition increases.
Huge anti-war demonstrations and civil unrest continued on campus into 1970. That led administrators to call the Indiana National Guard to the edge of town, but the troops were never deployed to campus.
Over the next two decades, the meadow was home to near-constant protests, including long-term encampments that became known as “shantytowns” built to oppose apartheid in South Africa.
Bill Breeden, an activist and former Unitarian minister, helped initiate a 45-day rally in 1991 against the Gulf War. When hecklers harassed the encampment, police were on hand to clear them away and protect the protesters, he recalled.
“It was just a different era at Indiana University,” he said. “The university understood that meadow had been made a free-speech area.”
Both Breeden and Loftman, who spoke at the meadow during last week’s protest, say that the surprise reversal of IU’s longstanding policy stems in part from recent efforts by Indiana’s Republican supermajority to tighten control on the state’s public universities.
Both pointed to controversial Senate Bill 202 signed by Gov. Eric Holcomb in March. The law requires universities in the state to establish policies where faculty members may not receive tenure or promotions if they have not encouraged “free expression” and “intellectual diversity.”
The law has drawn fierce pushback from college faculty and administrators. The University Alliance for Racial Justice said it creates procedures by which “students may in Orwellian fashion turn in a professor guilty of promoting diversity without giving equal time to other perspectives (such as racism?).”
State Republican lawmakers last year also approved an amendment cutting public funding to IU’s Kinsey Institute, which studies human sexuality and relationships. The world-famous institute was founded in 1947.
Following the mass arrests at IU last week, thousands of students and faculty are calling for the resignation of IU President Pamela Whitten, who spearheaded the last-minute policy change. That comes after a year that’s included other controversial decisions, one regarding a Palestinian artist and another regarding a student group.
Whitten has given no indication she intends to resign. Loftman pointed out the current supercharged political climate and said there’s a good chance she’ll remain at IU with the full support of Republican lawmakers.
“I won’t be surprised if those forces say, ‘Great job, Pamela. We will give you a bonus,’” he said.
Holcomb has defended the state police response to the protests, saying “We can peacefully protest, and you can express your emotionally charged opinion, but you’re not going to infringe on other people’s rights.”
Breeden argued that defending the forceful arrest of students who are peacefully protesting sets a dangerous precedent and sends a menacing message to all Hoosiers.
“It’s a word that’s thrown around a lot, but I think it’s well used here: fascist,” he said. “Whatever you want to call it, I think we’re in a very dangerous place.”