Schuyler Burke

This election will soon be over. All should vote. But let’s not confuse that civic duty with meaningful democracy. The Electoral College ensures that the presidential outcome in Texas, like most states, is a foregone conclusion, at least for now. We have a Senate race, but although Texas has over nine percent of the United States population, it has only two percent of the seats in the Senate. In the U.S. House of Representatives, gerrymandering guarantees that most incumbents are protected. Similarly in the Texas legislature. Only at the local level is your vote likely to matter, in the sense of possibly affecting the result. Well, that’s something. Vote anyway, it’s a good habit and someday it might make a difference.

Democracy is however more than voting. It’s also the rule of law, including constitutional and statutory limits on the power to suppress speech and protest. Here the University is a critical microcosm. We have “Institutional Rules” which — as of last April — provided robust protections for your rights as students, as faculty, as staff, as members of the general public to assemble, speak, dissent, to be seen, to raise your voices and to have them heard on campus. The Rules also provided clear and reasonable limits to those rights.

Institutional Rules, like laws and constitutions, aren’t merely for those who would like to speak out. They bind on all parties in the University, including the administration. They were approved and published by the administration. They are not owned by, or specific to, any political faction. They were written (as it happens) largely by conservatives, to protect speech rights in line with the Chicago Principles, endorsed by our own Regents. Those principles state:

“In a word, the University’s fundamental commitment is to the principle that debate or deliberation may not be suppressed because the ideas put forth are thought by some or even by most members of the University community to be offensive, unwise, immoral, or wrong-headed. It is for the individual members of the University community, not for the University as an institution, to make those judgments for themselves, and to act on those judgments not by seeking to suppress speech, but by openly and vigorously contesting the ideas that they oppose. Indeed, fostering the ability of members of the University community to engage in such debate and deliberation in an effective and responsible manner is an essential part of the University’s educational mission.”

In a report released last summer, the Committee of Counsel on Academic Freedom and Responsibility documented numerous breaches of the Institutional Rules by The University administration in dealing with the protests over Gaza. We made the case that the rules, to be legitimate, must be respected by those who enforce them.

Dear students, if you want to live in a democracy after you graduate, it is a good idea to become familiar with the principles of democracy while you are here. The CCAFR Report is online at: https://utexas.app.box.com/s/62ystgs6gfxr516ukvhkykpwuxeavfr5.

Galbraith is a professor of government at UT and the chair of the Committee of Counsel on Academic Freedom and Responsibility.