IRVINE, Orange County — When student government representatives at UC Irvine voted to ban all flags — including the American one — from their tiny office, they thought they had found a solution to a battle over freedom of speech that began when someone first tacked a U.S. flag to the wall in January. The flag had been at the center of an increasingly bitter game of cat-and-mouse, with some students taking it down repeatedly and others replacing it in the dark of night.
Last week, six student legislative council members passed a resolution banning all flags from their office space, saying the U.S. flag could be viewed as hate speech because some consider it a symbol of colonialism and imperialism. The executive cabinet of the Associated Students organization vetoed the legislation two days later — but it was too late.
The vote prompted a furor: Taxpayers protested on the campus plaza, the school was bombarded with angry comments on its social media sites, and one state lawmaker proposed a constitutional amendment that would prohibit state-funded colleges and universities from banning the U.S. flag on campus. On Thursday, student government meetings were canceled for the second day in a row because of an unspecified threat.
The debate resonated on the ethnically and religiously diverse suburban campus, where tensions over freedom of speech have taken the national stage several times before. For years, Jewish students and members of the Muslim Student Union have sparred in a dispute that came to a head in 2011, when 10 Muslim students were arrested and prosecuted for disrupting a speech by Israeli ambassador Michael Oren. In 2007, federal civil rights investigators looked into complaints of anti-Semitic speeches given at the university by invited Muslim speakers, but they found the comments were directed as Israeli policies, not Jewish students.
Testing Out Ideas