Letter From Faculty and Staff In Defense of Students’ Freedom of Expression

Dear President Smith and Vice President Ives,

As Swarthmore staff and faculty members, we write to express concern about the disciplinary charges recently issued to eight students for their alleged distribution of zines containing criticisms of the Board of Managers and the College administration. The March 5, 2026 issue of The Phoenix reports that the College has issued multiple charges, including for “Bullying and Intimidation” and “Endangerment or Affliction of Physical Harm.” These charges, whose potential outcomes include suspension and expulsion, pose a significant threat to students’ freedom of expression. Disciplining students for the alleged distribution of printed matter would be alarming anywhere, but it is especially dismaying at a college that prides itself on cultivating civic engagement. It is also at odds with our commitment to critical inquiry. In the classroom, we teach students careful observation, informed analysis, and engagement with a wide range of perspectives, including those that do not conform to our own worldviews. We are concerned that the disciplinary system is taking a different approach, one that undercuts the College’s own learning goals.

Zines are self-published texts characterized by “a certain scrappiness” and a “participatory, punk ethos,” as Swarthmore Communications’ News and Events put it when McCabe Library’s zine collection opened in 2023. The form has given rise to numerous library collections like McCabe’s, museum exhibits, and an extensive body of scholarship. Historically, Swarthmore has recognized zines’ literary and cultural value: several faculty members teach zines in their classes, some have written about them, scholars and curators have visited campus to speak about them, and our archives preserve examples of zines from various campus movements. Zines have attracted this interest because they are interpretively rich texts. Yet the charges leveled against the students narrow the zines’ contents to a single meaning. This is precisely the kind of reductive thinking we teach our students to resist. Moreover, the charges present the zines not as texts using rhetoric — indeed, sometimes sharp rhetoric — to make arguments, but as weapons, by characterizing them as objects “intended to cause, or that any reasonable person should know would cause, physical or substantial emotional harm.”

To make this argument, the charges rely on a tenuous and literal-minded interpretation of the evidence — again, one that is antithetical to what we encourage in our classrooms. They allege that an image featuring a crosshairs over a collage of photographs of the Board of Managers with the caption “Public Enemy No. 1” in one zine constitutes a threat of violence against the member — rather than, say, a political critique or a cultural reference to the iconic Public Enemy logo. In a February 25, 2026 WHYY article, Temple University Law School professor Craig Green emphasized how strained this interpretation is, given that “the fact that the crosshairs did not single out an individual would ‘almost certainly … be interpreted as a general statement of opposition.’”

Further allegations focus on statements in the second zine that described the College’s decision to call in 34 police officers to break up the spring 2025 encampment as opening a “new chapter of our struggle — one that will be necessarily more escalated, necessarily more violent” and that urged students to “put [their] bodies on the line.” The College’s charges refer to these statements as “calls for action that threatened, intimidated, and/or promoted potential violence on campus.” By removing the context for the statements, this interpretation construes them as instructions for escalation and violence instead of commentary on the escalation and violence that had been directed at the protestors themselves, while also missing the evident reference to Mario Savio’s famous “put your bodies upon the gears” speech during the Berkeley Free Speech movement. Indeed, in the WHYY article, Professor Green noted that “the idea of students ‘putting their bodies on the line’ is a known concept among nonviolent activism employed by Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.”

Furthermore, we are disturbed to learn that these disciplinary cases are based on extensive CCTV surveillance of the students charged — not only footage of them allegedly distributing the zines but also going about their daily activities on campus. Images of students eating a meal or walking into their dorms serve no clear role in determining their involvement with the zines. They do, however, chill protest activity by creating an atmosphere of fear. We are dismayed that the College has resorted to these Big Brother-style tactics.

Swarthmore’s decision to discipline students for the distribution of zines, as well as its increasing surveillance of the campus community, sets a disturbing precedent for future disciplining across the ideological spectrum. It should frighten any of us who teach, study, or care about political dissent. At a time when freedom of expression is in grave danger, we call on the College to rescind the disciplinary charges.

Sincerely,