Contested Voices: The Hill House Free Speech Board’s Persistent Legacy at Sarah Lawrence
Isabel Lewis ‘25, Sylvia Kline ‘28 and Ava Velluzzi ‘27
Hill House’s free speech board on the day it was announced it would be relocated. Photo credit: Isabel Lewis ‘25
On Oct. 2, Hill House residents received an email from Dave Stanfield, the Vice President and Dean of Students at Sarah Lawrence College, about the fate of the Free Speech Board—two pieces of plywood stacked atop each other and cemented to the ground by two metal pipes, perched atop the narrow hill beside the back entrance of Hill House. When this email went out the board depicted the Palestinian flag and the words, “Join the Student Intifada @slcdivest,” “make love not war” and “be happy.”
“While the board serves as a platform for promoting student events, activities, and political speech, some of the content has, at times, made residents feel uncomfortable and even unsafe in their living space due to the board’s location directly facing several student rooms,” Stanfield wrote in his email to the roughly 300 residents living in Hill House.
Stanfield continued, “after thoughtful consideration and consultation with multiple campus stakeholders, including student leaders, we have decided to relocate the Free Expression Board to a nearby spot.”
Reactions to this email were mixed. Some felt relieved, others were angry and a few were confused, unaware that this had even been in discussion.
In an interview with The Phoenix, Stanfield, who started at Sarah Lawrence in the summer of 2023, said that conversations around the board’s potential removal came “out of specific complaints from this year.” He said he couldn’t estimate how many complaints came in and did not specify if they came primarily from students, parents or faculty members. Instead, Stanfield posed a rhetorical question: “Do we take parents’ complaints seriously?” He answered, “of course we do,” but added, “student feedback would be the primary reason that we would be here today talking about such a topic.”
“[Stanfield] was really adamant that it wasn’t about the content of the board, but was about that it faced students' windows,” Aysu Aricanli ‘25, one of the co-chairs of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), said. Aricanli learned about the plans to remove or relocate the board more than three weeks before Hill House residents received the email through her role as a resident advisor. After finding out, she had multiple meetings with Stanfield, both in her capacity as SJP co-chair and separately as an RA. In these meetings, Aricanli said she advocated against the board’s removal or relocation. “They could move [the board] an inch or a mile,” Aricanli said, but it would still set a “dangerous precedent.”
Aricanli believes that the reason the board is being moved is specifically because it said, “Join the Student Intifada.”
In an interview with Aricanli and Nazira Atalla, the other co-chair of SJP, Atalla said that to her “Intifada” means “protest [and] resisting colonial oppression.” Aricanli added, “it’s not inciting violence.”
A Jewish Hill House resident, who spoke to The Phoenix under the condition of anonymity, said that to her, “Intifada” means “an armed uprising of Palestinians against Israelis.” She said, “I hate walking past that board because it makes me sad. It upsets me I think because it calls for something that is against the Jewish people.” She added, “I will always be behind free speech. However, there’s free speech and there is using that word.”
The anonymous student said she was not among those who complained and did not necessarily believe the board should be removed. She suspected that the complaints primarily came from parents. While she understood the concerns—admitting that she too, felt uncomfortable walking past a board displaying “Join the Student Intifada”—she had a critique of how the administration handled the issue. “I feel like they’re trying to appease everyone, and you cannot appease everyone,” she said. “I think they’re trying to avoid protests. Unfortunately, protest is going to happen.”
To gauge how Hill House residents felt about the potential removal or relocation of the board, The Phoenix left flyers under all Hill House student apartments on Sept. 24. The flyers included a QR code that directed students to an anonymous questionnaire about their views on the board. All 12 of the questionnaire respondents indicated that they felt information about the board had not been adequately communicated to students.
Most students who filled out the questionnaire reported learning about the board’s status from a post on @slcanonymous, an Instagram account where people in the Sarah Lawrence community can anonymously submit content to be posted. One student who responded, Sonjia Armitage ‘27, said she only became aware of the issue through the flyer that was slipped under her door. In her questionnaire response, Armitage wrote, “Every student at this school should know when their free speech is being questioned by those who claim to represent us.”
After Stanfield’s email stating that the board was being relocated rather than removed, Armitage said in an interview, “I wish there had been more notice to the student body about this. I wish I had known this was a question being asked in the first place.”
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Many students discovered that the board’s location was being questioned weeks before Stanfield’s email was sent to Hill House residents.
On Sept. 10, a post was made to @slcanonymous that said, “PLEASE post tonight: admin has decided to take down the free speech board by hill house TOMORROW (9/11).” On that day, the board read, “Join the Student Intifada @slcdivest” with a depiction of the Palestinian flag. Early the following day, Sarah Lawrence’s Divestment Coalition, posted, “DEFEND THE FREE SPEECH BOARD AT HILL HOUSE.” The post has garnered nearly 400 likes. On Sept. 11, a few students from the Divestment Coalition set up lawn chairs and sat by the Hill House free speech board in protest of its projected removal.
Before the @slcanonymous post, the first students to be informed of the board’s disassembly were the 12 resident advisors of Hill House. Kyla Hunter, a senior staff member in the Residential Life department sent an email to those RAs and wrote that there had been concerns about the content of the Free Speech Board over the first few weeks of the school year. In the email, Hunter included a copy of an email scheduled to be sent out to the rest of Hill House from Director of Residential Life Abbie Young. Although Young is the Director of Student Life, she put in her resignation over the summer and is no longer living on campus. Young is acting as the Director of Student Life until the school can find a replacement.
In Young’s drafted email she wrote, “In an effort to strike a balance between supporting free expression and enabling students to not feel triggered or uncomfortable in their living space, the Free Expression Board outside Hill House will be deconstructed.” To end her email, Young wrote, “Your feedback is essential, and encourage you to reach out to me directly to share any thoughts, concerns, or questions.” However, the tone of the email implied that the decision to deconstruct the board had already been made.
Hunter declined to comment, and wrote in an email, “At this time, I think it’s best to center student voices in this matter.”
Young also declined to comment and responded in an email: “I have not been sufficiently involved with the deliberations regarding the board” and directed The Phoenix to Stanfield.
Bart Brown, who oversees the Hill House Resident Advisors, told The Phoenix that Residential Life learned about the concerns the day before Hill House RAs, on Sept. 9. Although Stanfield said that the efforts and conversations around the board were initiated by both him and Residential Life, Brown said, “[Residential Life is] not heavily involved in conversations about [the Free Speech Board.]”
“I think that Dave [Stanfield] as the Dean of Students took this on too because he was fielding the complaints,” Brown said. “At the moment, he has not asked [Residential Life] to be more involved than we currently are.”
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When interviewed, Stanfield said he learned about complaints regarding the Hill House free speech board through his role on the Bias Incident Response Team, which reviews all bias incident reports. According to Stanfield, he and Residental Life staff initially agreed that Residental Life would handle the matter. However, after the backlash from the Sept. 10 email sent to RAs, Stanfield got involved and realized the issue warranted attention from the Dean of Students office.
Stanfield said he requested material on the free speech board at Hill House from the College Archives on Sept. 11 and found that the board emerged out of the Committee of Student Life—which consists of administrators, faculty members and students that “advise the president on all non-academic matters affecting student life on campus”—around the early 2010s. According to Stanfield, in his research, he found that beyond agreement that the board should be placed at Hill House, “there was very little to no discussion about the location [of the board],” and added, “I think it literally didn’t occur to people that it was outside of a substantial number of student bedrooms.”
The Phoenix reviewed the committee minutes from 2009 to 2013, which revealed that the free speech board was erected to combat the graffiti problem that was widespread during the fall 2009 semester. Hill House seemed to be hit the hardest, with the minutes noting that “the amount of graffiti in the stairwells [of Hill House], at its worst, made it look like every surface had been covered.”
The Committee on Student Life spent considerable time discussing possible solutions to the graffiti problem, including installing cameras, sending a campus-wide email, fining all Hill House residents and restricting access to Hill House. There was also a suggestion to create a “graffiti wall,” which would provide a dedicated space for students to express themselves. The college eventually took action by restricting access to Hill House to residents only, which seemed to reduce some of the graffiti. However, committee members believed students still needed more space for self-expression. The proposal for a “graffiti wall” eventually evolved into the Hill House free speech board.
Discussions about a new expression board on campus continued during the spring 2010 semester. Suggestions for locations included behind Andrews House or near the Campbell Sports Center. Some advocated for visibility while others wanted it tucked away from campus visitors. A subset of the committee surveyed students and met with Michael Rengers, the former head of Campus Operations, to find a suitable location.
The survey concluded that students felt another expression space—comparable to the existing Free Speech Board at Bates—was needed, and Rengers suggested Hill House, where 25% of residential students lived. The favored idea was “bookends” on campus, with boards at Bates and Hill House. Although some committee members wanted to consult Hill House residents, it was noted that residents would change by the time the board was installed.
In March 2010, the committee voted to place the free speech board up near Hill House. In spring 2011, nearly a year after the vote, the Hill House free speech board was installed.
Over the past decade, the board has uncontestedly displayed everything from event advertisements to political statements, with the exception of a brief removal in 2018. The sole reported instance of the Hill House free speech board being taken down occurred on Nov. 3, 2018. At the time the board featured unproven allegations about politics professor Sam Abrams. This incident followed Abrams’ publication of an opinion piece in The New York Times a few weeks earlier, titled “Think Professors are Liberal? Try School Administrators.” In the article, he criticized Sarah Lawrence’s administration for not providing students with a “meaningful alternative” to “overtly progressive events” on campus. Although the board was initially painted over, the paint washed away in the rain, leading campus operations to remove the sign altogether for a couple of days.
In 2019, The Phoenix reported on how students perceived the board’s removal. Students expressed similar sentiments then as now: they felt Sarah Lawrence's administration was not sufficiently communicative about the root of the problem or how it was addressed. There was no dialogue among the broader Sarah Lawrence community before decisions were made by the administration.
“This is not a new situation,” Sam Abrams, who has been a professor at the college since 2010, said in a recent interview with The Phoenix. “Students are always in shock over changes that come for reasons that don’t make any sense, and we’re not really treating students with respect.”
Abrams had little to say in response to questions regarding the incident in 2018 that led to the speech board’s temporary removal. He said, “I don’t know when it was taken down last time. I was not a part of that. I did not tell [anyone in administration] to take it down.”
Though students have used the board in the past to protest Abrams’ employment at the school and display false allegations against him, he was adamant that the Free Speech Board should not be removed. Abrams was interviewed before the announcement that the board would be relocated instead of removed and suggested that if the school were to move it, it should be relocated to a more public place on campus. Abrams, who only learned about the conversations around removing or relocating the board when The Phoenix reached out to him, said that decisions of this magnitude should involve faculty, administration and students.
“This is bad management,” Abrams said. “This sort of stuff should be very transparent. And this is the sort of stuff that should be discussed among faculty.” According to Abrams, the faculty had not received any formal notice from the administration regarding the board or the conversations surrounding its removal or replacement.
Abrams acknowledged that “speech can be troubling and upsetting,” so it is a fair critique for students to not want it outside of their residential window. However, he said, “I think that this has been handled very poorly. It is not transparent, and I totally empathize [with] why people are losing their minds.”
Stanfield said he would have approached the issue of the free speech board differently—primarily by speaking to more students. “We genuinely didn’t realize that it would be such an important topic for students,” Stanfield said. He said he is “trying to do right and get broader perspectives.” He has met with 75 students—a mix of student leaders and members of student organizations who have expressed concerns.
According to Stanfield, most feedback from student leaders and organizations has been clear: the board should not be removed. However, there is disagreement over “the notion that [the free speech board] is a Hill House matter versus a broader [campus matter],” according to Stanfield. He said he does not plan to send an email to the entire student body, and said, “it’s a very rare scenario where you would try to engage all 1700 students to gather their feedback.”
Stanfield believes that relocating the board is “a solution that balances that perspective between the value of freedom of expression, which we still absolutely want to champion, but honors students’ residential space.”
As of now, the Hill House free speech board has yet to be moved, and there is no definitive date or location for its relocation.