Spooking the Students

If you thought the days of COINTELPRO were over when Nixon left the White House, think again, says a coalition of UT student groups. The coalition, led by the Undergraduate Students Association (UGSA) and Students for the ACLU, has issued a proposal charging UT with spying on its own student organizations. Last week, the coalition unveiled a Free Speech Proposal that aims to abolish content censorship by the university, loosen UT's restrictions on the time, place, and manner of protests, and end monitoring of student groups by the UT Police Dept.

That last item ought to send a shiver up the spine of civil libertarians. According to UGSA President Aaron Garza, students have found evidence that UTPD has engaged in undercover surveillance of student organizations, including abortion rights advocates who counter-demonstrated last year when an anti-abortion group displayed huge photos of aborted fetuses on-campus. Also allegedly spied upon was the Radical Action Network, which hoped to publicly interrogate Henry Kissinger during his planned UT address last year. After RAN's plans became known, UT canceled Kissinger's appearance, saying they had been requested to do so by the U.S. Secret Service. Subsequently, the Secret Service told student reporters at The Daily Texan that they had made no such request.

UT partly admits to conducting the surveillance. "We found, through a Freedom of Information [request] regarding the [anti-abortion] exhibits, a police report from Lieutenant J. [Julie] Gillespie of the UTPD in which she said, 'I went undercover to this organization meeting, here's what they're doing, here's what they're planning, they're planning a lawsuit against the university,'" Garza says. "We also threw in a Freedom of Information [request] about the Kissinger speech, [and] found information from the university to [state Attorney General] John Cornyn, saying, 'Hey, we have student informants, and we can't give this information out or it would divulge the names of our informants.' And then Cornyn responded back and said, 'Okay, you don't have to give this information out.'"

Garza says UGSA members e-mailed UT Police Chief Jeffrey M. Van Slyke to ask him whether the UTPD maintains any standards or policies regarding student surveillance or protocols. "He said that there are no standards, that there is no official policy regulating who gets surveilled and who doesn't, and how that actually happens," Garza says.

UT President Larry Faulkner and Van Slyke were both unavailable for comment, but UT spokesperson Rhonda Strange says UTPD hasn't done anything illegal. "UTPD doesn't surreptitiously spy on students, but yes, on occasion they do go in plain clothes to open student-group meetings to gather information as part of their security responsibilities, and that's pretty much situational," Strange says. "They don't identify themselves as police officers -- they participate in the open meeting."

Asked how UT justifies this sort-of-but-not-really spying, Strange says it depends on the situation. "It would be motivated by need to gather information for security purposes," she explains, "and [for] any kind of operation like this ... the university police department has to conduct these kinds of operations within the Fourth Amendment." (The Fourth Amendment bars unreasonable searches and seizures, which legally includes undercover surveillance, which normally requires a judicial warrant.) Asked to respond directly to the Free Speech Proposal, Strange said that because it hasn't been presented formally to Faulkner, UT does not yet have a response.

Meanwhile, Garza says the UGSA and Students for the ACLU hope to collect 8,000 signatures on a petition in support of the proposal. The number is symbolic: In 1942, 8,000 students marched and protested on the state capitol after former UT President Homer Rainey was fired for defending the free speech rights of liberal professors.

At press time, the Chronicle had not reviewed the documents that the students say indicates UT surveillance. However, a front-page story in Wednesday's Daily Texan quotes the documents extensively, and supports the student groups' claims.