SOCIAL CONTROL AND INCLUSIVE FREEDOM

This study examines how staff at a Southern public university experienced and interpreted their participation in the institution’s Open Expression Support Team (OEST), a campus initiative designed to maintain an educational environment where students feel free to engage in freedom of speech and expression without fear of intimidation or coercion. Using an embedded single-case study design, the research draws on interviews, documents, and observations to explore the OEST’s role in supporting inclusive freedom (Ben-Porath, 2017), which emphasizes the balance of free expression and inclusion in higher education. Findings reveal that the OEST functions as a mechanism of social control, employing former social control through surveillance and policy enforcement, and informal social control mechanisms, including education and relationship building. While the OEST reduces reliance on campus police and fosters dialogue on campus, its commitment to viewpoint neutrality limits real-time support for marginalized students who face harmful speech and expression. The study highlights tensions between absolutist free speech norms and inclusion, situating the OEST within broader frameworks of disciplinary power, legal environments, and the college-prison nexus. It also illuminates how the sociopolitical climate of a campus shapes community responses to expressive activities. Additionally, the study underscores the extensive labor of student affairs practitioners, who often go above and beyond their formal responsibilities with limited compensation Implications include the need for institutional policies that affirm dignity alongside expressive activity. This study also connects higher education to the criminalization of school discipline by highlighting how a public university employed criminal justice-inspired tactics to regulate and support expressive activity. This research contributes to understanding how universities navigate free speech and inclusion amid polarized sociopolitical climates.