Dear President Daniels, Dean Martinez, Dean Sanchez and the Johns Hopkins University Administration,

We the undersigned JHU students, student groups, affiliates and concerned alumni and citizens petition the Johns Hopkins University administration to reject and repudiate the Johns Hopkins Student Government Association (SGA)’s “Resolution Regarding the SGA’s Opinion on Current and Future Chick-fil-A Development Plans” and reiterate the University’s commitment to freedom of speech, intellectual diversity, and religious freedom on campus.

Since 2012, the Hopkins Athletics Department has contracted with Chick-fil-A  to serve at all home games, and the popular chicken sandwiches have regularly sold out at sporting events on campus. After some students suggested building a permanent Chick-fil-A location in new construction developments, on April 21, 2015, the SGA passed a resolution to preemptively ban Chick-fil-A from campus because the restaurant’s former CEO Dan Cathy supports traditional marriage, and otherwise, they assert, “the LGBTQ+ community or  allies would be subjected to the microaggression of supporting current or future Chick-fil-A development plans.”

Unless the JHU administration disavows it, the Chick-fil-A ban will introduce unprecedented discrimination against social and religious conservatives into the University’s contracting policies, even though the Starbucks on campus enjoys the freedom to support socially liberal causes.

No one should have the unique privilege and paternalistic power of banning views they don’t agree with on the Hopkins campus. Banning viewpoints is incompatible with the mission of the University and is no way to prepare students for a pluralistic society. Whatever your opinion on same-sex marriage, the idea that giving students the freedom to buy Chick-fil-A on campus would constitute a "microaggression” or create an "unsafe space" of hateful discrimination against the LGBT community on campus is absurd. When Chick-fil-A began serving at sports games three years ago, no such crisis happened. The SGA’s ban was never about discrimination against the LGBT community, since Chick-fil-A has never discriminated against gays and lesbians in its service. This ban, like the Spring Fair’s recent attempts to censor a pro-life fetal model table, seeks to use coercion and bullying, rather than persuasion and debate to produce ideological conformity. If the argument for same-sex marriage is so strong, its advocates should not need the student government’s version of the thought police to silence dissenting voices.

The discriminatory ban sends a message of intellectual immaturity and intolerance that will needlessly drive away talented prospective students, doctors and professors who can surely find other universities that don't thought-police unorthodox opinions. In banning Chick-fil-A for "bigotry," "homophobia" and “microaggressions,” JHU is only a short step from also banning religious groups from campus like the JHU Catholic Community which promotes, like its “CEO” Pope Francis, the same traditional definition of marriage as Dan Cathy. The question before the Johns Hopkins administration is a simple one: are social and religious conservatives still welcome on the Hopkins campus?

The SGA’s entire notion of keeping the University a “safe space,” free from one side of hot-button social issues like same-sex marriage and abortion, is absolutely antithetical to Johns Hopkins’ stated commitment to the free and robust exchange of ideas, as expressed in the JHU Task Force on Academic Freedom: “Speech on academic, political or cultural matters...even when deemed offensive to some, is not alone grounds for sanctions… The more appropriate response to such statements...is objection, persuasion and debate.” 

In 2013, when Johns Hopkins students tried to ban a student pro-life group from campus and oust Dr. Ben Carson as commencement speaker for opposing same-sex marriage, the University administration reiterated its strong stance in support of freedom of speech. While the SGA cannot set the University's contracting policy on its own, if the Johns Hopkins administration merely stays silent on the SGA’s Chick-fil-A ban, it will implicitly give the University’s stamp of approval to those who would kill free speech on campus in the name of intellectual “safety” masquerading as “tolerance.”

To protect the free exchange of ideas on campus, the University must strongly revoke and repudiate the intolerant thought-policing of the SGA’s Chick-fil-A ban, and protect the rights of everyone in the Hopkins community to speak freely, publish freely, believe freely, and if they so desire, even purchase chicken sandwiches freely.

Sincerely,

The Undersigned