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Texas Tech students held a mock funeral for academic freedom on Thursday, May 7.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Students Engaged in Advancing Texas<\/p>\n
In the center of the hearse sat a scarlet urn, which \u201crepresented the spirit of Texas Tech,\u201d said Sumya Paruchuri, development director at Students Engaged in Advancing Texas, a statewide student-run organization that aims to get students involved in education policymaking. <\/p>\n
\u201cWe had faculty, students, alumni and community members bring books that were meaningful to them, that they taught, that they were taught with, and they placed them in the carriage as a statement,\u201d said Paruchuri. <\/p>\n
Funeral services began at 8 a.m. Thursday outside the system Board of Regents meeting. One student, Aaron Texidor, was approved by the board chair to speak during the public comment portion. <\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve learned from the greatest professors here, who know me by name. When you get that connection with someone, you start to hear their story. Yet, the story that I\u2019ve been hearing\u2014specifically in the psychology and education departments\u2014has been a story of fear,\u201d Texidor said before the board. \u201cWe cannot with one hand say we support education and with the other cover the mouths of our professors.\u201d <\/p>\n
Board chair Cody Campbell thanked Texidor for his comments but did not otherwise respond to what he said. Texas Tech spokespeople did not respond to Inside Higher Ed\u2019s request for comment on the funeral.<\/p>\n
After the open session of the meeting ended, students held a memorial service outside during which students and faculty members gave eulogies for various \u201cdeaths\u201d at the university, including for the women\u2019s and gender studies program and diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. The funeral procession began after that, and the 50-some people who gathered for the event walked for about an hour, Paruchuri said. <\/p>\n
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A horse-drawn hearse carried censored books across campus.<\/p>\n
Students Engaged in Advancing Texas.<\/p>\n
The funeral\u2014half performance art, half protest\u2014was accompanied by an art piece from ODEE Fri\u00f0riksson, a fine arts Ph.D. student at Texas Tech and \u201cculture jamming<\/a>\u201d artist from Iceland. Fri\u00f0riksson\u2014known simply as ODEE\u2014is best known for \u201cWe\u2019re Sorry<\/a>,\u201d a conceptual artwork that included an imitation website for the real-life Icelandic fishing company Samherji, on which Fri\u00f0riksson, acting as Samherji, apologized to the Namibian people for the 2023 Fishrot Files scandal<\/a>. <\/p>\n At Texas Tech, Fri\u00f0riksson created \u201cDeath of Academic Freedom\u201d by wrapping the university\u2019s iconic Will Rogers and Soapsuds statue in strips of black crepe paper. Traditionally, the statue is wrapped in red crepe before every home football game, but it has been wrapped in black before to mourn national tragedies. Fri\u00f0riksson said that, as far as he could determine, the last time the statue had been sheathed in black was to mark the 10-year anniversary of Sept. 11. <\/p>\n \u201cI came here to be in the land of the free and the land of the First Amendment. I was quite looking forward to starting at Texas Tech and exploring my academic freedom and being able to do my research and work,\u201d Fri\u00f0riksson told Inside Higher Ed. Part of the reason Texas Tech admitted him was because of his previous protest artwork, he explained.<\/p>\n “Bowie at Texas Tech,” a recent artwork by Ph.D. student ODEE Fri\u00f0riksson. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen you apply for the school, you present all the work that you\u2019ve done before. I was accepted here\u00a0\u2026 and they were impressed by what I\u2019d done before. So I didn\u2019t really expect that they would start to impose all these censorships and start to limit academic freedom,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n Five days ago, Fri\u00f0riksson created another art piece on campus. This one was titled \u201cBowie at Texas Tech\u201d and consisted of a video of David Bowie projected onto the red granite Texas Tech seal. He said he designed it in response to a meeting where he, along with other teaching assistants and professors, were told more about what they couldn\u2019t teach under the new content restrictions. Bowie is not allowed, and neither is Elsa, the animated ice queen in Disney\u2019s Frozen franchise who is widely rumored to be a lesbian, Fri\u00f0riksson said he learned at the meeting<\/a>. <\/p>\n \u201cWhen I saw David Bowie on the [seal], I just felt goose bumps. I felt really emotional seeing him, thinking about him being restricted, about not being able to teach about David Bowie. He was a wonderful human being and such an inspiration for mankind in general,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s not an angry resistance. It\u2019s more of a mourning.\u201d <\/p>\n<\/p>\n