The final version of an External Speakers Policy drafted last fall has not been yet adopted according to Dean for the Student Experience Ian Binnington.

The goal, Binnington said, is to have the final version in place by the end of May. The policy was first shared with the Allegheny community via GatorHub in late October, and interested parties were invited to attend a meeting of the Student Enrichment Committee on October 29, to share their feedback on the proposed policy. At the meeting, Binnington said the college intended to implement the policy by the end of the fall 2025 semester. But a stream of continued feedback and editing, he explained on Monday, has pushed the deadline back.

“Taking time to listen to everybody’s concerns and see what we can do about them has been more important than speed,” Binnington said.

One of the major pieces of feedback that continued to arise over the past several months is that the policy could lead to a chilling effect of speech on campus, which Binnington described as a “legitimate concern.”

“We absolutely do not want, as much as is humanely possible, to depress the willingness of faculty, staff and students to invite folks to campus,” Binnington said. “That is one of the points of a college campus: free exchange of ideas.”

Taking that feedback into account, the college has put significant effort into drawing a distinction between restricting speech and “controlling disruptive actions,” according to Binnington.

The original policy shared with the campus community in October 2025 outlined three levels of review that would be used to vet external speakers and said that a Level 3 review could be triggered by a “potential for significant disruption or protest.” The updated policy, Binnington said, rewrote that section to remove the word “potential” and instead specify that there would need to be a “credible threat” to the campus community.

Binnington described the policy in its current form as more supportive of speakers’ rights than similar policies at other higher education institutions.

He also described the policy as being protective of peaceful protest.

“The goal of this policy is not to either prevent peaceful protest,” Binnington said, “and it is not to have the possibility of protest be used as a reason to not allow a speech to go forward.”

Binnington clarified that disagreement and peaceful protest are not disruption, but that “credible threats to the safety of the campus” do qualify as disruption. For those protesting a speaker, credible threats could include violence and shutting down college operations.

“The college is absolutely committed to students exercising their free speech rights in ways that are neither violent nor disruptive to the institute — disruptive to other people or to the operations of the college,” Binnington said.

Binnington declined to show The Campus the current drafted version of the policy.

The policy has also been updated to be even more explicit in its content neutrality.

“Particularly in the current political moment, we have a tendency to think, well, this is aimed at right-wing speakers,” Binnington said. “Well, maybe, but I think there are plenty of times when folks who would have been regarded as left-wing speakers could have been accused of saying things that were disruptive. So we want to be very, very clear that we’re not attempting to police the content of what people say on campus.”

The team charged with reviewing external speakers comprises nine high-ranking members of the college administration, including the director of public safety.

The review team would be notified of an upcoming external speaker visit through Scheduler, the platform students, faculty and staff use to reserve spaces on campus. In the dropdown menu describing what type of event the user is reserving space for, the college added an “external speaker” option, which will direct the team to review the details of the event. If the user accidentally or intentionally does not select the external speaker description, Binnington said the director of conference and events, who regularly checks Scheduler, would likely flag the event for the review team’s attention.

Before banning a speaker, Binnington said the review committee would likely recommend adjustments, such as changing the location of the event to be more secure.

The policy is not a free speech policy, but is designed to manage risk, Binnington said. If the college did not have the policy, it would be harder for the institution to control the circumstances that could lead individuals to allege that the college violated free speech protections or failed to keep them safe.

“We’re not afraid of getting sued if we’ve done the right thing,” Binnington said. “We are more interested in mitigating the risk and keeping everybody safe.

At the October SEC meeting, Dean for Student Life & Title IX Coordinator Trae Yeckley said that the Statement of Community is the college’s “free speech policy” and establishes guidelines around appropriate speech. Binnington echoed this framing.

“The Statement of Community is a powerful statement of principle,” Binnington said. “It is not a statement of policy.”

The lack of enforcement power in the Statement of Community was by design, Binnington added. When it was written in the 2000s, he said, there was a contingency of community members who feared the ways in which the policy could be used if it had sanctions — for many of the same reasons as the concerns about the potential chilling effect of the External Speakers Policy.

For the past several weeks, the External Speakers Policy has been with legal counsel, who have not made any major substantive changes, but have tweaked certain language to firm up the intention of the policy, according to Binnington.

“We also recognize that while I think the faculty and others believe in the good faith of the president and the good faith of the people that are writing the policy now, a policy outlives the people that wrote it,” Binnington said. “So making sure that a policy can’t be weaponized later on to do things that was not intended is really, really important.”

Binnington feels confident about the current state of the policy.

“We tried to incorporate as much of the feedback as is legally and practically possible,” Binnington said. “And I think we’ve come up with the best policy on this subject that we could have written.”