Boston University Defends Pride Flag Removal Amid Backlash
Faculty push back after Pride flags were removed from campus windows, with officials citing a “content-neutral” signage policy.
Boston University President Melissa Gilliam is defending the school’s removal of Pride flags and pro-LGBTQ signs from campus buildings over spring break.
According to Boston public radio station WBUR, the university removed Pride flags displayed in outward-facing windows, including ones in the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, the BU Children’s Center, and from a fourth-floor office window belonging to professor Nathan Phillips overlooking Commonwealth Avenue.
Phillips said the flag wasn’t confiscated but was taken down and left on a chair with a note stating it had been removed “per University policy” for being outward-facing. It added that university affiliates are “welcome to display signs, posters, or flags on authorized bulletin boards or on interior walls of their private offices.”
The note also included three boxes indicating whether the alleged violation was a first, second, or third offense, with an “X” marked in the second box, according to a photo taken by Phillips.
The removals weren’t limited to Pride flags. In one instance, the university repeatedly removed a sign from a professor’s office window expressing support for detained international students.
BU’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors sent a letter to Gilliam arguing that the removals reflect a broader crackdown on free expression.
Under the university’s signage policy, adopted in September 2024, “[n]o unattended placards, banners, or other signs will be permitted unless they are affixed securely to an approved location,” such as the university’s “Free Expression Boards” — bulletin boards where flyers and posters may be displayed without prior approval.
The policy also states that signs related to on-campus events or demonstrations “may not be affixed to any University-owned property, including walls, windows, or furniture.”
Some faculty told the Daily Free Press that the university has not uniformly enforced its policy, noting that other flags and banners — including one supporting Seattle’s professional hockey team on a dorm and an American flag hanging from another office building window — have not been removed.
Responding to the criticism, Gilliam said during a campus town hall that there was “no targeting of any particular population” in the removal of Pride flags. Instead, she said the university is enforcing a signage policy she described as “content neutral,” according to WBUR.
“I want to be very clear that we have unequivocal support for our LGBTQIA+ community,” Gilliam said during the town hall, citing her years as a pediatric and adolescent gynecologist in defending the university’s stance. “The experience of queer and non-conforming young people, all young people, minoritized groups, is my life’s work. So to suggest that we as an administration do not see and value this community is frankly untrue.”
She said that working in a university community “means that people have lots of different ideas, and the privilege of being in an academic community is you get to say what you want, no matter how wrong-headed it is. But you speak as an individual. We have time, place, and manner of rules, and these are content-neutral. And so we’ve decided that if you have the privilege of having a window that faces campus, you don’t get the privilege of speaking for the university.”
Some faculty said they were surprised by Gilliam’s refusal to amend the signage policy.
“I’m just really shocked that she’s going to dig in her heels about this. I don’t understand it,” Keith Vincent, an associate professor in the Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies department, told WBUR.
Some professors have since re-hung Pride flags and other signs in their windows in defiance of university policy.
Vincent, whose office in the School of Theology building faces the Charles River at the edge of campus, said he has a Pride flag in his window visible to others.
“I’m not gonna take it down until they take it down,” he said, adding that he will re-hang the flag if it is removed.
Phillips, whose Pride flag was removed twice, has also re-hung it in his window, despite the possibility of disciplinary action.
“I have no idea what happens if strike three happens. I really don’t,” he said. “If BU wants to escalate this, they’re at risk of real reputational damage, of documented selective enforcement.”
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