After over a month and a half of revisions, Student Union Senate passed a resolution promoting freedom of expression and academic freedom early Wednesday morning.

Student Union initially wanted to pass the resolution, which was, in part, a response to controversy surrounding the University of Chicago’s August statement on freedom of expression, prior to the Washington University-hosted Oct. 9 presidential debate to encourage respectful open discourse surrounding the debate and the presidential election.

However, Senate chose to spend more time on the resolution in order to gather opinions from more student groups, including the Chinese Student Association, the Association of Black Students, College Democrats and College Republicans.

Although Senate condemns hateful speech with the resolution, the governing body also encourages respectful debate on controversial issues. Speaker of the Senate and junior Ben Hauser noted that senators all felt that students should be comfortable sharing their opinions regarding beliefs on various issues.

“Obviously, I think the big point of the resolution that everyone was really on the same page on is that we really want to encourage discussion,” Hauser said. “We really want to have people decide for themselves where they think they stand.”

Senate debated whether safe spaces should be viewed as a space for debate or not, ultimately deciding that safe spaces were important because they were places for students to feel comfortable, but were not the right spots for debate.

“The way we talk about safe spaces is that they are inherently valuable and that they are something that we need,” junior Chris Hall, one of the co-writers of the resolution, said. “We talk about safe spaces as being important and spaces where discussion and dialogue can occur, but that they are not—I think the exact words are that they are ill-equipped to serve as spaces for debate.”

Hauser said that Hall and sophomore Varun Lahoti, the other co-writer of the resolution, made a strong effort to interview students from a number of organizations following feedback on their initial presentation of the proposal in mid-October.

“I think one of the big things they wanted to do was to go out and talk to a bunch of student groups, and I think they made efforts to talk to a ton of student groups,” Hauser said. “Compared to the presentation a couple weeks ago, we really focused on, how to do we make sure we know what the students want, and I think that was probably the biggest change.”

Sophomore and senator Zak Kadish, who helped work on the resolution, said that the finalized resolution was also shorter than previous drafts in an effort to better reach the student body.

“[The final resolution] is a lot shorter, for one. I’d like to think in our first writings we waxed poetic a little too much—this is definitely more parsed down. The language is less flowery and, we feel, more accessible,” Kadish said.

While the resolution was not introduced in time to encourage respectful discussion during the presidential election cycle, Hauser said that it sets a standard for Student Union with respect to issues of free speech, both with respect to how SU representatives deal with these concerns and with how SU portrays itself to Washington University students.

“I think one of the big things about the resolution now is that it’s sort of turned into a guideline for Student Union in terms of how do we approach this issue, and how do we as a student body see this play out in terms of our community and then within the University community at large,” Hauser said.

Kadish noted that much of the speech the student body wishes to restrict is offensive but said that the goal of the resolution is to preserve free speech so that students can feel comfortable speaking out on issues they’re passionate about in the future, regardless of whether they support controversial causes.

“I recognize that a lot of the types of speech people on campus want to restrict can be hurtful, offensive to marginalized groups and can just be in bad taste in general, but we don’t know who is going to be restricting freedom of speech in five years; we don’t know if the causes that we’re right now championing are going to be the ones that are going to be restricted in the future,” Kadish said. “By preserving free speech, we eliminate that double-edged sword of censoring debate on a number of issues.”