The Silencing (15 page)

Courts have repeatedly held that a “free speech zone” on a public campus is unequivocally unconstitutional. Yet these zones continue to proliferate on the campuses of taxpayer-funded institutions like the University of Cincinnati, which had been warned beginning in 2007 that their speech regulations were unconstitutional. They changed their policy only after a court ordered them to cease from their violations of the First Amendment.
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FIRE has determined that there are seventy schools in the United States that currently have unconstitutional “free speech zones.” Greg Lukianoff, the Stanford Law School graduate who runs FIRE, says that sometimes it seems as though for every “free speech area” the courts strike down, another one pops up.
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Private universities are not
legally
barred from establishing “free speech areas,” but you would think that institutions that brag about their openness to debate and the importance of diversity would shun the hypocrisy of free speech zones. But to the illiberal left, “debate” and “diversity” are not so broad as to include ideas with which they disagree.

Many of the incidents involving “free speech zones” would be funny if they weren’t so chilling. A student
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at Modesto Junior College in
California was denied the right to hand out copies of the U.S. Constitution on Constitution Day by campus police. He was informed by a clerical staffer in the Student Development office that there was no room in the “free speech area,” which the staffer referred to as “that little cement area.” Apparently two other students were expressing free speech that day and our budding free speech activist was informed the next available date for him to hand out U.S. Constitutions was several days hence, which obviously would no longer be Constitution Day.
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The U.S. Constitution seems to be a particular target of the illiberal left busybodies who dominate taxpayer-funded schools. In April 2014, two students sued the University of Hawaii at Hilo for preventing them from distributing the Constitution.
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A few months later at Penn State, members of Young Americans for Freedom set up a table to hand out Constitutions.
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The administration, which had violated its own previous commitment to dismantle the zones, told the YAF students that their use of a table to hand out material violated a university policy against unregistered structures.
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In 2014, at Miami-based Broward Community College, a conservative activist was ordered to go to the campus “free speech zone” by a campus security guard after asking a student if “big government sucks.”
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When the activist explained such zones were unconstitutional, the guard informed her, “If you just want to hang around I have a supervisor coming.” The activist walked away, at which point the guard demanded to see her identification. She refused to provide it, because it is neither illegal to ask people questions nor is the United States yet the bureaucratic equivalent of East Germany. So what did the security guard do? He called the police, who showed up within minutes. The police politely asked her to leave, saying she was trespassing. Her group ultimately launched a
Change.org
petition asking Broward College to remove its “unconstitutional” free-speech zone.
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Unfortunately, if students want to exercise their right to free speech they often have to go to court against their own college or university. And it is not just students our colleges and universities aim to silence, it is anyone with an opposing point of view.

COMMENCEMENT SHAMING

It is becoming sadly predictable that whenever a prominent conservative, or even an insufficiently leftist liberal or moderate Democrat, is invited to be a campus commencement speaker, that speaker is often forced to withdraw because of student or faculty protests. I call it “commencement shaming.” What is intended to be an honor ends up in humiliation for the invitee.

In 2014, for example, protests from lefty students and professors compelled two of the most accomplished women in the world—former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde—to withdraw from delivering commencement speeches to Rutgers,
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and Smith College, respectively.
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At Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, students, alumni, and faculty protested to demand the university rescind its commencement invitation to Democratic State Senator Mike Johnston of Colorado, because they disagreed with his policies on school reform. They questioned Johnston’s claim to have been inspired by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders and said they believed the Democratic senator’s “vision and policies have been informed far more by conservative economists . . .”
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Johnston saw what the students and faculty missed: an opportunity for dialogue. He offered to meet with the protesters. Twenty-five protesting students showed up for the meeting, and in the end his speech received a standing ovation.
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Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, delivering the 2014 commencement speech to Harvard University, noted the alarming trend on America’s college campuses of silencing commencement speakers on the basis of protests, often by a vocal minority. Bloomberg—who himself had been the target of protests demanding his invitation to speak be withdrawn—hit on the irony at the root of this phenomenon: it’s “open-minded” liberals who are leading the charge to limit the expression of viewpoints on college campuses. He said, “In each case, liberals silenced a voice [of] individuals they deemed politically objectionable. That is an
outrage.” He added, “Today, on many college campuses, it is liberals trying to repress conservative ideas, even as conservative faculty members are at risk of becoming an endangered species.”

Bloomberg continued: “Like other great universities, [Harvard] lies at the heart of the American experiment in democracy. Their purpose is not only to advance knowledge but to advance the ideals of our nation. . . . Tolerance for other people’s ideas and the freedom to express your own are inseparable values at great universities,” Bloomberg noted. “Joined together, they form a sacred trust that holds the basis of our democratic society. But that trust is perpetually vulnerable to the tyrannical tendencies of monarchs, mobs, and majorities. And lately, we’ve seen those tendencies manifest themselves too often both on college campuses and our society.”

As explained in
chapter one
, the free-speech advocacy group FIRE has noted that in the six years from 2009 through 2014, the number of protests resulting in speech cancelations equals those from the previous twenty-two-year period at 62 instances each.
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Clearly this is an accelerating trend. But liberals should not assume that they are safe from this roving campaign of intolerance. One of the 2014 commencement speakers felled by protesters was Robert J. Birgeneau, the former chancellor of the University of California-Berkeley—a man of impeccable liberal bona fides—who was invited to speak at Haverford College. But Haverford students and several professors complained about his leadership during a 2011 incident when UC police used force on students protesting college costs.
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According to the
Philadelphia Inquirer
, Birgeneau received a letter stating that if he wanted to speak at the commencement, he must “meet nine conditions including publicly apologizing, supporting reparations for the victims, and writing a letter to Haverford students explaining his position on the events and ‘what you learned from them.’”
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Birgeneau understandably declined to meet their chilling demands and withdrew from providing the commencement speech.

The silencing isn’t limited to commencement speeches. Even speeches meant to build bridges and tolerance for differing opinions are off limits.
Renowned Princeton professors Robert George and Cornel West have visited campuses to educate students on the importance of respectfully co-existing with people with whom you disagree. In 2014, they were invited to speak at Swarthmore College on the meaning of discourse. Known for their friendship despite their conflicting political views, they came to discuss topics such as, “What does it mean to communicate across differences regarding what is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’?”

Many students at the famously liberal college protested that they did not want George, a conservative who opposes abortion and gay marriage, expressing his views on their campus. The event went forward. Afterwards, one student complained to the student newspaper that she was “really bothered” with “the whole idea . . . that at a liberal arts college we need to be hearing a diversity of opinion.”
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As ludicrous as that sounds, this view is far from an anomaly. This intolerant viewpoint is endemic among the illiberal left, which views opinions at odds with their ideological and political goals as illegitimate.

In October 2014, Scripps College canceled
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a planned appearance by Pulitzer Prize–winning columnist George Will following protests over a column he wrote questioning the alleged epidemic of rape on college campuses. In it, he noted that, “when [colleges and universities] make victimhood a coveted status that confers privileges, victims proliferate.”
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He went on to question the validity of campus rape statistics. Women’s groups and liberals in general were apoplectic. The controversy followed Will to Miami University in Ohio, where over one thousand students, faculty, and alumni signed an open letter requesting the university disinvite Will.
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Another open letter from the university’s Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty asserted that in Will’s column “he [was] engaging in hate speech as opposed to free speech” and accused him of “bullying” rather than seeking dialogue.
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Sorry, but Will’s column, however upsetting it was to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies faculty, hardly registered as “hate speech.” The faculty apparently missed the irony of trying to ban a columnist from
speaking at their campus while condemning him for his alleged lack of interest in dialogue. Who is the bully here exactly?

One of the professors who objected to Will’s appearance, Anita Mannur, director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, told Media Matters, which was leading a harassment campaign against Will, “I am disappointed that a speaker who clearly does not respect women, or take the issue of sexual assault seriously, is being given a platform to speak, particularly because such inflammatory rhetoric has the potential to re-victimize and re-traumatize some of our students.” Here again we are asked to believe that points of view skeptical of leftist assumptions, data, or campaign should be silenced because they might traumatize students. The final absurdity: Will was not even scheduled to speak to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program, he was invited to lecture at Miami University’s Farmer School of Business.

There was nothing in Will’s column that implied he did not take sexual assault seriously, and certainly nothing that suggested he “does not respect women.” But we see this tactic from the illiberal left all the time. Disagree with us, and we will smear you as a misogynist (or worse).

To their credit, Miami University’s administration did not cave to the mob and the speech went forward. There were no reports of trauma units being overwhelmed at local hospitals following Will’s lecture. But the controversy erupted again when Will was scheduled to be the graduation speaker at Michigan State University, along with documentary filmmaker Michael Moore, who of course has never said anything offensive about conservatives or anyone else. Despite protests, the university refused to cancel the speech, saying, “In any diverse community there are sure to be differences of opinion and perspective; something we celebrate as a learning community. We appreciate all views, and we hope and expect the MSU community will give the speaker the same respect.”
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When Brandeis University was faced with the same kind of intolerant bullying of a prospective speaker, they chose appeasement over free speech. In 2014, after the historic university offered women’s rights activist Ayaan
Hirsi Ali an honorary degree, they caved to student complaints and disinvited her. Hirsi Ali’s unpardonable sin was her expression of fierce criticism of Islam, the religion of her birth and upbringing. It didn’t matter that she was not being honored for any work related to Islam, the mere fact she was a critic was enough to delegitimize her. Hirsi Ali later complained that what was meant to be an honor had turned into a public shaming.

In 2013, Swarthmore alum and former president of the World Bank Robert Zoellick withdrew as the college’s commencement speaker after students protested against him because he supported the Iraq War and served in George W. Bush’s administration.
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Prior to the withdrawal, a Swarthmore associate professor told a reporter that a “relatively small minority of students . . . have questioned Zoellick’s appropriateness” but said most of the students were looking forward to his speech. Too bad for them: the minority mob won. That same year, Mayor Bloomberg’s former police commissioner Ray Kelly was shouted down by students at Brown University and his speech had to be aborted after nearly thirty minutes of interruptions.
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Disrupting speeches has been a favorite tactic for the illiberal left if they are unsuccessful in getting the speech canceled in the first place. At the University of Chicago in 2009, former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert arrived to give what was meant to be a twenty-minute talk on leadership.
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Thanks to protestors, who interrupted throughout, it took more than an hour.
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A year later, the Israeli ambassador to the United States, Michael Oren, suffered through ten interruptions trying to deliver a speech at the University of California-Irvine.
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At one point, Oren was forced to take a twenty-minute break mid-speech.
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