BY HANK REICHMAN
I thought of the old adage in my title when I read the following in today’s San Francisco Chronicle:
UC Berkeley police are investigating the theft of names and emails of people interested in joining the Berkeley College Republicans, the student group whose invitation to Milo Yiannopoulos of Breitbart News prompted a night of student protests and anarchist mayhem last week.
The Republicans had their usual table set up on Sproul Plaza at noon on Feb. 2, the day after the forced cancellation of the Yiannopoulos talk, when someone approached and took the signup sheet, said Sgt. Sabrina Reich, spokeswoman for the campus police, who received a formal complaint about it on Saturday.
Although members of the Republican group recovered the signup sheet, “the individual took a photo of the list and fled the area,” Reich said.
Later, people on the list received “harassing emails” asking about their attendance at the Yiannopoulos event and warning of “negative repercussions,” such as making their names and addresses public, Reich said.
Meanwhile, a blogger who opposes Yiannopoulos and the student Republicans has posted the list on the Web.
This is not right, people!
In a recent statement on Targeted Online Harassment of Faculty the AAUP decried the posting of faculty names and contact information on blacklisting sites and noted that
Individual faculty members who have been included on such lists or singled out elsewhere have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings. Such threatening messages are likely to stifle the free expression of the targeted faculty member; further, the publicity that such cases attracts can cause others to self-censor so as to avoid being subjected to similar treatment. Thus, targeted online harassment is a threat to academic freedom.
While that statement was concerned with the academic freedom of faculty members, the freedom of other members of the university community, especially students, to express their opinions and to affiliate with whichever legal organizations they may wish must also be protected. The 1967 Joint Statement on the Rights and Freedoms of Students, issued by the AAUP and several other organizations stated clearly:
Student organizations may be required to submit a statement of purpose, criteria for membership, rules of procedure, and a current list of officers. They should not be required to submit a membership list as a condition of institutional recognition.
Campus organizations, including those affiliated with an extramural organization, should be open to all students without respect to race, creed, or national origin, except for religious qualifications which may be required by organizations whose aims are primarily sectarian.
Regular readers of this blog will be right to assume that I am not a Republican. And I was repulsed by the willingness of the Berkeley College Republicans to invite the penny-ante thug Yiannopoulos to speak. Although that is their right, it does not reflect well on their judgment or their views.
Nevertheless, the person who stole their sign-up list and the idiot who posted it online have done no service either to the cause of free expression or to the movement to oppose the sort of bigotry that Yiannopoulos fosters. The freedom of all members of the campus community to think their own thoughts, advocate their own views — even repellent ones — and affiliate with whatever organizations or individuals they so wish must be inviolable.
Two wrongs definitely don’t make a right in this case.
