BY JOHN K. WILSON
Two cancelled speeches last week, at Beloit College and Columbia University, have brought new attention to the issue of censoring speakers. At Beloit College, a speech by Erik Prince was cancelled out of fear of student protesters. At Columbia University, a panel about censorship in Turkey was cancelled because the administration felt it wasn’t balanced enough.
The Columbia cancellation was particularly ironic because one speaker on the banned panel works for PEN America, and the subject of banning speakers is one focus of an exhaustive new report on campus liberty by PEN America.
The PEN America report includes a lot of thoughtful ideas about maintaining the sometimes difficult balance between the right to speak and the right to protest. But one problem with it is the lack of balance. You’ll find an enormous amount of attention to the high-profile protests by leftist students similar to Beloit College. But almost nothing in the PEN America report addresses the problem of administrators censoring speakers, often at the behest of powerful right-wing interests, as happened at Columbia University.
The Beloit College cancellation, even though it happened at a small college in the rural Midwest rather than at a top university in the media capital of the world, attracted more attention because it fits a right-wing media narrative about leftists as oppressors. And it’s remarkable how much misinformation has spread about the Beloit case.
InsideHigherEd’s story on the PEN America report noted, “In some cases, most recently at Beloit College, students have blocked some speakers whose views they find objectionable.” It was a common assertion. Even Joel Simon, executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, claimed in the Columbia Journalism Review (which reported on the Beloit case but not the Columbia one): “a group of students used drums and musical instruments to disrupt Prince’s talk.”
But that account is not actually true. At Beloit College, Blackwater founder Erik Prince was prevented from speaking, but was not blocked by any students. It was the administration and its security that chose not to begin the speech and then cancel it.
About five minutes after the speech was scheduled to start, four students arrived with musical instruments and engaged in loud drumming. That may be obnoxious (like most drumming), but until someone tries to start an event, all the drumming in the world is just pre-show entertainment. You can’t use noise to disrupt an event that never begins. That’s like disrupting a movie by talking loudly before the movie starts.
It’s not clear if the protesters wanted to engage in a short protest, or planned to prevent Prince from ever speaking. And that matters a great deal. You can’t find students guilty of shouting down a speaker who never speaks. And nothing in advance of the speech was a threat or action that prevented anyone from beginning the speech.
The university chose to ban the event for “safety reasons,” out of an excess of caution, or more likely because they didn’t want to risk the PR damage of having their students try to shout down a speaker.
The student newspaper reported, “The entire thing was mostly 30 minutes of laughter, clapping, and intermittent shouts of ‘Erik Prince where are you?’”
As one attendee noted, “There was absolutely no reason Mr. Prince could not have taken the stage at 7:30 to deliver his talk. At best, there would have been a slight disruption as people walked out. …We all sat there patiently waiting for Prince. He never showed himself. Finally at 8:00 PM, having waited a half an hour, people got up and placed their chairs on the stage as a sign of protest. At 8:15, when it was finally announced that Prince would not speak, the chairs were removed and the room restored to its original condition.”
The university declared, “Due to disruptive protests and safety concerns, the event hosted by the Young Americans for Freedom featuring speaker Erik Prince had to be cancelled to ensure the safety of all participants.”
The college president sent an angry email lecturing “those who disrupted the talk.” But nobody disrupted the talk because the university refused to let it begin. According to the conservative students, they “waited for the go-ahead from security to enter Moore Lounge and begin the lecture” and then were told that it was cancelled by the College.
The campus newspaper reported that one of the drummers at the event said “the group had not restricted Prince’s freedom of speech. They argued that he had been able to come out to Moore Lounge at any point.”
The president, Scott Bierman, was able to ban his cake and eat it, too. He banned a controversial speaker and then was able to blame the protesters, and “condemn excessive disruptions unequivocally.“
That’s a lovely condemnation, but there was never any excessive disruption by the students, only a hunch that they might do so when Prince gave his speech.
According to the account by campus security, “it was obvious that the protesters were not going to allow the speech to take place. At that time, it was decided that we would need to cancel the event for the safety of our students, and to avoid further escalation that would necessitate involvement from Beloit Police.”
So the real reason why the event was cancelled was to avoid calling in the city police who were waiting outside, because it was “obvious” that the students would disrupt the event. And how do they know this?
According to the director of security, “We spoke with the students, who stated that they intended to play the drums and cymbals throughout Mr. Prince’s speech. We attempted to reason with them, but they refused to comply with requests not to play the drums during the speech. The students made it very clear that they would not disperse unless we had them restrained and carried out.”
Really? All you need to do to get a speech banned is say that you intend to disrupt the speech? And let’s say that this account is accurate, and the students did say that. Saying you plan to disrupt an event is fundamentally different from actually disrupting it. The refusal to arrest students who might hypothetically disrupt an event is not an adequate reason to ban an event.
All it took to stop this event was four guys with drums (who actually left the room at one point). An op-ed in the local Beloit newspaper lamented, “Beloit College kneeled to a mob.” But there was no mob. A social justice student group had arranged a walkout and alternative events such as a drag show, while advising against any disruption. The entire concern was about four drummers.
After waiting more than half an hour, the students got bored, and decided to declare victory and pile their chairs on the stage. This was incorrectly reported by Breitbart this way: “Erik Prince’s scheduled speech at Beloit College was delayed by at least 40 minutes while students took chairs and began stacking them on the stage…” This was stupid, rude, and intolerant, but a minute’s worth of chair stacking is not something that actually prevents a speech from going forward.
What happened at Beloit was censorship by the administration, not by students, and it’s far worse than any disruption by students.
But the censorship at Columbia was worse still. The cancellation of an event by the administration is much, much more serious than people shouting down a speaker. The reason is that a shout-down is always condemned by an administration. By contrast, when the administration censors an event, it sends a message to all faculty and staff that they should not organize controversial events or even speak out the wrong way on issues such as this.
When multiple groups co-sponsor an event and one of them wishes to withdraw, then the event must continue so long as one group wants it to happen. A university can only cancel an event when every group authorized to make a room reservation decides to cancel it, which did not happen here. As long as one group still wants to hold the event, they are free to do so. The fact that some faculty and some programs refuse to participate or wish to withdraw from the event is no excuse for a cancellation.
The possibility that Turkish government was involved in this censorship is frightening, and Columbia needs to be transparent and fully disclose all contacts and emails from anyone lobbying to stop this event, as well as internal emails about the reasons for this action. But banning an event is absolutely indefensible even if a foreign government was not involved, and even if there are plans to reschedule it.
Unfortunately, in the rhetoric about political correctness, cases of censorship blamed on the left as at Beloit receive far more attention than censorship on the right, and few will ever realize that the key problem at Beloit was the administration banning a speech, not leftist students disrupting it. The fact that even a thoughtful PEN America report can devote page after page to leftist censorship of speakers without really mentioning censorship of right-wing speakers is a sign of how powerful the right’s rhetoric has been in shaping the terms of our public debate.
The writer I think underscores why the free speech contention on college campuses isn’t so much about the constitution, the first amendment or even the students, but rather about tort law and liability. Universities are fearful of lawsuits stemming from a number of cause of action bases, and seek to preempt that risk by foreclosing its possibility. In that regard it is merely corporate risk management. And that’s what modern universities are before they are learning, teaching and research centers: financial corporations. This story also might make one consider whether university administrations should simply exit the speech, assembly and speaker policy roles, and let students and faculty organize, operate and assume responsibility for, all such events. This in itself would be a learning experience, and corporate level risk is very simple to manage through indemnification, ADR agreement (alternative dispute resolution), and the establishment of non territorial, non jurisdiction venues. I discuss the legal complications further in the Wall Steet Journal in The Government and Free Speech on College Campus. Thank you and Regards.
I think risk management is not the only value at a campus, and even by that standard censorship is a bad idea. When you cancel events out of fear of a protest, you encourage future protests to disrupt events because they know the tactic is effective. So censorship doesn’t reduce the risk, it increases the risk of violence in the future.
The Beloit incident is reminiscent of the now infamous speech by Ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick in Wheeler Auditorium at UC Berkeley in the 1980s. As part of my research on central America I was in attendance. So were a dozen or so student activists from CISPES, the Committee in Solidarity with the People of El Salvador. The students heckled Kirkpatrick as she opened her remarks. She took umbrage and stormed off the stage. Of course, there was no excuse for doing that – she was simply unwilling to engage with her critics or to speak over or around them as members of the UK Parliament do quite readily. In fact, a few minutes later the Ambassador returned to the stage and finished her remarks unimpeded. But that did not stop the right wing from using the incident to claim left wing censorship when nothing of the sort occurred.
Similarly, at an event recently at CUNY Law School a conservative law professor was mildly heckled by a group of students prior to beginning his talk but was easily able to begin his speech and even to engage with the students for a few minutes and then finish his remarks after the student protesters left. This law professor has now turned this event into a myth of being “deplatformed” in an attempt at an academic paper: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3362682. The reality is that he was mildly heckled before beginning to speak, engaged with the protestors as he started his remarks and then when the students left, finished his talk. No deplatforming. Here is my account of the event based on video, some of which was shot by the law professor himself: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3362682
These are some interesting examples of the difference between rude behavior and deplatforming. But the Beloit example is different from these: Erik Prince wanted to speak, but it was the administration that decided not to allow it, and the protesters never had the chance to do anything, so we can’t know if they would have heckled him briefly or shouted him down to deplatform him. What happened at Beloit was not a heckler’s veto, but a fear-of-hecklers veto by the administration.
From a witness perspective: I think that he didn’t intend to speak, he could’ve entered that auditorium at any time, none of the entrances were blocked, and the chairs were stacked on stage roughly 45 minutes after he was slated to speak, and there was no way for the administration to know that the drumming would continue if he showed up. This is similar the the Jeanne Kirkpatrick situation as Prince seemed to cancel the event himself, and then somehow corralled 50 people to meet him at a hotel in downtown beloit. Most of the student body considered him to be a no-show, and administrators cancelled the event after he decided to bail.