BY HANK REICHMAN
When I saw the headline this morning on Inside Higher Ed, “Another Speaker Unable to Appear at Middlebury,” I immediately thought, “Haven’t those students learned that shutting down speakers is not only wrong but counter-productive?” Two years ago Middlebury students famously shouted down conservative speaker Charles Murray and a faculty member was injured in a scuffle that ensued. Public reaction was not favorable to the students, to say the least, and not only among those who may agree with Murray’s politics.
It turns out, however, that the student protesters did indeed learn their lesson; it was the Middlebury administration that did not.
Ryszard Legutko
Yesterday the college administration cancelled a talk by right-wing Polish politician and academic Ryszard Legutko “in the interest of ensuring the safety of students, faculty, staff and community members.” Legutko had been invited by the Alexander Hamilton Forum, a faculty-led organization. Students and others in the Middlebury community objected to the invitation, most specifically to Legutko’s intolerant comments about gay rights. His talk was to be entitled “The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies.” Middlebury Russian Professor Kevin Moss, who studies gender in Eastern Europe, told the campus newspaper that he first encountered Legutko’s position on tolerance and the LGBT community when he saw that he had made incendiary comments about homosexuality on a Polish news channel. “Through my colleagues in Poland I became aware of what else he had said, and what his views were, and it turned out that the ‘demon’ in democracy that he is referring to is tolerance,” Moss said.
The administration cited “security and safety risks” for its cancellation, yet it provided absolutely no evidence to justify those risks. As Chris Newfield suggested in an email, their approach was reminiscent of Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s famous charge that he had a list of Communists in the State Department, but refused to reveal their names. Similarly, the Middlebury administration implies that they know of potential disrupters, but they too decline to name them.
In fact, students were planning to protest the talk, but, mindful of what happened when Murray came, they were adamant that their actions would be peaceful and non-disruptive. “We decided that it would be better for the safety of students who want to be involved in this protest if we did not try to stop Legutko from speaking,” organizer Taite Shomo said. “It is absolutely, unequivocally not the intent of this protest and those participating in this protest to prevent Legutko from speaking. Disruptive behavior of this nature will not be tolerated,” he wrote in a Facebook post promoting the protest.
Legutko still spoke on campus, but to a private classroom audience. He delivered his lecture to Political Science Professor Matthew Dickinson’s “American Presidency” seminar. The talk, initially intended for the nine students in Dickinson’s class, became a pseudo-public event as students arrived over the course of the talk, which continued about 15 minutes after the class period ended.
According to Dickinson, the event was entirely impromptu. “I asked the students, as part of the classroom experience, do you want to invite him in here to critique his argument,” Dickinson said. When students expressed interest, Dickinson administered a secret ballot. He said that he would not invite the speaker unless there was a unanimous decision to invite him, which there was. Before Legutko arrived, Dickinson had students research the politician’s views and formulate questions. “We spent the first hour of class conducting our own research to gather questions for discussion,” said Owen Marsh, a student in the class.
I think that the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) sometimes exaggerates the extent of student protest against outside speakers and occasionally implicitly and unfairly places blame on protesting students for the actions of a handful, at times not even students. But in this case FIRE’s Nico Perrino hit the nail squarely on the head. Referring to Dickinson’s class, he wrote,
What resulted is exactly what you would hope for at a liberal arts institution: a grappling with ideas. Vigorous debate. There was no disruptive protest. No violence. Only learning, according to reports.
But the only reason this could occur is because Professor Dickinson had the courage to exercise his academic freedom rights within his classroom — free (this time, anyway) from administrative control. For that, he should be commended. And for that, his students should be thankful.
The Middlebury administration’s actions, Perrino wrote, not only “deprived a willing audience from hearing Legutko’s arguments.” They “deprived student critics of Legutko from challenging those arguments, either through peaceful protest or pointed questions.” They also “deprived faculty members from exercising their academic freedom right to invite speakers to campus in service of educating their students.” Middlebury administrators should be ashamed of themselves.
Thanks for this analysis of the Middlebury situation. I was fascinated that so many people blamed the “mob” of students at Middlebury for this speaker being banned, when those student protesters went to extraordinary efforts to oppose and prevent any disruption. One of those critics of the “mob” was Robert George of Princeton, so I asked him about this. He responded:
“My understanding is that Middlebury’s senior administrators cancelled the Legutko lecture because they feared disruption and possible violence—disruption and violence that could not be prevented, or against which people could not be adequately protected, by campus security officers or local police. Although I am critical of the College’s administration for cancelling the lecture (which creates the precedent of the heckler’s veto), I’m willing to take the administrators at their word about their reasons for cancelling the lecture. If, however, the administrators are not telling the truth—if without significant risk of disruption and violence they cancelled the lecture—then they deserve to be criticized much more severely than I have criticized them. I don’t doubt that some, perhaps most, protestors wanted a peaceful protest. But either there was a reasonable basis for administrators to believe that there was a significant risk of violent disruption or there was not. Either there were people responsible for creating a reasonable basis for administrators to fear violent disruption, or the administration cancelled the lecture without such a basis.”
I don’t agree with George’s response here. The fact that the student group organizing the only protest against the speech was emphatically opposed to any disruption should carry some strong weight, both in judging Middlebury’s students and in how the administration should have reacted. It should also be noted that part of the reason for the cancellation was that the administration said that they could not adequately protect the protesters from being attacked, not just the fear about the speaker’s event. If the administration had some evidence of danger, they ought to disclose those facts now.