Newsletter

September 2009

Why No One Should Be Silenced On Campus

Robert L. Shibley

WHEN CONSERVATIVE columnist
Don Feder spoke at UMass-Amherst last month, his speech was cut short by a
large group of students whose noisy and disruptive antics drove Feder off
the lectern midway through his speech. As one UMass student wrote after the
event, “I am embarrassed of the way
my fellow classmates have chosen to express their discontent.” She should
be—
but she should also know that she is not the only one who is due for some
embarrassment.

America’s campuses are
seeing a growing movement by students to shut
off debate by organized groups and silence speakers with whom they
disagree. Rather than engage in the give-and-take that should be
characteristic of the university as a “marketplace of ideas,” these students
have decided that opposing views don’t even bear hearing. And all too often
they are aided by administrators whose policies reward hecklers rather than
students who wish to engage in civil debate
and dialogue.

UMass is one of those
campuses. After word got out that students were planning to protest Feder’s
speech, the UMass-Amherst Police Department pressured Feder’s hosts, the
Republican Club, into paying nearly
three times as much in security costs for the event as they had planned. Of
course, the student hecklers disrupted the event anyway with no interference
by the police.

Feder’s hecklers were
thereby handed a double victory by the university — not only did they manage to silence Feder, but they also succeeded in
forcing their political enemies on campus to pay a huge security bill for
little return. This tactic was so successful it’s hard to imagine that the
same UMass students won’t do it again, and
it’s unlikely that the lesson has been lost on students who sympathize with
Feder.

The real casualty of the
heckling “arms race” fostered by such policies will be the possibility of
getting a truly liberal education. The more violent and disruptive the
threatened protest, the higher the security costs will be demanded of the
host, giving those most willing to be violent the strongest veto over
campus discourse.

At the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), where I work, we tell students that
if they have gone through four years of college without ever being offended
or having their beliefs challenged, they should ask for their money back.
John Stuart Mill, in his 1859 treatise “On Liberty,” observed that nobody
is infallible, and that an opinion we detest might be right, or, even if
wrong, might “contain a portion of truth” that we would otherwise have
missed. Might Feder’s opinions have contained that “portion of truth?” UMass
students may never know.

Charging a higher security
fee for controversial speeches is not just unwise; on a public university
campus it is also unconstitutional. In Forsyth County v. Nationalist
Movement (1992), the Supreme Court struck down a county ordinance that
permitted the local government to set varying fees for events based upon how
much police protection they believed an event would need. The Court stated
that “[s]peech cannot be financially burdened, any more than it can be
punished or banned, simply because it might offend a hostile mob.” Public
universities must meet the same First Amendment standard.

FIRE
has asked UMass to revoke its excessive security fee for Feder’s speech
—
so far, without response. However, other campuses have begun to address the
problem. After FIRE protested the University of California at
Berkeley’s decision to charge a student group
$3,000 to host a speech about the Arab-Israeli conflict, Berkeley agreed to
reduce the fee to the normal amount and to use only viewpoint-neutral
criteria to determine such fees going forward. FIRE has also asked
the University of Colorado at Boulder to revoke a similar fee charged for
an event featuring controversial professors William Ayers and Ward
Churchill. CU-Boulder has yet to respond.

Berkeley has it right. The
First Amendment has made America unique in the world in its respect for the
rights of controversial speakers—
some of whom, inevitably, turn out to be right. In a free society like ours,
universities should serve as the ultimate “free speech zones,” where
anyone’s ideas can be examined and discussed. Eliminating the “heckler’s
veto” is the only way to ensure that the nation’s universities can continue
to serve this vital function.

Robert L. Shibley, an attorney, is vice president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
New York Times, April 9, 2009.