Keep Students Safe From the Heckler’s Veto Colleges encourage more violence when they appease mobs. By Robert Shibley
https://www.wsj.com/articles/keep-students-safe-from-the-hecklers-veto-1506551849?mod=nwsrl_commentary_u_s_&cx_refModule=nwsrl#cx_testId=16&cx_testVariant=ctrl&cx_artPos=11
Jeff Sessions has joined the debate over censorship on campus. At Georgetown Tuesday, the attorney general criticized institutions that capitulate to the heckler’s veto—when “administrators discourage or prohibit speech if there is even a threat that it will be met with protest.”
It’s been a banner year for hecklers, including violent ones. The University of North Carolina says that it “is not willing to risk anyone’s safety” to allow white nationalist Richard Spencer to speak on campus. He’s banned at Michigan State “due to significant concerns about public safety,” and at Texas A&M, though he spoke there last December.
At Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash., professors had to hold classes off campus in a park while police politely asked radical students to stop arming themselves with bats and “patrolling” campus.
Social scientist Charles Murray was literally chased out of Middlebury College in Vermont, then disinvited from Assumption College in Massachusetts. Conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos still hasn’t spoken at the University of California, Berkeley, where Antifa extremists rioted to stop his appearance in February. Neither has Ann Coulter, leading her would-be student hosts to sue.
A recent Associated Press report claims colleges are “grappling with how to balance students’ physical safety with free speech.” But the idea that free speech is in opposition with safety is nonsensical.
You are not safe if you are under threat of physical attack for expressing or listening to political views. Debate and dissent are normal parts of living in a free and diverse society, and that should be especially true at an educational institution. Silencing dissenters in the name of physical safety simply punishes the victims of wrongful, sometimes criminal behavior.
In no other situation do colleges simply throw up their hands and say that student safety is an unreachable goal. Campuses have vast bureaucracies dedicated to combating sexual assault, eliminating discriminatory harassment, and discouraging alcohol abuse. Emergency phones, designated drivers and safe-escort programs are thick on the ground. Colleges even attend to students’ “emotional safety” by setting up “bias response” teams that “intervene” when somebody says something hurtful.
Yet colleges have allowed the heckler’s veto to flourish, which only encourages more violence. Under its new chancellor, Berkeley reportedly spent up to $600,000 to ensure that commentator Ben Shapiro was able to speak on campus two weeks ago. Critics moan about the expense, dismissing such speeches as stunts unworthy of academia and not worth the price. But the cost of bowing to mob rule is far higher.
Making the statement that violence will not be allowed to substitute for debate will save far more in the long run—and, more important, teach the coming generation about how a free society resolves its differences.
Mr. Shibley is executive director of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.
Comments are closed.
