A Heckler's Warning

Balancing free speech with students’ objections to speakers with unpopular views has become a messy task in recent years. With students, the rights of free speech can come into conflict with the need to feel safe and welcome. Although the problem has recently surfaced all across the country, the most public episode was the shouting down of the conservative, Charles Murray, at Dartmouth last year.

Four months later when Murray was to appear at the University of Michigan, the experience was very different than that at Dartmouth. The problem has a long history. My college grappled with the issue back in the 1950s. But with the polarization in our country, the issue has become more front and center.

Part of the problem is that students often come to college having never interacted with someone with a different viewpoint or different lifestyle. Today’s homogeneous residential neighborhoods limit the opportunities for diverse interactions. There are also virtual reality silos where similar views can be curated so that one’s perspectives are always affirmed and never challenged.

Of course, there’s also a bit of imitation going on. The student brain thinks that they did it at Dartmouth so we can do it here in Podunk Center.

The best way to deal with the issue is...

the way U Michigan and U Chicago have dealt with the problem. They intend to have open conversations, supporting free speech. And so, the student is prepared for the university response. Michigan, for example, formed an “engagement team” that included faculty, student leaders and public safety officers in a dialog with the organizers of the talk from a speaker with unpopular views. They let students know that they were fully committed to the right of the speaker to speak and the right of hearers to hear. They also let students know that students who wanted to dissent had to do so “in a way that didn’t preclude others’ rights.”

The protocol is that when students start to heckle, they are given a warning and explained the principles behind it. After five minutes the students are asked to be quiet again, or they will be removed by public safety officers. Typically, the students leave, or if they start to heckle again, they are forcibly removed.

In a blog from 2016, I explained how the University of Chicago has gone even further. Here's the verbatim from the dean of students at the University of Chicago, pushing back against recent college trends.

We do not support so-called trigger warnings, we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial and we do not condone the creation of intellectual 'safe spaces' where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own. 

The dean concludes with this statement: Civility and mutual respect are vital to the campus culture, but not at the expense of shielding students from unpopular opinions or ideas.

David Axelrod, the director of the UC Institute of politics, nails the issue with a quote from Van Jones, a news commentator who spoke at the institute: We owe it to you to keep you from physical harm, but we don’t owe it to you to keep you from ideas you find abhorrent. We want you to be strong not safe. Because the world is going to demand that you be strong.