When Conservatives Suppress Campus Speech

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/17/opinion/conservatives-campus-speech-wisconsin.html

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I only remember a little of what I learned during my first days as a University of Wisconsin-Madison freshman in the late 1990s. The vegetarian chili sold in the student union’s bar tasted of beans and sawdust. The most important unwritten rule required freshmen to take blurry Polaroid pictures of ourselves seated atop the lap of the Abraham Lincoln statue at 2 a.m. And if we wanted to protest anything, we could.

So I was shocked when the leaders of the University of Wisconsin System approved an anti-protest policy in early October that punishes any of the 182,000 students at the state’s 13 public colleges who disrupt campus speeches and presentations. A student can be suspended or expelled for engaging in violence “or other disorderly conduct,” but it’s unclear what constitutes such behavior. The argument behind the new policy is that students need to listen to all viewpoints and opinions. This rationale pretends that the anti-protest policy protects all discourse, but it excludes the views of the students who are protesting.

The move is part of efforts by the state’s Republican lawmakers to privilege conservative speech over liberal speech. It was approved by the 18-member Board of Regents, 16 of whom were appointed by the Republican governor, Scott Walker. And it’s virtually identical to anti-heckling legislation passed by the Republican-majority State Assembly last June. The president of the regents reportedly told the board before the vote that enacting the policy demonstrates “a responsiveness to what’s going on in the Capitol, which helps build relationships.” Apparently, making sure universities agree with the desires of Republican legislators is a higher calling than protecting students’ rights.

This is particularly outrageous given University of Wisconsin’s long and illustrious history of student protest, which my professors proudly pointed out during freshman orientation. Students defended socialists in 1910, argued for women’s suffrage in 1919, and, in the 1960s, opposed everything from segregated lunch counters to nuclear testing to the draft. Madison’s current mayor and University of Wisconsin alum, Paul Soglin, got his political start by leading years of protests against the Vietnam War. I participated in the February 1999 protest that culminated in the university’s chancellor, David Ward, signing tougher anti-sweatshop guidelines for companies that did business with the school, and the September 1999 walkout to protest tuition hikes.

As a black student at what has always been a very white university, the freedom to protest meant that I had a chance to get the university to listen to my viewpoints, even if university officials didn’t agree with them. For students who are threatened or belittled by the status quo, or simply choose to oppose it, campus protests are one of the most compelling ways to signal dissatisfaction.

And student protests at universities like University of Wisconsin have been held in particularly high regard, because Wisconsin students are traditionally seen as respectable, white, middle- to upper-class people who are attending university in order to learn skills that send them off into the kinds of careers that make them pillars of their communities. This doesn’t mean protests at places like University of Wisconsin are more important. But rather, the factors that have historically allowed students on Wisconsin college campuses to protest without undue pushback from college administrators have made colleges generally more protected environments in which to engage in free speech. So any threat to the rights to protest and speak openly in the university environment means the future of free speech elsewhere in our country looks dim.

The only campus protest cited in the discussion of the new anti-protest rule issue is when students shouted down and “traded obscene gestures” with the ex-Breitbart editor Ben Shapiro last year. So school administrators must be quaking in their boots at the idea that students might stand up and disrupt a speaker, an activity students there have engaged in since at least 1918, when students disrupted a talk by the historian Robert McNutt McElroy. But now verbal interruptions are clearly so dangerous to the functioning of Wisconsin’s public universities that they must be stopped.

The University of Wisconsin System, by punishing student protests, is turning its back on more than a century of its own storied history and stated values in order to protect conservative opinions that are apparently too fragile to withstand a round of student yelling. But surely a little heckling isn’t sufficient cause to take away free speech rights.