Stifling University Free Speech: A Tale of Two Campuses
Last week, student demonstrators at the University of Michigan drowned out the University president’s speech during an Honors Convocation and brought an end to the event. The protest was organized by the TAHRIR Coalition, a group of 80 University of Michigan student organizations advocating for boycott, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. Ironically, the Michigan student chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, once associated with free speech, is part of the coalition and helped to organize the protest.
Also last week, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) was at the University of Maryland to deliver the Irving and Renee Milchberg Endowed Lecture on the subject of “Democracy, Autocracy and the Threat to Reason in the 21st Century.” Here, too, student protestors shouted down and heckled Rep. Raskin. Here, too, the event ended abruptly. Raskin had only been able to deliver a few minutes of his intended lecture.
In Michigan and Maryland, we see two polar opposite responses to infringements on freedom of speech: one that endeavors to uphold free speech values and one, while using words that suggest otherwise, that fundamentally undermines campus speech. We can only hope that the Michigan model prevails.
Darryll Pines, president of the University of Maryland, seemed positive about the outcome of the Raskin lecture. “What you saw play out actually was democracy and free speech and academic freedom.” Professor Howard Milchberg, a professor of Physics at the university, reiterated the president’s sentiments: “It didn’t go as planned…it was an actual exercise of democracy rather than a story of about democracy.”
Back at Michigan, the response of the university president was, at first, to release a fairly milquetoast statement on the right to protest but not to disrupt. This was followed, however, by three students who had been identified as part of the protest being issued citations for trespassing. These students are barred from entering four campus buildings and may now be unable, in a poetic turn of events, to attend their own graduation.
A spokesperson for the University of Michigan stated: “Although we support students’ right to protest, such rights are not limitless. Disrupting speakers and events is not protected speech and is a clear violation of university policy.”
Both the University of Michigan and the University of Maryland are public universities and therefore bound by constitutional protections under the First Amendment. Indeed, the University of Maryland purports to take freedom of speech on campus so seriously that in 2018 it adopted a Statement on Free Speech Values. It states that “every member of the campus community has an obligation to support the right of free expression at the university, and to refrain from actions that reduce intellectual discussion.”
The University of Maryland goes on to say: “ The right to speak on campus is not a right to speak at any time, at any place, and in any manner that a person wishes. … the First Amendment does not protect an individual’s right to disrupt a class... Freedom of speech does not give one permission to silence the speech of others by shouting, heckling, or otherwise disrupting a speech to the point that the speaker cannot continue or that the audience can no longer listen, and UMD policy expressly prohibits such interference.”
It is all the more remarkable, then, that the president of the University of Maryland and a professor of Physics at that same university would characterize the disruption of Rep. Raskin’s lecture as a win for freedom of speech and democratic values. Perhaps the president simply needs a refresher on his university’s free speech policies. Perhaps he disagrees with those policies. Or perhaps, for President Pines, this was the path of least resistance – allowing the protestors to shut down the lecture was the most politically expedient option available to him - which he could then characterize, after the fact, as a sign of the university’s commitment to its students’ freedom of speech.
These two responses are indicative of two models that have emerged of how universities address free speech issues and protests. The “Maryland” model wherein a right to protest is limitless and disruptions to campus events are praised by the president, and the “Michigan” model, wherein the demonstrators can shut down an event but be punished after the fact. Neither is entirely satisfactory.
The better response is for universities to anticipate disruptive behavior—after all, the students usually telegraph it in advance—and to intervene or stop it on the spot. However, the University of Michigan response suggests that at least some university administrations are no longer willing to undermine campus free speech policies. Michigan provides a kernel of hope that universities will return to their founding mission of free inquiry and free speech. One can only hope that President Pines and Maryland come to realize that heckling a speaker is no speech at all.
