What in the world were administrators at the University of California Berkeley thinking when they decided not to let conservative provocateur Ann Coulter make a speech on campus?
Berkeley is one of the schools where the idea of academic freedom of speech prominently took root during the civil rights era five decades ago. Now the school is claiming that because so many people might object to what Coulter says, the event became a security risk and therefore had to be cancelled.
Berkeley apparently has forgotten the whole idea of freedom of speech. It’s in the Constitution to guarantee the airing of unpopular viewpoints and to challenge robotic groupthink.
Berkeley is a well-known haven for liberals, so Coulter and the student groups who invited her to speak are clearly in the minority. But no one is required to listen to her. Anybody who dislikes what she says can simply stay away, or protest peacefully if they wish.
The university deserved the lawsuit filed against it by the student groups, which claim the decision to cancel Coulter’s appearance violated their right to free speech.
Further, the school’s claim that it fears violence if Coulter appears — she says she may still show up on campus today — only encourages more threats of disruption by protesters. The end result is to exclude unpopular opinions, and a university is the last place where that should happen.
This is the second time in the past three months that Berkeley’s administration has caved into student protests against conservative speakers. In February, Milo Yiannopoulos, a controversial former editor at the ultraconservative Breitbart News website, was forced to cancel his speech and leave campus under a police escort.
Conservatives have received similar rough treatment in recent months on other U.S. campuses, too. Charles Murray had to talk over screaming demonstrators at Middlebury College before being ushered to a video studio to finish his presentation online. Students and professors were blocked by protesters from entering the building at Claremont Mckenna College from hearing Heather Mac Donald make her case in defense of police.
Such efforts to silence opinions with which the established majority disagrees amounts to what Mac Donald describes as “soft totalitarianism.” It doesn’t matter whether it’s liberals silencing conservatives, as in these cases, or conservatives silencing liberals, college administrators should stand up to the bullying. If dissenting students and faculty are not confident enough in their own opinions that they can’t stand to have them challenged, maybe their opinions aren’t that well-grounded in the first place.
Besides, such censorship is self-defeating. Rather than stopping minority opinions from being aired, it ends up giving them a larger audience.
One of the cherished principles in this country is freedom of speech. It is essential to American democracy to maintain a vigorous marketplace of ideas everywhere in the public square. Let the best ideas prevail on the merit of their arguments, not on who has the muscle to force theirs on others and silence everyone else’s.
When campus administrations give into the anti-free-speech bullies, they set a dangerous precedent that could later haunt faculty members whose opinions may not be in the mainstream.
If an oversized police presence is needed in order to uphold the right of various opinions to be aired on college campuses, so be it. That’s a small price to pay to defend something as important as free speech.
