March 30, 2007
Columbia University and Free Speech (for Selected People Only, of Course—We’re a University) Posted by John Steele Gordon at 12:35 PM EST Last fall a group of Columbia University student thugs violently prevented a speaker from the Minutemen, a group concerned with illegal immigration, from finishing a talk that he had been invited to give by a campus organization. They invaded the auditorium and forced him off the stage. You can see the video of the incident here. Quite a lively discussion followed on this blog when I brought the subject up. I wrote that as far as I knew this sort of behavior on the nation’s campuses was exclusively the province of the left. At least I could think of no incident where right-leaning students had prevented a speaker from peacefully having his say at a campus event. Neither could any other contributor to this blog. After a five-month investigation (it took five months to investigate an incident that lasted five minutes?), Columbia has finally punished the perpetrators of this outrage against free speech and academic inquiry. Their punishment? According to the student newspaper, “they were charged with simple violations of the University’s Rules of Conduct. The resulting warnings . . . will be notated on students’ transcripts and remain there until the end of 2008.” Boy, that’ll teach ’em not to commit the intellectual equivalent of armed robbery. One wonders what they would have gotten if they had simply shot the speaker in order to shut him up. A two-week suspension, perhaps? If you think the punishment does not exactly fit the crime, the students involved entirely agree: “It’s a light punishment, it’s a slap on the wrist,” said one of them, Monique Dols, a graduate student. “It’s a victory for free speech and anti-racism.” No punishment at all for the violent suppression of free speech at an institution supposedly dedicated to it is a victory for free speech? George Orwell, call your office. Perhaps the reason this sort of behavior is exclusively a province of the left is that the campus authorities encourage it by their reaction, or rather non-reaction, to it. Does anyone think that, had the Columbia Republicans (the group that had sponsored the Minutemen talk) violently disrupted a speech by, say, Cindy Sheehan, this would have been the only result?
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