A Campus-Politics Whodunit: Who Invited James O’Keefe to Speak at Middlebury?

For an event that received such heavy promotion, James O’Keefe’s speech last month at Middlebury College — well, near Middlebury College — seemed anticlimactic.

Mr. O’Keefe, the self-styled undercover journalist whose Project Veritas sting operations try to embarrass media outlets and liberal politicians, showed up in a drab hotel conference room a couple of miles away from campus. Only a few dozen people turned out. He spoke for about 80 minutes and left without much fanfare.

Middlebury is no stranger to speech controversy. In March, when the political scientist Charles Murray arrived on campus for a lecture, he was shouted down, the student body was inflamed, and a faculty member was injured in a scuffle after the event.

Mr. O’Keefe’s talk, by contrast, would be a footnote — a blip in the free-speech wars that barely registers outside of Vermont — if it weren’t for the odd mystery at the heart of it.

Who brought James O’Keefe to Middlebury, anyway?

A student group called the Preservation Society claimed credit for hosting Mr. O’Keefe. In the days ahead of the event, its representatives sent an email promoting it to almost everyone at Middlebury. Yet most on campus had never heard of the group.

And who was Emily Faulkner? Earlier that week, the unknown woman had asked two people at Middlebury to serve as advisers to the Preservation Society, thereby allowing it to “become a recognized campus group.”

As the roster of controversy-courting speakers on the college lecture circuit has grown, the student groups who sponsor them have at times found their motives questioned. At the University of California at Berkeley, for example, officials wondered whether the Berkeley Patriot, the student group sponsoring Milo Yiannopoulos’s canceled Free Speech Week, ever meant to go through with its plans.

Wondering if a student group is even real, however, is something far different. The confusion that surrounded Mr. O’Keefe’s Middlebury appearance offers a window into the unusual processes through which people who view higher education as a breeding ground for liberal bias may attempt to gain a foothold in campus politics.

‘Middlebury as a Battleground’

Mr. O’Keefe was set to speak on a Thursday. The emails from the Preservation Society came on Tuesday and Wednesday. The Tuesday message — an image of an flier — announced Mr. O’Keefe’s appearance and shared a link to a Google Form for RSVPs.

Almost immediately, the disavowals began to pour in. Project Veritas had just drawn newfound scorn after it bungled an attempt to covertly film journalists at The Washington Post. (A woman named Jaime Phillips had approached the Post with a false story about Roy S. Moore, the Alabama Republican nominee for the U.S. Senate; the newspaper tracked her to Project Veritas.) Few people on campus were eager to be associated with Mr. O’Keefe, who pleaded guilty in 2010 to entering federal property under false pretenses during another attempted sting.

But the disavowals went beyond Mr. O’Keefe. Yes, the email invitation indicated that the event was taking place off campus. But it had been sent to virtually everyone at the college. Student groups — outside the student-government association — aren’t authorized to send an email blast like that. Bill Burger, vice president for communications and chief marketing officer, wanted to be clear: The college hadn’t mass-advertised on behalf of Mr. O’Keefe.

In fact, the college wasn’t even sure how the sender got hold of what amounted to an all-campus email list. According to Mr. Burger, Middlebury administrators believed that someone had scraped the addresses from an email directory on the college’s website; after the Preservation Society’s message, they prohibited people off campus from viewing that directory.

“It’s unfortunate that this email made it through the college’s spam filters,” Mr. Burger wrote in an email to the campus. “Middlebury College has nothing to do with this event.”

Middlebury administrators weren’t the only ones who were exasperated. Campus conservative groups rushed to deny responsibility for bringing Mr. O’Keefe to town, too. People weren’t just pointing fingers at the Preservation Society; they were asking what on earth it was.

“No one claiming to represent such an organization has approached the College with a request for recognition as a student organization,” Mr. Burger had written in his message. The College Republicans subsequently issued an even-stronger statement: “The ‘Preservation Society’ mentioned in yesterday’s email has no connection to any Middlebury student or to the College in any manner.”

An email from Middlebury’s student branch of the American Enterprise Institute, the group that had invited Mr. Murray, made the same point: The society, it said, “has no Middlebury Student members and no index to reserve space on campus.”

So if the Preservation Society was a sham, who was promoting Mr. O’Keefe’s visit? The conservative groups pointed to outside infiltrators. “We are highly disappointed that non-college groups are attempting to advance their political agenda by using Middlebury as a battleground in their campaign for publicity,” the College Republicans wrote in a statement.

They had a particular group in mind: the Leadership Institute. The institute is a nonprofit organization whose website says it has “trained more than 191,000 conservative activists, leaders, and students” since its founding in 1979. The organization supports conservative groups and newspapers on campus, and it oversees Campus Reform, the news website whose stated goal for its coverage of higher education is to “expose and defeat the radical left.”

According to a report in The Middlebury Campus, the student newspaper, the institute had earlier contacted “several Middlebury students” about the possibility of hosting a campus appearance by Mr. O’Keefe. Now the student Republican group accused it of dispatching paid employees “to create false appearances of student organizations.”

The seams were showing. That Wednesday the Preservation Society sent another campuswide message. This is time it sought to defend its legitimacy. “Our group members, a handful of Middlebury students, came together and formed The Preservation Society out of a legitimate fear of punishment and/or sanctions from the University,” they wrote.

There was just one problem. Why did the sender of that message, presumably a student, refer to Middlebury, a private liberal-arts college, as a university? The difference might seem minor to outsiders, but to those attending the institution, it stuck out like a sore thumb.

The turnout for Mr. O’Keefe’s speech, according to local media reports, was far from overwhelming: It landed somewhere in the dozens. The student newspaper reported 50 people in attendance, while Seven Days, the local alternative weekly, counted just 40. Many were members of the local media.

Mr. O’Keefe spoke about the media and his previous investigations with Project Veritas. Ms. Faulkner later uploaded the video to Facebook with the caption “Middlebury College can’t stop free speech. #PreservationSociety.”

‘Free Speech Was in Danger’

Ms. Faulkner is not a student at Middlebury College and never has been.

She is a recent graduate of Colorado State University. It was there that she fought her first battle over free speech: A student group she founded, a local chapter of Students for Life, sued the university, saying it had been denied funding because of its opposition to abortion. The chapter sought $600 in damages; it settled with the university.

That battle stoked a passion. She found work as a contractor for the Leadership Institute, whose website names her as its “Northeast Regional Field Representative.” In that role, the site says, she “identifies, recruits, and mobilizes students on college campuses to promote the ideals of a free society.”

After the flap over Mr. Murray’s speech, Middlebury was on the Leadership Institute’s radar, said Morton Blackwell, the organization’s president. “It appeared free speech was in danger there,” he said in an interview. “It seemed like a reasonable place for us to try to start a conservative group.”

Ms. Faulkner is no fan of Mr. Murray. (The political scientist is “actually a racist,” she said. “I don’t agree with him.”) But she took on the Middlebury mission “as an American citizen for all people,” she told The Chronicle, “because free speech is for all people, not just those who are liberal-minded.”

She spent time getting to know people on campus, working a few connections through friends, and soon enough, she says, the Preservation Society coalesced. No one denies that the group was small. Mr. Blackwell said it had two or three members. Actually, Ms. Faulkner said, there were five.

The group wanted to do what student groups tend to do: bring a speaker to campus. Mr. O’Keefe was the society’s choice, Ms. Faulkner said, not a name foisted upon it by the Leadership Institute. But to arrange a campus appearance, the Preservation Society needed to be recognized by Middlebury; to be recognized, the group needed an adviser.

So Ms. Faulkner tried to find one.

In an email obtained by The Chronicle, she wrote to James Douglas, a former Republican governor of Vermont who is an executive in residence at Middlebury.

It was sent at 12:38 a.m. on November 28, the same day the initial wave of mass emails went out to the campus.

“My name is Emily and I recently founded a free speech club at Middlebury called The Preservation Society,” she wrote. “I was reaching out to you to see if you would be interested being the advisor for the group. The commitment is low and we really want to become a recognized student group so we can foster dialogue on campus.”

Mr. Douglas confirmed that he received the email. He told Ms. Faulkner he would be unable to serve as the adviser because he was already serving in that role for the College Republicans.

“I didn’t explore the group’s status, as I wasn’t going to be involved anyway,” he wrote in an email.

Ms. Faulkner made the same request of John Schmitt, a professor of mathematics, in both an email on the same day and later in a sit-down meeting. Mr. Schmitt declined to comment for this article.

The search didn’t pan out, though Ms. Faulkner said the society would continue to look for an adviser. In the meantime, it booked Mr. O’Keefe at the Courtyard by Marriott in Middlebury.

‘Proceed With Extreme Caution’

The Preservation Society had its first speaker. Now it needed to get the word out.

So Ms. Faulkner did what any recent college graduate would do. She turned to Google. After a search for “Middlebury College directory,” she had a list of every email address she needed.

The college’s indignation at someone spamming their system was funny, she thought, given how easily she was able to access the database. “If you don’t want people emailing,” she said, “don’t have it public on the Internet for millions of people to find.”

Sure, the society could have relied on fliers or word of mouth, but that would limit the reach. An email to the campus? That’s guaranteed to reach almost everyone.

“It was honestly just for our convenience,” Ms. Faulkner said. “We wanted everyone to know about the Preservation Society as well as the event we were having. It was an easy way to do it, and it was available online.”

What seemed elementary to Ms. Faulkner clearly aggravated many people at Middlebury. Colleges have become staging grounds for intense battles over free speech, often waged by outsiders with only tenuous connections to higher education. It can get tiring for the people who have to live and learn on campus.

Perhaps that’s why, when the leaders of Middlebury’s chapter of the American Enterprise Institute saw the Preservation Society’s first email blast, they issued a warning. Mr. O’Keefe’s visit, they said in an email to members reported by The Middlebury Campus, was “likely an attempt to embarrass students.” The leaders urged students to “proceed with extreme caution” if Ms. Faulkner got in touch.

Ms. Faulkner chalks up that resistance to small-town paranoia. To her, there’s nothing weird about going onto a campus with the intention of forming a student group for which there appeared to be no great demand. “Technically, it would not have been founded if I hadn’t organized the students,” she said of the Preservation Society. “I went in and organized them. So all of us together, with our ideas and our conservative thoughts, we formed it all together.”

“I love free speech, and I am sorry Middlebury doesn’t,” she said. “There’s really nothing evil or wrong with my intentions. I just see a place that is devoid of free speech and devoid of one of the basic liberties of our country, and I wanted to help people bring it back.”

Does it matter that Ms. Faulkner could find only a handful of Middlebury students who seemed to want the same thing? Mr. Blackwell, president of the Leadership Institute, brushed off concerns like those from the College Republicans taking “non-college” interlopers to task. “There are other organizations that send people onto campus and help the creation of other organizations,” he said. “That’s the way most such organizations are founded. That’s a silly statement.”

“It’s a standard practice that we send field reps onto campus and find students who are conservative and encourage them to organize some conservative student organization there,” Mr. Blackwell said.

Mr. O’Keefe himself is a product of that model. More than a decade ago, when he was a student at Rutgers University, Mr. O’Keefe started a conservative magazine called The Centurion. The Leadership Institute provided him with training and financial assistance. After college, Mr. O’Keefe worked with the institute, leading workshops that taught other students how to start conservative publications of their own.

During his Middlebury speech, Mr. O’Keefe mentioned that the Leadership Institute had paid him a few thousand dollars to speak. Mr. Blackwell confirmed that an honorarium was given.

Mr. O’Keefe’s Middlebury lecture might have been uneventful. But the tactics that brought him to Vermont — “standard practice” or not — will soon bring him to campuses elsewhere.

Last week, Nathan Berning, a regional field coordinator for the Leadership Institute, posted a message on his Facebook page seeking people who wanted to bring the Project Veritas founder to their campus. “James O’Keefe is doing a book tour in the Spring and wants to swing through Michigan,” Mr. Berning wrote. “Chapter leaders, let me know if you are interested in hosting him!”

Chris Quintana is a breaking-news reporter. Follow him on Twitter @cquintanadc or email him at chris.quintana@chronicle.com.