Disinvited Speakers Get a Platform to Talk About Being Denied One

Lisa Rathke, AP Images

Harvey C. Mansfield, a professor of government at Harvard University, was looking forward to talking about great books at a gala celebration at Concordia University’s Liberal Arts College, in Montreal. But when word got out about his controversial writings on feminism and gay marriage, the invitation was yanked.

Bob Kerrey, formerly a U.S. senator, Nebraska governor, and president of the New School, responded to a backlash at Creighton University against his views on abortion rights by bowing out of a commencement address at the Jesuit institution.

The two are among 26 speakers whom colleges have either disinvited or attempted to rescind invitations to this year, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington-based think tank. They were among the participants on Tuesday in a forum presented by the center, which brings together leaders from diverse perspectives to take on the nation’s key challenges.

Michael S. Roth, president of Wesleyan University, is among those facing pressure when decisions about whether to invite or disinvite campus speakers have roiled campuses like Concordia and Creighton. For the most part, he’s erred on the side of including controversial speakers, as long as they’re making intellectually valuable contributions and aren’t there just to stir up trouble.

Free-speech groups objected when Kerrey was pressured to bow out, but he said he didn’t think it was unreasonable to seek a commencement speaker who’s appropriate for the given campus environment. He thought back to the protests that erupted in 2006 when he invited a longtime friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, John McCain, to be the commencement speaker at the New School, a progressive institution.

Commencement is supposed to be a celebration, Kerrey said, but it became “unpleasant” when protesters heckled and turned their backs on McCain. Kerrey said he wasn’t eager to spoil another college’s celebration.

Mansfield wasn’t so understanding when the welcome mat was pulled out from under him. Concordia had invited him in December to deliver the keynote address at a gala in May, he said, but the university scrapped the event after professors and alumni complained.

Mansfield, whose 2006 book, Manliness, was criticized by many feminists, said he was insulted when the opportunity to speak on the subject of great books was revoked. “One of the great things about great books is they disagree,” he said. “That was going to be my theme.”

In an April essay in The Wall Street Journal, Mansfield wrote that free speech is no longer possible on college campuses, and that feminism is partly responsible for intolerance for opposing views.

Critics have accused free-speech advocates like the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education of exaggerating the extent of the free-speech problem, singling out isolated incidents in which speakers were disinvited and ignoring the many other controversial speeches that have gone off without a hitch.

‘We All Learned Something From Him’

Roth talked about his decision, in 2012, to support the invitation to U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia to talk at Wesleyan despite his own strong opposition to the justice’s rulings and the objections of some faculty members and students.

“There was a protest outside,” Roth said, “but it was about his views, not his character, and we all learned something from him.”

Roth said it’s important to be sensitive to changing student demographics but, at the same time, to safeguard robust intellectual debate. Campuses, he argued, should provide safety from harassment, intimidation, and retaliation for unpopular views.

While free-speech advocates often argue that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech, that approach can fall short when marginalized students are faced with racist or threatening screeds, some argue.

“More speech in this context can be poisonous and not just contribute to a marketplace of ideas,” said Roth, who wrote a book scheduled for release this summer called Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses (Yale University Press).

Matthew J. Dickinson, a professor of political science at Middlebury College, decided to allow Ryszard Legutko to speak to his class after college administrators canceled a planned speech by the right-wing Polish politician.

Middlebury had suffered a public-relations blow in 2017, when some 70 students were disciplined for their roles in a disruptive protest of an event featuring Charles A. Murray, a political scientist who espouses views that some consider racist.

Perhaps as a result, “Middlebury’s administration got cold feet at the last minute and pulled the plug on [Legutko’s] talk,” Dickinson said.

One of his students suggested inviting Legutko, in a nearby hotel, to their class. He was in the classroom an hour later, “and it was one of the best teaching experiences I’ve had,” Dickinson said.

When word leaked out that Legutko was on campus, “my nine-person seminar turned to a 50-person seminar,” the professor said. The appearance reignited the debate over who should control speaker invitations.

After the Murray debacle, Middlebury revised its speakers policy to give the administration more leeway to cancel events should there be a credible threat to the safety of the speaker or others on campus.

Dickinson said such changes spill over into professors’ attitudes about what they can safely teach in the classroom and whether some students might complain to administrators.

“The worry I have is it’s gone beyond disinviting commencement speakers. It’s seeping into how we teach classes,” he said. “Even tenure is no longer a protection for professors viewed by some as transgressing, making it an unsafe environment.”

Social media has aggravated the challenges of civil discourse, Kerrey said. Someone who disagreed with a U.S. president’s policies, for instance, used to focus more on the issues. Today, he said, a critic is more likely to denounce the president as “a traitor or a scumbag. If you want to have an impact, you have to insult.”

“It has to seep over in the way you debate,” Kerrey said. “Technology has allowed us to behave badly and be rewarded for it.”

Mansfield agreed. Technology “accentuates the nastiness of human nature” and “adds great weight to the wrong kind of speech” on campuses, he said.

Some of the speakers whose invitations to speak on college campuses have been rescinded delight in upsetting their audiences and probably would have offered few redeeming scholarly contributions.

At the University of California at Berkeley, for instance, a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, a conservative provocateur, was canceled in 2017 after protests turned violent. Richard Spencer, a white supremacist whose campus speaking tour forced colleges to spend enormous sums for security, was also a favorite invitee of those seeking to test the limits of free speech.

Colleges should rely more on faculty members to identify speakers from diverse ideological viewpoints who can stimulate thoughtful discussion, Roth said.

Mansfield blamed “youthful transgression” for the tendency of some student groups to “often choose someone of no account intellectually, thinking, “Now at last we get a chance to thumb our noses” at the college.

Katherine Mangan writes about community colleges, completion efforts, and job training, as well as other topics in daily news. Follow her on Twitter @KatherineMangan, or email her at katherine.mangan@chronicle.com.