Richard B. Spencer was met with chants of “Go home, Spencer,” “Black Lives Matter,” and others too profane to report here when he spoke on Thursday at the University of Florida. The persistent chants and other audience noise at times made it hard to hear the prominent white supremacist, though he was able to speak audibly during most of the event.
The heckling echoed several recent instances in which protesters attempted to shout down speakers.
For instance, last month a Black Lives Matter group at the College of William and Mary shouted down the executive director of Virginia’s American Civil Liberties Union chapter, claiming the ACLU had protected white supremacists by representing an individual who sued the City of Charlottesville, Va., for revoking his “Unite the Right” rally permit.
As the frequency and intensity of heckling has seemed to increase, colleges are grappling with how to respond. The University of Wisconsin system has adopted a policy that mandates discipline for students who heckle speakers, while public colleges in North Carolina are now subject to a state law governing heckling.
States legislators will involve themselves if they feel like campuses aren’t preventing heckling, said the Republican state representative who sponsored the North Carolina bill on campus speech.
Heckling incidents are hard to talk about broadly because so much depends on the particulars. While many examples involve students protesting controversial guest speakers, there are multiple examples in which nonstudents (who are not subject to the institution’s code of conduct) disrupt public events on college campuses.
On October 10, a local anti-immigrant group called “We the People Rising” heckled a guest speaker at Scripps College who was speaking about Islamophobia in the United States. Campus police officers stationed themselves around the perimeter of the auditorium while hecklers asked questions like, “What do you think of suicide bombings?” but the police never removed the hecklers. “Although it was heated, no one was ever in danger,” Karen Bergh, a university official, explained.
Five days earlier, an anti-immigrant group heckled Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, at Whittier College, forcing an early conclusion to the speech. When nonstudent hecklers interrupt campus events, if moderators are unable to calm them, it is appropriate for the police to intervene, said Howard Gillman, chancellor of the University of California at Irvine and coauthor of a book on campus free speech. The hecklers are “disturbing the peace of the campus, and the campus has the ability to act against them even if it’s not in the code of conduct,” he said.
In dealing with student hecklers, police intervention is the “last resort,” says Jesh Humphrey, vice chancellor of institutional integrity and general counsel at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s Office of Legal Affairs. It’s all about the optics, said Mr. Humphrey, who pointed out that “the best picture on the local news is police coming in and grabbing someone.” It’s part of students’ strategy, sometimes, to be arrested or detained, said Kevin Kruger, president of the student-affairs association Naspa.
Student Sanctions
An alternative to police intervention is imposing sanctions on student hecklers. Two weeks ago, the University of Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents approved a policy that suspends students for a semester for disrupting a guest speaker twice, and expels them for heckling three times. Students will be disciplined after a “formal investigation and disciplinary hearing,” the policy says.
Student hecklers will be identified through a joint effort by those hosting the event and campus-safety officials, said Mark Olkowski, associate dean of students at the University of Wisconsin at Green Bay.
Mr. Olkowski said he appreciates how the new policy allows individual institutions to decide on which sanction to impose the first time a student heckles a speaker. When a first offense is committed, the college can have an “educational conversation” with the student, he said.
The new policy is more effective than “just arresting students and taking them to jail,” said Mr. Olkowski. It’s difficult to observe the effectiveness of the new policy at the Green Bay campus, says Mr. Olkowski, because there have been no heckling incidents there.
Last year, hecklers interrupted the conservative speaker Ben Shapiro at the flagship campus in Madison. Although the new policy “unnecessarily take[s] away the discretion of a campus” to decide which sanctions a student receives, a statement from the campus said, “we will follow the Board of Regents’ policy.” University officials declined to comment further.
North Carolina’s House Bill 527, passed on July 31, states, “the constituent institution shall implement a range of disciplinary sanctions for anyone … who substantially interferes with the protected free expression rights of others.” Each institution determines what sanction a student deserves, Mr. Humphrey said.
At UNC-Charlotte, student hecklers are identified through members of the Demonstration Activity Resource Team, or DART, which is spearheaded by the dean’s office. The DART team will approach hecklers during the event so that disciplinary violations can be avoided, said Mr. Humphrey.
The specter of legislators’ intervention in campus-speech issues has spooked some academics. State lawmakers “have a less nuanced view of the issue,” Mr. Gillman said. “It’s much more likely that a law will be more punitive or overbroad than it’s intended to be.” Universities will have less autonomy to determine which disciplinary actions are best for a community, said Mr. Humphrey.
States legislators will involve themselves, however, if they feel like campuses aren’t preventing heckling, said Mr. Gillman. Jonathan Jordan, a Republican state representative in North Carolina, told The News and Observer he sponsored Bill 527 because it will “help provide some direction and some protection” to college campuses.
Regardless of whether the state intervenes, colleges need to educate hecklers and protect the speech rights of the guest speaker, said Mr. Gillman. “If you’re living a life where on your social media all you do is listen to the echo chamber of people who support your views,” then “it’s the natural response to ridicule, dismiss, and feel no sense of obligation to listen.” If heckling is stifled, he said, then more-appropriate forms of political discourse can flourish.
