Hey, Look Over Here!

Richard Spencer was coming, and Texas A&M University couldn’t stop him. The First Amendment was on the white nationalist’s side. So the university needed to figure out how to make him feel unwelcome without locking the door.

Since Mr. Spencer thrives on attention, university officials decided to try to cut off his air supply. They scheduled an “Aggies United” rally to coincide with his talk. They invited actors, musicians, dancers, student leaders and athletes, the president, the chancellor, a Holocaust survivor. There were lofty proclamations about the power of love over hate.

Mr. Spencer later derided the rally as “world’s largest safe space,” but Raygan Batiste, one of several black students who chose to go to Mr. Spencer’s event instead, may have been closer to the mark when she said Texas A&M was trying to create a diversion.

“I feel like the Aggies United event and all the performers are just an attempt to distract from what’s going on,” she told The Chronicle.

It has been the year of the free-speech arsonist. Right-wing heels like Mr. Spencer and Milo Yiannopoulos have used campuses to stage a kind of performance art: They rhetorically take a match to the values higher education has promoted for years. Then they dare somebody to try to stop them. Often it works: Sometimes people light actual fires. Sometimes they wear balaclavas and throw rocks. One time, somebody got shot.

Colleges have been left with the unhappy task of accommodating these speakers while also distancing themselves and trying to avoid the calamity of a violent counterprotest. A popular approach has been to hold an alternative event that officials and students can feel good about — a place for students to go instead of standing in a crowd and yelling at neo-Nazis or hiding out in their dorm rooms. Something positive and newsworthy — with celebrities, if possible.

Drawing eyes away from shock-and-awe political figures is difficult for the simple reason that something exotic and frightful is more interesting than something familiar and expected. The prospect of a neo-Nazi invasion of an otherwise peaceful campus is captivating and urgent. A talk about the importance of tolerance and respect? Quite possibly a yawn, even for those who agree.

“That’s like mom and dad telling the kids, ‘Don’t go to the prom, we’re going to have soda and snacks in the rec room,’” says Gene Grabowski, a partner at the crisis-management firm Kglobal.

In the run-up to the infamous Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, the University of Virginia planned a daylong symposium to promote a more positive, thoughtful view of how race can and should be discussed. The program included lectures on free speech, inequity, enfranchisement, race and education, and conservative politics.

UVa officials considered several ways of describing the event, none of which were particularly direct about the racist menace that had necessitated it: “Unity Dialogues,” “community conversations,” then, finally, “a reflective conversation.” Organizers were eager to crow about the event, but there was considerable trepidation internally about how widely to discuss it, email records show. In August, when a Chronicle reporter asked to interview an associate provost who had helped put together the symposium, the university’s central communications office instructed him not to do it. (The associate provost seemed surprised, writing to a colleague: "!!!!”)

In any case, the Unite the Right rally ended up overshadowing everything else. Violence at the rally, including a white supremacist’s deadly car attack on counterprotesters, prompted the governor to declare a state of emergency. The university postponed the symposium.

Teresa A. Sullivan, the UVa president, had suggested that students avoid the racist demonstration. Other college presidents have given similar advice. Last winter, when Republican students at the University of Washington invited Mr. Yiannopoulos to speak on campus, Ana Mari Cauce, the president, admonished would-be protesters to stay away.

“I believe that letting him speak without interruption or audience beyond like-minded people,” she wrote in a public message before the event, “would deny him the thing he seems to want most: attention.”

Don’t go for the bait. That might be fine advice for the white people whom Mr. Spencer and Mr. Yiannopoulos see as potential recruits, but some people at UVa questioned whether inviting students to retreat to campus redoubts for lectures and a “diversity potluck” meal was the best move. For some students — particularly students of color — the neo-Nazis who marched across the campus on the eve of the rally represented more than a nuisance. They were an existential threat.

“Not confronting them,” Laura E. Goldblatt, a postdoctoral fellow in the English department, told The Chronicle in August, “is only an option for people already protected by institutional structures.”

Not everybody who stands against white nationalism wants to literally go toe-to-toe with white nationalists. When Mr. Spencer spoke last month at the University of Florida, some students of color were nervous even about leaving the safety of their dorm rooms, says Bijal Desai, a third-year student who is president of the Volunteers for International Student Affairs.

Mr. Desai was part of a group that put together a “virtual assembly” — a series of videos about race relations that Florida students could watch while Mr. Spencer was giving his talk elsewhere on campus. The idea was to give students of color a venue to be heard at the same time as Mr. Spencer without having to put themselves in harm’s way.

In order to “entice viewers,” says Mr. Desai, the university reached out to Tim Tebow in the hope of getting him to record a video for the assembly; the former Gators quarterback reportedly declined. The videos didn’t mention Mr. Spencer, according to Mr. Desai. “It was really focused on really big material like love and hate,” he says.

Are these alternative events working? It depends on how you measure success. Mr. Desai, an economics major who described himself as a “numbers guy,” says that the assembly got good ratings, Mr. Tebow or no. About 1,000 people logged in to the online event while Mr. Spencer was giving his talk to a much smaller crowd on campus.

“That’s what success looks like to me,” Mr. Desai says.

For Amy B. Smith, Texas A&M’s chief marketing and communications officer, the results were mixed. She disagrees with the idea that the university merely was trying to divert people from Mr. Spencer’s talk. The Aggies United rally was, by her account, a moving event in its own right, with stirring performances and a crowd of around 5,000 people — not bad for a chilly night in December. It yielded good video, which the university edited into a two-and-a-half-minute montage with themes of togetherness and tolerance. It also yielded good photos, which Texas A&M made available to media outlets.

To her dismay, however, the news outlets seemed more interested in photos of Mr. Spencer. He was still the main event.

“We were severely disappointed in your story coverage of the Richard Spencer uninvited visit and your coverage in a one-on-one interview with full page photo of him,” Ms. Smith later wrote to a Chronicle reporter, “as opposed to covering the Aggies United event and best-class example of how universities can deal with this — which garnered #1 most inspirational moment by Anti-Defamation League.”

Inspirational or not, Ms. Smith says the big-ticket event was not a sustainable solution to the problem of unwanted speakers on campus. Because tickets were free, Aggies United cost Texas A&M about $250,000.

The communications chief says she believes things have gotten more dangerous in the year since Mr. Spencer’s first visit. She’s not sure the university would want to hold another big alternative event these days. Counterprogramming might attract counterprotesters of its own.

“I worry,” says Ms. Smith, “about creating another physical venue for confrontation.”

Steve Kolowich writes about writes about ordinary people in extraordinary times, and extraordinary people in ordinary times. Follow him on Twitter @stevekolowich, or write to him at steve.kolowich@chronicle.com.