In Renting Out Space, Do Colleges Invite Trouble?

Julia Robinson for The Chronicle

No one officially connected with Auburn University invited Richard Spencer to speak there. On Tuesday night, however, the university ended up hosting the prominent white supremacist anyway, thanks to a policy that let a resident of the distant Atlanta area rent an auditorium there.

Auburn’s administration had attempted to cancel the speech, citing safety concerns. But Cameron Padgett, the auditorium renter, had challenged that decision in U.S. District Court as a violation of his First Amendment rights, and Judge W. Keith Watkins on Tuesday ordered the public university to let the event proceed.

Texas A&M University found itself in a similar position last fall, as a result of a policy that let an outsider rent a room in its student center so Mr. Spencer could speak there. Rather than trying to cancel the speech, which they held to be protected under the U.S. Constitution, administrators there beefed up security and simultaneously staged an “Aggies United” event in the football stadium to help defuse tensions.

Last month, to help prevent such a crisis down the road, the university revised its policy governing the rental of campus facilities to outsiders. Its new policy requires external clients seeking to hold an event there to secure sponsorship from a recognized student organization, one of the university’s academic or administrative units, or another campus in the Texas A&M system. It puts the sponsors on the hook for any unpaid costs or property damage.

“That makes a lot of sense, what Texas A&M is doing,” says Randy A. Burba, chief of public safety at Chapman University and president of the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. Mr. Burba says he has not heard of other colleges contemplating similar changes in their space-rental policies, but he expects “that will change drastically” in the wake of the Auburn and Texas A&M controversies.

Among the questions that the recent developments raise:

Where else might space rentals cause colleges headaches?

Although colleges’ students and employees account for the lion’s share of demand for rented space on campus, a substantial share of institutions, especially in the public sector, rent out space to people with no direct connection to them, according to Donna-Jo Pepito, director of research for Nacas, an association of college auxiliary services. Often, colleges’ willingness to rent space to outsiders changes over the course of the academic year, with availability peaking in summer and during winter break, when demand on campus has ebbed.

Most of the time, outsiders rent space for decidedly uncontroversial events, such as wedding receptions or meetings of local civic groups. Even if they seem intent on provoking controversy by bringing in inflammatory speakers, there won’t be a stir if no one cares that they’re there. The Texas Tribune reports that the man who rented space for Richard Spencer’s appearance at Texas A&M had been bringing white supremacists and other extremists to campus for years. The previous ones, however, spoke to small audiences and drew little protest or media attention.

Like Milo Yiannopoulos, a fellow right-wing provocateur, Mr. Spencer has changed the game by adeptly using social media and his venue choices to gin up controversy and to draw big crowds of both supporters and opponents, some of whom arrive itching to do battle.

Can’t events sponsored by campus groups also cause a ruckus?

Certainly they can. Campus chapters of the College Republicans sponsored the Milo Yiannopoulos appearances that recently led to mayhem at the University of Washington and the University of California at Berkeley. A Middlebury College student group, the American Enterprise Institute Club, arranged the visit by the controversial author Charles Murray that last month sparked violence there.

Texas A&M officials are under no illusions that their new sponsorship requirement will prevent any reoccurrence of tensions over campus events. “We fully anticipate that we will have controversial speakers who are sponsored by people on campus,” says Amy B. Smith, a Texas A&M spokeswoman.

Now, however, outsiders won’t be able to speak there unless another system campus or some group of students or employees wants them to be heard. The university’s administration will be dealing with people somehow attached to the institution, fostering trust and offering leverage when it comes to ensuring that the event is properly planned and recovering funds for unpaid costs or damage. Ms. Smith says the new policy also helps ensure student access to meeting rooms in the face of high demand stemming from rapid enrollment growth.

Mr. Burba, of the campus law-enforcement administrators’ group, says such a sponsorship requirement will also promote broader university involvement in planning events, helping to ensure that they are framed as civil exchanges of different ideas rather than one-sided diatribes countered only by protest. “The point of a university is to facilitate debate,” he says.

Many colleges that do not require such sponsorship of outsiders’ facility rental nonetheless strongly encourage it through a tiered pricing structure. Jeff P. Pelletier, director of operations and events at Ohio State University and president of the Association of College Unions International, says his organization’s members will typically charge outsiders a full rate while offering a discount to faculty members or administrators and a bigger discount to students.

Why let outsiders rent space at all?

It isn’t the money. Mr. Pelletier says most college unions rent space at a rate intended to cover any associated costs and put some funds in reserve for equipment replacement and facility upgrades. If events staged by outsiders require a larger security presence than covered by the rental fee, they can cause the host college to lose a lot of money.

Such was the case at Texas A&M when Mr. Spencer showed up at an auditorium with a rental fee that assumed the type of security costs associated with a wedding reception or high-school awards ceremony. Ms. Smith says the university’s policies required it to charge the same rate regardless of how the room was to be used.

Generally, Mr. Pelletier says, college unions’ rental of space to outsiders stems from their desire to be centers of campus involvement. Typically, he says, such space requests are handled through a process that weighs projected security costs, risk-management considerations, and the logistical needs of other renters who will be in nearby spaces at the same time. For the most part, he says, unions try their best to accommodate such requests and seldom turn them down.

Plans for events that will draw large crowds draw the closest scrutiny from campus security officials, who tend to have final say over whether an event can happen. Mr. Burba says security officials at public colleges, which are bound by the First Amendment, generally have to be careful not to base decisions to block events from happening based on considerations of what will be said. Although private colleges vary in how their cultures approach free speech, most see allowing open debate as central to their missions.

“We might say ‘It would be a lot better if this event did not happen,’ but we understand why it needs to,” Mr. Burba says.

Peter Schmidt writes about affirmative action, academic labor, and issues related to academic freedom. Contact him at peter.schmidt@chronicle.com.