It’s Been a Messy Semester for Free Speech on Campus. What’s Next?

On April 27, here in Sproul Plaza, heralded as the birthplace of the free-speech movement, police officers carrying zip tie handcuffs watched as crews set up thick jersey barriers in response to a speaker who said she was not coming to the campus.

Ann Coulter had canceled her talk the day before, but the possibility of trouble, officials of the University of California at Berkeley said, still hovered. Violence had been conceivable, it seemed, ever since the February riot over an aborted speech by Milo Yiannopoulos in which masked people smashed windows and ignited fires in this very same plaza.

But on this Thursday, the only sign of melee was a tree on the southern edges of campus, still damaged from the fires nearly three months earlier.

Several days after Ms. Coulter’s canceled talk, Nicholas B. Dirks, the university’s chancellor, said it’s possible that the event would have been a nonissue had Mr. Yiannopoulos’s appearance gone as planned. Mr. Dirks appeared cognizant of the damage inflicted in the latest fracas and said that he was “very sorry” the university couldn’t host Ms. Coulter.

“We at this point need to have a successful event,” he said, “to show that we can in fact stage these things in ways that don’t get taken over by other groups.”

To accomplish that, he said, the institution is developing a checklist for booking speakers that would make it clear exactly what steps student groups need to take to schedule speeches. He acknowledged that could only go so far in preventing flare-ups.

In some ways, Berkeley is a special case. After all, it’s the only university whose handling of a speech prompted President Trump to threaten its federal funding. But the problem it faces — how to protect the student body while defending the spirit of free speech — is one that many residential colleges are grappling with. To name the high-profile examples: Richard Spencer’s visit to Auburn University provoked raucous protests and arrests, and Charles Murray’s trip in March to Middlebury College was hijacked by a small group of protesters who injured a professor.

As a semester dominated by turmoil winds down, it’s worth asking: Who wins when a free-speech circus envelops a campus? Perhaps the better question is, Who loses?

It’s relatively easy to shout down a controversial speaker, and the act of doing so enables activist students or outside protest groups to declare victory. The publicity that follows — on social media and in the news — is just the sort that speakers like Ms. Coulter or Mr. Yiannopoulos thrive on. And the student groups that sponsor such speeches may find unity and notoriety in draping themselves in the First Amendment. The remaining major player — the university — finds itself playing defense. The only time a college wins, it seems, is when the circus passes it by.

Of course, for every campus event that spins out of control, thousands more go right. Even on his speaking tour, Mr. Yiannopoulos spoke at several institutions without violent eruptions. Most of Mr. Murray’s subsequent talks following the meltdown at Middlebury have been noteworthy only for their calmness. But a free-speech showdown can dominate the life of a campus for weeks. Angus Johnston, a lecturer at the Hostos Community College and a historian of student activism, said speakers such as Ms. Coulter and Mr. Yiannopoulos choose universities for a reason.

“This is not really about the campus,” Mr. Johnston said. “This is not really about academia. This is an act of theater designed to send this sort of ersatz message about the state of academic freedom on campus.”

The Players

Ms. Coulter and two student groups, the Berkeley College Republicans and the nonpartisan Bridge USA, had agreed independent of the university administration that she would speak on campus on April 27. In fact, Mr. Dirks and others have repeatedly said they officially learned from the student newspaper that the event had been scheduled for that day. The administration responded by saying it didn’t have a proper venue for Ms. Coulter to speak on that date, and initially offered her a speaking slot in the fall, and then, after public outcry, one on May 2.

Ms. Coulter balked, insisting she would speak at the university on the original date. But the student groups hosting Ms. Coulter pulled their support the Tuesday before her speech, and she withdrew the next morning. Ms. Coulter and the college Republicans made national and local headlines for days, appearing in The New York Times and on Fox News.

The Berkeley College Republicans sued, alleging that its First Amendment rights had been trampled. Harmeet Dhillon, the lawyer representing the group, argued that the university had deliberately declined to provide a space for the event. In the suit, Ms. Dhillon writes that the university’s “unwritten” policy, including a 3 p.m. curfew and “unspecified venue restrictions,” were applied to Ms. Coulter, a conservative, but not to others such as the former Mexican president Vicente Fox.

They “freely admit that they have permitted the demands of a faceless, rabid, off-campus mob to dictate what speech is permitted at the center of campus during prime time, and which speech may be marginalized, burdened, and regulated out of its very existence by this unlawful heckler’s veto,” reads the lawsuit.

The university was further pilloried at a free-speech rally held near the campus in connection with Ms. Coulter’s canceled talk. Gavin McInnes, one of the rally organizers, faulted Berkeley for canceling her speech and said universities are supposed to be venues for debate.

“We’re in a funny situation where the fascists are the anti-fascists, and they’re shutting down women and gays and minorities and preventing them from having their say,” Mr. McInnes said.

Many at that rally wore helmets, some even wore what appeared to be military fatigues, in anticipation of a group known as “antifa,” the same people said to have disrupted Mr. Yiannopoulos’s speech in February. That group has remained largely silent, though some who identified themselves as “members of Berkeley antifa” signed a column that appeared last week in The Daily Californian, the student newspaper, that said they had no plans to protest Ms. Coulter’s speech or the rally.

“While her views are disgusting and deserve to be protested, nobody wants to get attacked with a nightstick or go to jail over Ann Coulter,” the column read.

They also wrote they, too, were tired of Berkeley feeling like a war zone while they also appeared to take credit for the protests tied to Mr. Yiannopoulos’s event. “We decided this was unacceptable. You may disagree with our actions, but if it protected even one student from being targeted, then we are not ashamed,” they wrote.

‘Everybody Is Ready to Pounce’

In search of a better way to handle the issue of inviting controversial speakers, it’s helpful to understand the players’ motives.

Amy J. Binder is a sociologist at the University of California at San Diego who studies conservative campus movements. Inviting speakers like Ms. Coulter or Mr. Yiannopoulos, she said, is meant to provoke extreme responses. It’s a challenge for universities, she said, especially given the politically charged climate.

“It’s just a moment when everybody is ready to pounce,” said Ms. Binder, a co-author of the book Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape Young Conservatives.

Not all free-speech blowups originate from a student group’s invitation. At Middlebury, a conservative student group initially invited Mr. Murray to speak there, but the political-science department was also involved, sponsoring the event. The chairman of the political-science department, Bertram Johnson, has since apologized to the campus for failing to consult with others in the planning process.

“Most importantly, and to my deep regret, [the event] contributed to a feeling of voicelessness that many already experience on this campus, and it contributed to the very real pain that many people — particularly people of color — have felt as a result of this event,” Mr. Johnson wrote.

In response to these well-known controversies, state lawmakers nationwide, including in Wisconsin, Louisiana, and North Carolina, have proposed punishing those who would heckle or otherwise try to disrupt such talks. The efforts echo model legislation proposed by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank in Arizona.

Many academics say clear policies that define where and how guest speakers are booked would help prevent the sort of planning chaos that marked Ms. Coulter’s planned visit to Berkeley.

Mr. Dirks said a checklist for booking speakers would make planning much easier. He also said a heavy police presence very likely deterred violence on campus.

But that’s expensive, and many public universities’ budgets are shrinking, not increasing. Not to mention that militarizing the campus police force can generate other problems. Juniperangelica Xiomara Cordova-Goff wrote in an op-ed last week in The Daily Californian she was “shocked” at the heavy police presence. “I wondered how the UC could come to the conclusion that filling Sproul Plaza with men and guns made anyone feel safe,” she wrote.

Ms. Binder said the best practice to avoid such blowups would be for universities to hold the events despite the security costs. The best solution, she added, might lie beyond the influence of administrators. “I would also advise faculty, students, and those in the community to ignore the events and not even show up to protest, quite frankly,” Ms. Binder said. “It’s the vacuum that entertainers like Coulter, Yiannopoulos, and David Horowitz and their local and national sponsors can’t stand.”

‘Lose-Lose Situation’

Observers at Berkeley fear that the university may be powerless to respond to outside forces.

Bob Jacobsen, an academic dean, said the university often has controversial speakers and protests, but the recent events are different because “it’s attracting so much attention from the world.”

Peter Glazer, a Berkeley professor who studies theater performance and who sits on a number of faculty groups, said the violence surrounding the Yiannopoulos event had “changed the game.”

“It’s a lose-lose situation,” Mr. Glazer said. “All that has to happen is that Milo has to be invited to campus, and there’s no way for Berkeley to come out looking like it did the right thing. If the campus let him speak, there would be a horrible situation. If they don’t let him speak there’s a horrible situation.”

Robert Powell, head of the faculty senate at Berkeley and a faculty member since 1990, said the formal and informal policies that for so long had worked to provide venues for all types of free speech aren’t working anymore, “because of a greater willingness, for many parts of the political spectrum, to engage in significant violence.”

The challenge is outside groups coming to campus, Mr. Powell said, to fight.

“This is not about the exchange of ideas,” he said. “And it’s not about completely legitimate protest against those ideas.”

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