To Protect Free Speech, U. of Wisconsin Is Poised to Double Down on Punishing Disruptive Protesters

The University of Wisconsin could soon impose mandatory punishments for students who disrupt speakers or prevent other people from exercising their free-speech rights — a step further than most states and colleges have taken in their efforts to protect expression on campuses.

The Wisconsin system’s Board of Regents is expected on Friday to formally approve the punishments, which would require suspension if a student was twice found to have “materially and substantially disrupted the free expression of others.” Three such incidents would result in expulsion.

The board approved the current free-speech policy in 2017. That policy includes the same disciplinary consequences, but in order for the penalties to be permanently adopted and enforced, the board has to go through a rule-making process that includes public hearings and several layers of approval.

The punishments have been widely criticized by students, faculty members, and First Amendment experts. A spokesman for the system declined to comment.

The idea of disciplining college students who shout down speakers has been floated more often over the past three years as many campuses have played host to clashes between controversial visitors and protesters.

Just this week, the acting secretary of homeland security was disrupted by protesters at Georgetown University’s law school and so was unable to give a planned keynote address. The students and activists who shouted Kevin K. McAleenan offstage on Monday were protesting the Trump administration’s immigration policies and detention of migrants at the border.

A top Justice Department official called on colleges last year to punish students who shout down speakers. “If schools would impose serious consequences on those who shut down events and engage in violence, it is likely such tactics would abate,” he said in a speech at Northwestern University.

Punishments for hecklers have gained support in part thanks to the Goldwater Institute, a right-leaning think tank that has pushed a model bill on campus free speech that advocates such sanctions.

“Students have come to take it for granted that they will face no discipline for such disruptions,” the Goldwater proposal says. Some offenses might result only in a probationary warning, it says, but students who repeat the behavior could face more-serious penalties.

A Tricky Business

Several states have enacted laws that include elements of the Goldwater proposal. North Carolina’s free-speech law, for instance, requires that University of North Carolina campuses develop a range of penalties. But Wisconsin’s mandating of suspension and expulsion would go a step further.

Two free-speech experts said they oppose the shouting down of campus speakers, but they don’t see mandatory punishments as the best way to deal with students who do that.

Such policies “tie the hands of individual decision makers — administrators who are better equipped to determine the context, what actually happened, and mete out a punishment accordingly,” said Will Creeley, vice president for legal and public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

The organization, known as FIRE, submitted a public comment to the Wisconsin regents in August, in advance of a board hearing on the mandatory-punishments policy. Nearly all of the three-dozen comments submitted to the board opposed the policy.

Determining whether speech crosses a line into disruption is a tricky business, said Nadine M. Strossen, a professor at New York Law School and former president of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Strossen has spent much of her career defending the speech rights of extremists, even neo-Nazis. But Wisconsin’s policy, she said, would have the effect of privileging their right to speak over students’ right to demonstrate against them.

When students shouted down the homeland-security secretary at Georgetown on Monday, the failure of university officials to act was unacceptable, Strossen said. The students should have been escorted out of the auditorium. But that doesn’t mean they should be expelled, she said.

University of Wisconsin officials have already grappled with controversy in their efforts to enforce the system’s current free-speech policy. In May a student on the Milwaukee campus went to a rally celebrating Israel’s independence and held up a sign that depicted a swastika and said: “Gas.”

The university’s chancellor said the student’s speech was protected, which prompted a backlash and a petition, signed by nearly 1,800 people, calling for the university to expel the student and arguing that his sign was an “incitement of violence against the Jewish community on campus.” The chancellor then issued a second statement condemning the student’s anti-Semitism more forcefully.

Sarah Brown writes about a range of higher-education topics, including sexual assault, race on campus, and Greek life. Follow her on Twitter @Brown_e_Points, or email her at sarah.brown@chronicle.com.