Why Did East Carolina Allow Trump to Speak? The University Probably Didn’t Have a Choice

Updated (7/18/2019, 6:07 p.m.) with comment from the university.

East Carolina University was the site on Wednesday of President Trump’s latest campaign rally, where he doubled down on his racist attacks on four congresswomen of color. As Trump criticized Rep. Ilhan Omar, who was born in Somalia, the chants of thousands of his supporters rang through the university’s coliseum: “Send her back!”

The university released a statement this month stressing that East Carolina was not technically hosting Trump, as nobody at the university had invited him there. Still, for some people, allowing Trump to speak on the campus crossed a line.

Critics — including students and alumni — questioned why the university, in Greenville, N.C., would provide the president with a platform, especially given the furor over his recent tweets telling the four Democratic lawmakers to “go back” to the “crime-infested places from which they came.” Three of the four women were born in the United States, and all four are American citizens.

East Carolina officials, though, probably weren’t in a position to say no to Trump. The Trump campaign simply asked to rent the coliseum, which is something that political candidates, musical acts, and other groups often do.

“With regard to the facilities that ECU makes available for rental by the public, the First Amendment requires public universities like ECU to allow access on a content-neutral basis,” Jeannine Hutson, a university spokeswoman, wrote in an email. Some staff members in facilities services worked during the rally, and the campus police department handled security outside of the coliseum, Hutson said.

If a public university has in the past allowed political candidates to rent a campus venue, then it can’t just decide not to make the space available to Trump, said Joe Cohn, legislative and policy director at the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education.

Several presidential candidates have made campaign stops at East Carolina’s coliseum in recent years, including George W. Bush and Barack Obama. In 2016 Bill Clinton visited Greenville to campaign for Hillary Clinton.

Under the First Amendment, Cohn said, public universities “can’t not allow facilities to be available to people on equal terms, and certainly not for content-based reasons.” If East Carolina had denied the campaign’s request, Trump could have sued, he said.

On top of their First Amendment obligations, public universities in North Carolina must comply with a campus-free-speech law enacted in 2017. State lawmakers wanted to crack down on campus attempts to block controversial speakers. More than a dozen states have passed similar measures, largely spearheaded by Republicans who are concerned that conservative views are being quashed at colleges.

But most of those new state laws apply to speakers who are invited by students or faculty members, Cohn said. North Carolina’s statute wouldn’t be relevant for a Trump rally, unless a student group like the College Republicans had invited him to the campus.

Bad Speech and Better Speech

What if university leaders worried that a Trump rally could threaten public safety, because supporters and protesters could clash? That argument probably wouldn’t hold up in court, Cohn said. For one, presidents bring with them the Secret Service and a host of other security measures, he said.

The federal courts have said law-enforcement officials — not government officials like public-college administrators — have to make calls about public safety. And first they must take steps to protect people who are exercising constitutional rights. Only something like a credible bomb threat would typically be enough to call off an event.

“It’s really hard to say that a university can’t host a president,” Cohn said, “because universities have hosted the president for generations.”

While critics may feel that Trump’s language and policies are harmful, Cohn said, “the court has not yet agreed that Trump has incited violence at any of those rallies.”

Hutson, the East Carolina spokeswoman, said that campus events could be disallowed, limited, or moved if the university deemed that an event was “likely to produce a clear and present danger of serious bodily injury or substantial damage to university property or grounds, based on prior experience in the same or similar circumstances.” Other reasons include changes in the expected size of an event and weather conditions.

Legal obligations aren’t the only issue for campus officials. They also have to consider that protecting speech, even the offensive kind, is widely seen as a core part of higher education’s mission. Colleges are supposed to be havens of rigorous debate and free inquiry, the thinking goes, and that means all viewpoints must be welcome.

Jonathan Zimmerman, a professor of the history of education at the University of Pennsylvania, emphasized that while he loathed Trump’s racist language, he doesn’t believe colleges should police debate and discourse.

“The answer to bad speech is always better speech,” said Zimmerman, who published a book about campus free speech in 2016. “I don’t want university officials to decide what is permissible and what is not.”

Denying Trump a place to speak, he said, could also provide a rallying cry for his supporters: “Look, these politically correct universities are muzzling us. They are un-American too.” No matter how reprehensible Trump’s comments were, Zimmerman said, “they are an important dimension of our political sphere right now.”

East Carolina’s leaders should clearly explain, he said, that they allowed the Trump rally to take place on campus because they believe in free speech. They can then emphasize that free speech allows people to make statements that defy the university’s values — and detail why Trump’s racist remarks conflict with what East Carolina stands for.

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.