Simple in theory, and from a safe distance

One thing most Americans are reasonable enough to agree on these days: College presidents, provosts, trustees or, in Georgia’s case, Regents are in precarious and often no-win positions when it comes to issues of free expression and public safety on college and university campuses.

We say “most” Americans, because for some — few if any of whom, one suspects, are anywhere within shouting distance of the reality — it’s all quite simple. (Just ask them.)

Last month the Georgia Board of Regents adopted a policy of designated campus areas for outside speakers and campus protests and other kinds of demonstrations. This came before, but is certainly relevant to, the debate over how Auburn University handled the appearance of white supremacist Richard Spencer.

It was an awkward sequence of events: AU first granted Spencer permission to speak, then later revoked that permission, only to have that decision overturned by a federal judge.

A spokeswoman for the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center — as vigilant an organization as there is when it comes to tracking hatemongering — told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that Auburn shouldn’t have let campus protests goad them into trying to cancel Spencer’s speech.

She’s right. Aside from basic First Amendment considerations, Auburn gave Spencer more of a platform by trying to revoke his permit than he already had by being granted one. (The most unfair aftereffect might have been the few absurd comparisons of the Auburn issue to the uproar at Cal-Berkeley that resulted in the cancellation of archconservative author and commentator Ann Coulter’s scheduled speaking engagement.)

Georgia’s Regents, and others in positions of responsibility over institutions of higher learning, have a lot more to keep in mind than abstract, if critically important, arguments about free expression. And they have to make decisions amid a buffeting of politically loaded distortions, misconceptions, flagrant fallacies and utter nonsense.

For one thing, though higher education should be about the free exchange of ideas, even controversial ideas — especially controversial ideas — a campus is not a democracy or a constitutional republic. It is an insular society governed, of necessity, by rules and restrictions not applicable to the larger culture.

For another, the older adolescents and young adults who make up most of the American college population are generally smarter and savvier than we give them credit for. They aren’t all huddling in ideological “safe spaces,” or insisting that points of view that make them feel “uncomfortable” or “threatened” be institutionally suppressed. The AJC story quoted an Auburn senior who had organized a counterdemonstration to the Spencer event: “Because of freedom of speech we do have to let him speak,” she said. “But we do believe what he speaks about conflicts with the Auburn Creed.”

Which brings up one of the most flagrant, and familiar, of the aforementioned fallacies — the notion that a protest against a point of view is an assault on free speech. On the contrary — it’s an exercise of it.

There’s also the fact that ideological friction on campus usually doesn’t involve just students, faculty and speakers. On hand at AU were members of the white nationalist, anti-Semitic Traditionalist Workers Party, complete with helmets and black wooden shields. (Stupid ideas and moronic plywood storm trooper toys are free expression, too.) On the other extreme were a bunch of “antifas” — anti-fascists — down from Atlanta to “punch Nazis.” (Exactly how does potentially turning a protest into a riot constitute anti-fascism?) Fortunately, good sense prevailed and that did not happen. But unless colleges and universities are to become, God forbid, fortresses behind barricades of razor wire, free speech is going to entail a certain amount of risk on campus, just as it does everywhere else.

Ideally, left-wing loon radicals and alt-right “populists” (and how did “populism” ever come to describe politics of supremacy and exclusion, whether from the likes of Eugene Talmadge or Richard Spencer?) would be laughed, not shouted or silenced, out of relevance. They would provoke not rage, but dismissive ridicule.

The people who have to make decisions and policies about public events at institutions of higher education, whether Columbus State University, or Auburn, or Berkeley, or Georgia, or countless others, don’t deal in such ideals, except theoretically. They deal in realities that are anything but simple.

This story was originally published April 28, 2017 at 6:26 PM with the headline "Simple in theory, and from a safe distance."