David Michael Miller
Early last month, the University of Wisconsin System regents passed a policy entitled “Commitment to Academic Freedom and Freedom of Expression.” Good progressives across the country, including Isthmus columnist Alan Talaga, are up in arms over it.
The policy bans “protests and demonstrations that materially and substantially disrupt the rights of others to engage in or listen to expressive activity.” It also specifies serious sanctions for repeat offenders, including eventual expulsion. The board’s action emulates a substantial portion of the Campus Free Speech Act, which is currently under consideration by the state Legislature.
Opponents perceive the policy as an attack on students’ right to protest. But the policy explicitly applies only in narrow circumstances, when students “materially and substantially disrupt the rights of others” to express themselves. Though attacked as vague, this qualifying language puts anything resembling a conventional protest well outside the policy’s scope. And we should all agree that physical assertiveness should never determine who does — and doesn’t — get heard on UW campuses.
Disruptions have long been considered misconduct under university rules. But the rules, apparently, lacked sufficient teeth to deter bad behavior. The group behind an extended interruption of conservative Ben Shapiro’s fall 2016 campus appearance actually notified the UW-Madison Police Department of their intentions ahead of time. Instead of precluding the planned misconduct, the police merely set some guidelines. Later, in an interview with The Badger Herald, Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank downplayed the seriousness of the violation, saying, “I realize there was a lot of controversy about it, but the students who wanted to protest came, they protested ... the students then left and the event proceeded.” Back when I was a student, I would have read that as: Disrupt away!
Defenders of lax enforcement routinely conflate the expressive aspect of disruptive protest with the intrusive aspect, thereby wrapping the entire behavior in a sympathetic cloak of “expression.” But a single act can comprise distinct components. A person standing in Library Mall with an anti-abortion sign is a protester. If that person takes his sign to the entrance of a clinic, blocking access, he is still a protester. But he is, now, also a criminal. You don’t get to violate other people’s rights just because you are expressing your own beliefs while doing so. The regents’ pronouncement bars intrusive behavior, not expression.
Some concede that disrupting a speaker is a punishable offense, but frame the Shapiro ruckus as an isolated incident, not worthy of the board’s stern reaction. It’s true that there has been only one bona fide disruption in Wisconsin thus far.
But there has been a rash of disruptive activity at other schools. And a Brookings Institution scholar recently concluded, after conducting a multi-campus survey, that “a surprisingly large fraction of students believe it is acceptable to act — including resorting to violence — to shut down expression they consider offensive.” Students will lose interest in forcibly silencing their rivals when, and only when, the ugly emotions that guide our current politics begin to dissipate. Does anyone believe that’s going to happen soon?
Though the Brookings survey found that enthusiasm for suppressing campus speech traverses the political spectrum, students on the left seem most disposed to take attention-grabbing action. Astute progressives like Slate columnist Michelle Goldberg recognize how much real-life leftist political goals suffer as a result. Goldberg, who has closely studied the Trump-era right, says of speech disruptions, “You just cannot overstate how gleeful the right is whenever one of these incidents breaks out.” She points out that alt-right leaders consider leftist speech interference to be a prime recruiting tool. “I wish that progressives would stop giving them these gift-wrapped presents.”
Just a few days after the regents passed the new policy, Fox News contributor Katie Pavlich visited the Madison campus to speak in support of firearm ownership. A group of about 20 people protested peacefully outside the venue. They and their message drew notice from attendees, the media and Pavlich herself. Tellingly, the group’s leader noted that the board’s new policy “definitely changed the way” the protest was conducted.
So in acting when they did, the regents surely headed off the delivery of a second gift-wrapped present with a Wisconsin return address. If you’re a good progressive, but remain unconvinced that the regents did right by free expression, take that at least as a silver lining.
Michael Cummins is a Madison-based business analyst
