A free speech challenge
A college campus balances free speech and diversity
The email popped up at 1:30 on a Friday, that time in the academic week when nothing much is going on — or when something hairy is about to get rolling. I had a hunch which it would be.
Two months after Milo Yiannopoulos’s scheduled appearance at Berkeley left Sproul Plaza in flames, six weeks after Charles Murray was mobbed at Middlebury, and five days after Heather Mac Donald was shouted down at Claremont McKenna, Jessica Vaughan from the Center for Immigration Studies — an organization identified as a nativist hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center — would be speaking at our 55th annual International Affairs Symposium. Would Lewis & Clark College be next? As it turned out, no. Vaughan came to my campus, said her piece and left — and Lewis & Clark pulled through. Over the course of five challenging days, students and faculty sought to respect both diversity and freedom of expression. It was messy and difficult and there were tradeoffs — but, in the end, we did it.
Our four annual symposia (on environmental affairs, race and ethnic studies and gender studies in addition to international affairs) are a distinctive feature of undergraduate life at Lewis & Clark. They are planned and run entirely by students, who, with the help of a faculty mentor, select the topic, choose keynote speakers and staff the discussion groups and panels. The symposia last for three days, are open to the public and draw significant interest, both on and off campus. They are a lot of work for the students and a point of pride for the college.
The international affairs symposium is the oldest of the four and no stranger to controversy, regularly mixing together liberal, conservative and libertarian views, and the college regularly rises to the challenges such a catholic approach presents. Guest speakers are treated with respect, even as their positions and reasoning are closely scrutinized.
So we have our tradition. Still, Vaughan’s visit would be occurring against a national backdrop of violent, widely publicized campus unrest, and my hunch about the email I’d been forwarded (subject heading: “Hate group rep speaking at Lewis & Clark?!”) was quickly realized. Less than 80 minutes after I’d read it and reached out to the symposium’s faculty advisor, another message calling on the college to “disinvite” Vaughan appeared on one of our faculty email lists. For the rest of the afternoon and into the better part of Saturday, positions were established, attacked and defended among the faculty, while the student organizers of the symposium pondered next steps.
It wasn’t hard to figure out what had happened. Always a right-wing organization, the Center for Immigration Studies had been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center just 19 days before Vaughan’s scheduled appearance on our campus to debate Northwestern
University’s Galya Ruffer on the global refugee crisis. Headlined “Hate groups like Center for Immigration Studies want you to believe they’re mainstream,” the SPLC’s analysis made clear how our symposium organizers, searching for speakers whose views would make for strong debate, could have taken the CIS as representative of conservative thought on immigration — a view that the CIS insists is the right one.
On Saturday afternoon, the symposium steering committee announced that Vaughan would speak as planned, though her Tuesday night session would be closed to the general public “to preserve our academic environment as a place of discussion and debate.” The students acknowledged that Vaughan’s participation in the symposium might be seen as “tacitly support(ing) hateful rhetoric,” but they firmly rejected this interpretation. Such rhetoric “is an unfortunate reality of our current political and international climate,” the students wrote. “We can no longer afford to simply ignore that these feelings and perspectives
exist within this country and many others, but we can still show our strong opposition against these perspectives by meeting them head-on.”
Still, many continued to see Vaughan’s invitation as a de facto endorsement of the CIS. On the day of the debate, calls and emails from angry alumni and anxious parents poured in. “I can hear that you are an ally,” one anguished mother of a student told me. “But please — stop this!”
The decision to limit attendance to members of the Lewis & Clark community, and a supporting administrative decision to move the debate to a larger venue with more easily monitored access, proved sound. Black bloc protesters have been a constant, inciting presence at these events — a fact that’s minimized or ignored by pundits eager to sneer at “snowflake” undergraduates — and ours was no exception. Unable to enter without college ID, the protesters, some masked, chanted through bullhorns, set off air sirens, and played “Rage Against the Machine” at top volume in an effort to shut down the debate. A few also tried to break into the hall — there was periodic, thunderous banging on a door behind the dais. In two other campus buildings, fire alarms were pulled. The mayhem that has so recently marked campus appearances of right-wing speakers did indeed make itself felt — outside the hall.
Inside, it was a different story. After introductions by student organizers and the faculty moderator, Ruffer spoke, followed by Vaughan. While, for those of us in the back, it was often hard to hear
them, there were no interruptions or outbursts, no silencing clamor. Our community listened attentively — and critically, as the question-and-answer session made clear. Faculty and students interrogated not only the CIS’s claims but also its freewheeling take on social science methodology and data analysis. Whether Vaughan “dissolved” under the questioning, as one observer has claimed, is an open question. But no one who attended the debate and heard our community’s response could confuse the fact of her appearance at Lewis & Clark with support for the CIS.
This was a wrenching experience for our campus. In the days leading up to Vaughan’s visit, some painful things were said and written. That pain lingers, and difficult conversations continue as we strive to listen to each other, offering support as needed and probing claims when necessary. Yet this experience has shown us all that the principles of free speech and diversity and inclusion not only can, but must, be mutually respected. That’s hard work, no question. But, as we’d always hoped and now truly know, it’s work we’re eager and able to take on, together.
Catherine Gunther Kodat is dean of the College of Arts & Sciences and a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College in Portland, Ore. A former metro desk reporter and dance critic for The Baltimore Sun, she has taught at Boston University, Boston College, Tufts University and Hamilton College. She is moving to Wisconsin this summer to take up new duties as provost and dean of the faculty at Lawrence University.