Milo’s ‘Free Speech Week’ was a setup
UC Berkeley has gone to extraordinary lengths to support our commitments to free speech and the safety of our community.
On Sept. 14, at the invitation of the Berkeley College Republicans, the conservative speaker Ben Shapiro addressed an audience at Zellerbach Hall. His speech was not interrupted, and protests outside the hall were peaceful.
Then, at the invitation of a different student organization, the Berkeley Patriot, Milo Yiannopoulos announced his intention to bring a slate of speakers to campus for what he called “Free Speech Week,” from Sept. 24 to 27.
The day before the scheduled start, the Berkeley Patriot voluntarily canceled all the events. Yiannopoulos subsequently made a 20-minute appearance on Sproul Plaza, during which he snapped selfies and sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”
The contrasts between these two events are instructive. Together they reveal much about the challenges facing not just Berkeley, but all American universities in their efforts to protect free speech, and the extent to which college campuses are being used as stages for political theater and, at times, literal battlegrounds.
The Shapiro event fit the standard conception of a campus speech on a political topic. He came, spoke to an audience, answered questions and then left. The event was livestreamed, and it remains on the web. But Shapiro came primarily to talk, to be heard, to engage. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the speech was the thing.
“Free Speech Week” — so called — was an entirely different matter. The event was supposedly meant to be extraordinarily elaborate — 25 speakers over four days appearing at indoor and outdoor venues. The program as designed, and perhaps intended, would cause significant disruption on campus.
Two weeks before the event, cracks began to appear. The hosting student organization had failed to fulfill its contractual obligations and most of the sensible, standard and standing requirements of our events policy — submitting a list of confirmed speakers, requesting a security assessment, signing contracts and paying for venues.
The week before the event, Yiannopoulos published a list of speakers he claimed were confirmed. Within hours, we started to learn that several speakers had never heard of the event and had no intention of coming. Then, as the supposed start of the events approached, we witnessed incidents of harassment and provocation on campus — from disturbing posters to verbal abuse — aimed at individuals and underrepresented groups, and then quickly picked up and amplified by certain websites and social media outlets.
As “Free Speech Week” crumbled, we began to suspect it had always been, in significant part, a fiction. As one putative speaker, Lucian Wintrich, confirmed to us in an email, Free Speech Week had always been nothing but a “set-up.”
By taking advantage of First Amendment protections and campus policies formulated in a more innocent era (last year), the organizer, it seems, sought to provoke the university into canceling it in order to rehabilitate a damaged reputation, score political points and support a false narrative, on the web, that our university bans free speech.
It was an expensive setup. The university spent more than $2 million on security costs related to the two events.
There are many lessons learned from these two events, including how deep the division of opinion is on campus and beyond about the meaning and relevance of the First Amendment; how extensive security preparations needed to be; and the extent to which universities in general, and Berkeley in particular, are being targeted in a battle against objective scholarship, tolerance and diversity.
I have come to realize that free speech must be more than a set of principles but a process of engagement — a process complicated by unsettled areas of the law: What expense is reasonable for an institution to incur in the protection of speech, what regulation of time, place and manner is appropriate, what constitutes a sufficient security threat to justify cancellation of an event?
I have appointed a Commission on Free Speech to analyze recent events, to make recommendations for changes in content-neutral polices that would mitigate disruption, control security costs and better align our responsibility to protect free speech with our values as a community — values of diversity and inclusion. Thinking through that tension is some of the most important work before us as a campus and a country.