I wish colleges would tell the truth and say that they do not permit the public airing of certain opinions.
Catherine Rampell writes: Around the country, colleges have found a new excuse for shutting down free speech: safety.
Just as “national security” has periodically served as a pretext for robbing Americans of civil liberties, so too has “campus security” newly become a convenient rationale for discarding commitments to free speech. Unwilling to either defend controversial speech or cop to censoring it, college administrators are instead increasingly invoking public “safety” when they cancel events.
Ben Shapiro, a young conservative firebrand who has criticized Black Lives Matter, has recently been disinvited from two college campuses due to “security” concerns. In February, his scheduled talk at California State University at Los Angeles was canceled — or rather, indefinitely delayed — so that administrators could “arrange for him to appear as part of a group of speakers with differing viewpoints on diversity.”
The university president said the decision “was made in the interest of safety and security.” (Shapiro showed up on campus anyway; security indeed had to smuggle him through a back entrance to protect him from protesters, one of whom pulled a fire alarm to disrupt the event.)
Then, last month, a student group at DePaul University in Chicago had to revoke its invitation to Shapiro after administrators barred him from campus over “security concerns.”
A month earlier, DePaul had barred Milo Yiannopoulos, a sort of professional troll and informal spokesman for the racist, anti-feminist alt-right, from returning to campus. An earlier visit resulted in student protesters storming the stage, with one protester allegedly assaulting Yiannopoulos; security hired for the event did not intervene. When the College Republicans invited him back, an administrator said a review of video footage of the previous event revealed “it is clear that it would not be possible for DePaul to provide the security that would be required for such an event.”
Last week Yiannopoulos was also disinvited from an event at the University of Miami, again because of unspecified “security concerns.”
