Richard,

Where were you two years ago when the same thing happened, only worse, at a CIA recruiting event and Harvard was caught with its pants totally around its ankles? The event literally could not carry on, the protesters filibustered for like half an hour, and no public action seems to have been taken.

http://www.thecrimson.com/article.aspx?ref=507033

It's my not-totally-uninformed opinion that this year's fiasco is a direct result of the punting that the university seems to have done in the wake of the incident two years ago. There was no substantive follow-up, public communication, or taking of an educative stance, that I know of. Was there disciplinary action? You'd have to ask the students involved.

This time Harvard seems to have been just as unprepared, and in the absence of guidance from the moderator or faculty, HUPD ended up erring in the opposite direction. (The presence of the FBI Director, who has security concerns mere recruiters don't, is surely part of this result.)

I have little to add to the excellent posts made by your commenters this morning on the current matter. The main point is that there IS a policy, and that the school should follow it, enlisting the support of the police when needed.

I read the sentence about the "single warning procedure" differently than you do, though I agree it's poorly written. As I recall the policy, that sentence is justifying the creation of a standard procedure for warning disruptive people (the College then has guidelines for disciplining them on a stepwise scale based on how they react to each warning). (I had also recalled that the policy was promulgated around 1980, not 1990 as the Crimson says. No time for legwork for me today though.)

So when the sentence says that because definitions of disruptions vary, "A single warning procedure would avoid confusion," it means: "Because it's hard to identify disruption without taking sides, we need to institute a neutral and consistent (i.e., 'single') way of classifying disruptive events. WE SHOULD HAVE a standard procedure; if we do, confusion about where a line is being crossed can be prevented. Here is the procedure we have come up with: ... ." I think the idea, too, is that the *moderator* of an event should be prepared to issue such warnings in blanket fashion as things escalate, so that police don't have to go up to each disruptor individually. Such preparation should be standard procedure for any moderator at a potentially controversial event.

I agree that sustained disruption is unacceptable. The CIA event two years ago is a prime example of speech on campus actually being PREVENTED by a protest. (You can correctly label that deeply unacceptable, at a university, without calling it violent.) It seems though that in volatile political times the school wants (and wanted) to be very careful about classifying something as disruptive, rather than simply rude, dissenting, or persistent. There are good practical as well as principled reasons for this, as we see in the way that these particular obnoxious protesters have gotten to use the idea of Free Speech as a cudgel in the aftermath of their arrests.

Is the policy a bad one? I don't think so (though you're right about the grammar) -- it seems content-neutral and errs on the side of more speech rather than less in a maximal number of cases. A podium should not be an absolute license to silence others; but of course neither should having a pair of lungs, or an airhorn, or whatever. (One guy two years ago used his reverse-peristaltic powers to good disruptive effect.)

Unfortunately, Harvard in these two fiascos within three years of each other has found itself erring in each case on the side of less speech rather than more: the filibustering CIA protestors unhindered, and the over-quick (it seems, at least by the yardstick of the policy) arrests of the FBI protestors.

These errors are not the result of a disrespect for speech, but of failure to promulgate and execute existing policies. It's a matter of incompetence, not malice. Blame should fall on deans, past and present -- or at least that's how it looks from my perch.

Again I ask, where is the intellectual and moral leadership?

Standing Eagle
 

Standing Eagle,

Thanks for that long and good post. Very thoughtful.

The policy may not be a bad one, but it is extremely awkward to implement. And the writing of it is terrible.

What seems to me should have happened here is that Jean Shaheen (she was the moderator, no?) should have quickly stepped to the microphone and issued the University-suggested—not mandated, but suggested—warning.

But it is very hard to blame the police here, at least for the initial arrests. The protesters obviously planned to be silenced one by one; that's why the shouts were staggered, one after the other—for maximum disruptive effect. What were the police to do: Go up to each protester individually, warn him or her, and then sit and wait? It's absurd.
 

Richard, your concern for poor defenseless FBI Director Muller is touching, but a bit silly. How, oh how, would he ever have managed to have the courage to speak, if it had taken 5 minutes to remove the protestors?

The right to free speech is without doubt one of our most most important, but it doesn't guarantee the right of powerful public figures to speak without occasional interruption from pesky protestors.

I get the sense that you have some personal experience of having been protested or interrupted or something, and I think you ought to put that out publicly, if I've surmised correctly. It seems like you may be letting some personal history drive your evaluation here.
 

Nah, nothing personal. I just work in a field where we think this is important. Also, I've always believed that this kind of demonstration always does more harm than good for the cause involved, and as a progressive person, I am irritated by that.
 

Also, I don't give a damn whether it's the director of the FBI or a ninth-grade class orator speaking. When you start adjusting your principles depending on the situation, it is a very risky business.
 

well, i'm with you on the counter-productivity in this case, but i don't understand why it's irrelevant that the guy is the director of the FBI.

Three reasons. First, power differentials do matter, and it's much worse to interrupt a 15 year old kid than a professional political figure. People of the 2nd kind have many opportunities for public speaking, and occasional interruptions are therefore less serious, as they still have many opportunities for effective speech. Second, I'd expect the FBI director to be better able to psychologically handle the harassment. Third, the protestors are protesting an issue, right? Surely the gravity of the issue matters in evaluating these situations; it would be inappropriate to interrupt anybody just because didn't like the color of their tie, but it becomes trickier when you're talking about someone like Rumsfeld, for example, whose actions have arguably contributed to the deaths of hundreds of thousands.
 

Thanks for the thoughtfulness of your response, 6:08. I can see where you're coming from, and I certainly think it's a serious argument. I don't agree with it, still—whether it's Don Rumsfeld or Robert McNamara (who had to be escorted through the steam tunnels at Harvard), I just think that such confrontational protest that infringes on someone's ability to speak is wrong.