Shots In The Dark: Harvard's Free Speech Mistake

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

Harvard's Free Speech Mistake

The Crimson reports today that the University supports the dropping of criminal charges against the four protesters who disrupted a speech by FBI director Robert Mueller at the Kennedy School.

“The University is persuaded that more could have been done in the circumstances to apprise the students that they were in jeopardy of arrest,” said a statement released by Harvard last night. “Without condoning the students’ behavior at the Forum, broader principles have led the University to request that the criminal charges against the students be dropped.”

Isn't that like asking the police to read a suspected criminal his Miranda rights before making an arrest?

Apparently because the statement was released late at night—an attempt to bury it, I suppose—the story is short on important details, such as:

Who at Harvard released this statement? Mass Hall? College Dean Dick Gross?

What, exactly, are the broader principles involved? The right to shout down an invited speaker?

For, if you watch the video of the event, you can see that that is exactly what occurs.

It will be interesting to see the full text of this statement from the University, but my instinct is that Harvard is making a mistake here.

The students involved are facing punishment ranging from a month in jail (highly unlikely) to a $50 fine (much more likely). Let them face the legal consequences of their intrusion. Otherwise, how can protest have any seriousness?

I'm sure the protesters are well-meaning. But they seem to have an inflated opinion of themselves and a superficial understanding of the nature of their actions.

“We are looking forward to getting back to our lives,” [protester Michael] Gould-Wartofsky said.

No. After eleven days in the Birmingham jail, Martin Luther King was looking forward to getting back to his life. After 27 years in prison, Nelson Mandela was looking forward to getting back to his life. After a few hours in the Harvard University Police Department, you do not get to say that you are looking forward to getting back to your life.

Here's what one protester, J. Claire Provost, concluded: “In a way it was good to have such an issue made out of this case so that it highlights the issue that we were trying to highlight through our protest—the issue of suppression of civil liberties and the importance of free speech."

Provost says that she and her colleagues are protesting on behalf of free speech...by repeatedly shouting down a speaker in a public forum. If she is aware of the irony, she gives no sign.

“We hope that this will be the last prosecution of peaceful protesters that ever happens on Harvard’s campus,” Gould-Wartofsky said.

But shouting down a speaker is not a peaceful act; it is a violent one. It is aggressive, threatening, unnerving, disturbing, disruptive, and upsetting. And this is precisely why these students chose that route—because they thought that such a disruptive action would be more effective than, say, carrying picket signs outside the school.

Yes, shouting down a public speaker on private property is a form of protest. Just not a protected one.

Except, apparently, at Harvard.

¶ 7:55 AM

Comments:

I don't get this at all. You seem determined to be obtuse about this issue. Two things:

1) Harvard has a policy about how to arrest its students. That policy wasn't followed in this case, so they're trying to reverse the arrests. That's pretty clear and it involves no judgment whatsoever about the actual behavior of the protestors; it's purely a judgment about the behavior of HUPD.

2) You are dangerously misusing the word "violent." Perhaps the protestors were "aggressive, threatening, unnerving, disturbing, disruptive, and upsetting," as you suggest BUT that is NOT violence. "Violence" is the exercise of physical force to cause harm to a person, and that is simply not what occured here.

Believe me, if they had really tried to commit an act of violence directed at the director of the FBI, everyone involved would be treating this situation very, very differently. By using the word "violence" to characterize these clowns, you are evacuating the word of its real meaning and conflating them with much more serious characters. That does damage to our ability to analyze and characterize situations of real violence.

# posted by Anonymous : May 2, 2007 9:26 AM

Sounds like everyone behaved incorrectly. The Free Speech Guidelines are very good:
https://www.fas.harvard.edu/~secfas/public/FreeSpeech.html
The relevant part is I.C: "Because the definition of disruption is subject to interpretation, a single warning procedure would avoid confusion about what constitutes disruption. By issuing a warning, the disrupters are told that their actions are unacceptable and must stop. Members of the audience will learn where they stand; they will know where the line is. If people cross that declared line again, they cannot claim not to have realized they were disruptive."

Sounds like Harvard missed this step. Also sounds like the students were disruptive. Morally Harvard probably is in the right about whether free speech was impaired, but under the circumstances it probably did the only practical thing by asking that charges be dropped.

# posted by Anonymous : May 2, 2007 9:29 AM

I disagree. There are many different kinds of violence in addition to the physical. The people misusing a word here are the ones who describe the shouting as "peaceful."

Watch the video—does the shouting feel peaceful to you? Or do the adjectives that I used better describe it?

If Harvard wants to excuse the protesters because the university's arrest policy was not properly followed, that's one thing.

(I think it may actually be a flawed policy; if you watch the video and try to imagine the police warning these protesters one by one, it seems a ridiculous scenario.)

In any case, the Harvard statement spoke of broad principles, and I'd like to know what that is referring to.

# posted by Richard Bradley : May 2, 2007 9:37 AM

By the way, that comment was directed to Anon 9:26.

# posted by Richard Bradley : May 2, 2007 9:38 AM

I agree with much of this post, but it misses the reason that this policy exists.

You say that shouting down a speaker is unacceptable. Who could disagree?

Someone else says that having police drag out people who ask impertinent questions, or make impertinent comments, at events is unacceptable. Who could disagree?

So: WHO DECIDES in a given instance which of those two cases obtains?

The difficulty of answering *that* question is the reason that Harvard has a policy, in which the best cases to be made on behalf of each party, in a public disagreement, are credited and respected.

I think this comment also speaks to your question about 'broad principles' -- i.e., the principle that both established podium voices and dissenting ones are worthy of being heard, within certain clear limits.

Peace ---

Standing Eagle

PS. "If Harvard wants to excuse the protesters because the university's arrest policy was not properly followed, that's one thing."
I think that's probably the thing we have here. But why oh why is there no person behind that statement, lending moral authority to it? Where is the leadership?

# posted by Standing Eagle : May 2, 2007 11:23 AM

Standing Eagle...

Agree with all this, except for this part:

—Someone else says that having police drag out people who ask impertinent questions, or make impertinent comments, at events is unacceptable. Who could disagree?—

These folks were not dragged out for asking impertinent questions or making impertinent comments. They could have gone to the microphone after the talk and asked the same questions in a way that might actually have gotten an answer.

They shouted the way that they did not to generate a response, but to disrupt the speech. Which, for a while, they did.

There's an opportunity here for a very interesting campus discussion about the nature and limits of free speech. I hope Harvard's leadership takes the opportunity to foster that discussion.

# posted by Richard Bradley : May 2, 2007 3:51 PM

"These folks were not dragged out for asking impertinent questions or making impertinent comments."

But my point is not that *on the merits* they should be seen to have behaved appropriately. My opinion about what happened might match yours or not, but it isn't automatically going to become a consensus view.

My point is that since the policy wasn't followed, they can now CLAIM that thuggish suppression of their concerns is what happened, and CLAIM that their rights to free speech have been violated. Any number of people, in good faith or not, might agree with them. And then the school has made itself the bad guy, even though it believes in free speech much more than the next guy/institution.

The question is not just, What's the standard? It's, Who decides? Having a judicial branch that's independent (God willing, knock wood, impeach Gonzales) gives us in the US the luxury of sometimes ignoring that question. Within a university the question of Who decides? -- people over 30 or people under? "constituents" or "bureaucrats"? pupils or educators? -- is a highly loaded one (albeit less so now than in the seventies) that we need processes and policies to mediate and address.

It's to avoid having to make judgment calls like the one you make and defend so competently in this last comment that Harvard has a content-neutral, and basically judgment-neutral, policy, in which each step in the process of defining something as disruption is clear and mutually understood.

Oh, also, by the way: disruption bad. Free speech good.

How come you and I seem to be the only ones interested in this stuff? Is it cuz it's sunny out?

Standing Eagle

# posted by Standing Eagle : May 2, 2007 4:39 PM

Maybe no one takes this issue, or these protesters, that seriously?

# posted by Richard Bradley : May 2, 2007 4:45 PM

If these protesters didn't have an expressed link to The Crimson, would you have examined the issue with such passion and conviction?

# posted by Anonymous : May 2, 2007 5:37 PM

Well, I wouldn't have written the post about the "Crimson editor" policy, of course. But otherwise, yeah, I've been writing about this stuff for a long time. You could look it up: Yale Daily News, fall of 1983.

Sometimes, things really are about principles. I am just surprised that so many on this board seem to think that the ability to shout down a speech is more important than the ability to give one.

# posted by Richard Bradley : May 2, 2007 5:56 PM

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