It all started in the 1960s. William F. Buckley was one of the first to raise concerns about political life on college campuses when he published his now famous book God and Man at Yale. In his book, he criticized Yale University and its faculty for doing more to impose a collectivist ideology on its students than to promote the free exchange of ideas on campus.
God and Man at Yale was prophetic. That became evident in the 1970s, when the anti-war movement erupted on college campuses around the country. Those protests fed into social activism on campuses in the 1980s and 1990s, which fought for equality that crossed racial, economic, and geographic lines. Yet as student activists coalesced into more unified movements on college campuses across the country, they became, wittingly or not, vocal opponents of free speech through their demands for regulations and protections from offensive behaviors and words.
Regulatory speech codes were constructed on campuses across the nation in the 1980s and the 1990s in response to pressures brought on by groups resolute in their commitment to use institutional authority to eliminate potentially offensive or uncomfortable language. The tenuous balance between the requirements of free speech with the strong community values of mutual respect, harmony, and civility on college campuses was upstaged by a small and determined minority of campus activists. These activists succeeded in intimidating students committed to the classical liberal values of free speech and the free intercourse of exchange.
Throughout these battles, Dartmouth College was an important center of student activism. Threats to intellectual freedom and the classical liberal education that Dartmouth has for centuries been a bastion of were reflective of national struggles and the larger plight of higher education.
Yet a recent incident highlighted the disconnect between those who deny that free speech is threatened on our campus and the growing mass of evidence that indicates otherwise. Last spring, the Dartmouth College Libertarians invited British journalist, public speaker, and technology editor for Breitbart News Milo Yiannopoulos to speak at Dartmouth. Mr. Yiannopoulos, a self-professed cultural libertarian and free speech fundamentalist, has been criticized for his controversial views on feminism, social justice, and political correctness.
Sandor Farkas, Editor-in-Chief of The Dartmouth Review and a co-host of the event, said that the invitation was a result of the desire to promote the exchange of ideas.
“While many members of the campus conservative community, including myself, do not approve of Mr. Yiannopolous’s actions and disagree with many of his opinions, we believe that the ability to listen to such views is fundamental to the intellectual development of all college students,” he said. “Even if you believe that a person is pure evil, you must have the intellectual courage to meet them face to face and hear what they have to say. This enables you to gain a thorough understanding of your adversaries’ opinions and why you hold different views.”
Initially, however, Dartmouth College administrators-without explicitly expressing opposition to the event-went out of their way to prevent the event from happening. Collis Center administrators provided a prohibitively high security cost estimate of $15,000 to the College Libertarians. Administrators cited safety concerns in the wake of violent incidents sparked by Mr. Yiannopoulos’s controversial viewpoints as the rationale for this exorbitantly high security cost.
Farkas, however, said that
“this estimate was nothing near the price that other organizations paid for significantly more famous and controversial figures such as Governor Rick Perry and President Bill Clinton.”
It appears that the Dartmouth College Libertarians were victims of a new form of censorship often used by colleges and universities. What has been termed “security fee censorship” is a deceptive new tactic that administrations are beginning to use to force the cancellation of controversial events under the façade of prioritizing the physical safety of their students. Many of Mr. Yiannopoulos’s recent campus appearances- including those at the University at Miami, Villanova, the University of Maryland, and Florida Atlantic University- were cancelled because of the inflated security costs charged to campus conservative organizations. According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), an organization devoted to defending civil liberties in academia, this is an unconstitutional violation of the 1st amendment because those security fees effectively “function as a tax on protected speech.”
Mr. Yiannopoulos himself also acknowledged the tactic but argued that it would backfire and direct more attention towards him.
“College administrations, with a few honorable exceptions, will stop at nothing to torpedo my talks, and slapping extortionate security and event fees on students is easily among the lower, more slippery tools in their arsenal. I’m not sure what they hope to accomplish, beyond getting themselves in trouble and driving yet more attention to me.”
This past week, however, the College Libertarians received a notice that the security costs would be reduced. Farkas said that the new estimate is about one-tenth of the initial estimate.
“I’m very happy that they made the decision to lower the quote, but it doesn’t actually make me feel better about the administration’s initial intentions,” he said. “As this has progressed, I’ve become more and more convinced that the administration’s intent wasn’t entirely pure from the beginning. The reduction of the cost makes me think that the initial quote was purposefully inflated, whether through malice or through bureaucratic incompetence.”
Farkas claims that the administration lowered the costs after an extended series of conversations with conservative leadership on campus.
“I think we were quite honest with [the administration],” Farkas said. “We voiced to them our concerns that the cost was being inflated to dissuade us from having the event and that such an inflation, simply due to the other side’s desire to protest anything and everything, was categorically unfair.”
Nevertheless, the administration’s recent move to lower costs for the Milo Yiannopoulos event should be a cause for optimism. The assault on free speech that has slowly played out on college campuses across the country since the 1960s has reached a crisis point. The restoration of freedom of thought and intellectual expression is direly needed. Since the dawn of Western civilization, liberal education has been associated with the critical and dynamic exercise of the mind. The tension between competing ideologies and viewpoints has constituted the basis of such an education for centuries. In his masterpiece God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley wrote that
“what is required is more, not less, tolerance-not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship.”
The students and administrators of Dartmouth College ought to remember these words as they confront the increasingly important issue of free speech on campus.