COMMENTARY
These days it’s hard to tell who is less tolerant of viewpoints they dislike: a university’s administrators or its students. But rest assured that when guest speakers with unpopular views are invited to speak, someone on campus will seek to silence them.
Brown University, left, and Brandeis University. Wikimedia Commons
Brandeis University’s decision to revoke the honorary degree offered to women’s rights activist and outspoken Islam critic Ayaan Hirsi Ali follows a sad but common narrative. When Brandeis announced its intention to honor Hirsi Ali at graduation, some students were outraged that a woman who has publicly attacked Islam—most notably in her New York Times Bestselling memoir Infidel (2007)—would receive recognition by their university. In this article in Brandeis’ student newspaper The Justice, members of the Muslim Students Association wrote that they viewed Hirsi Ali’s selection as “a personal attack on Brandeis’ Muslim students,” and evidence of the school’s endorsement of “hate speech.”
Cowed campus administrators caved in to the pressure of student groups and withdrew Hirsi Ali’s honorary degree. In this statement, the administration wrote that they “cannot overlook certain of her past statements that are inconsistent with Brandeis University's core values.”
What exactly Brandeis’s “core values” are remains unclear. Tony Kushner’s anti-Semitic remarks caused students to protest his honorary degree in 2006, but Brandeis went ahead with it anyway. Then-president Jehuda Reinharz even said that “the University does not select honorary degree recipients on the basis of their political beliefs or opinions.” Yet in the case of Hirsi Ali, they apparently do.
Brown University also silenced a speaker this year, although this time it was the students—not the administrators—who forcibly stifled a dialogue. On October 29, 2013, student protestors shouted down former NYC Police Commissioner Ray Kelly as he attempted to give a planned lecture defending his controversial “stop-and-frisk” policy. In the days before the lecture, posters announcing Kelly’s arrival were defaced with swastikas and other Nazi symbolism. When the university refused to disinvite Kelly, “we decided to cancel [the lecture] for them,” said Jenny Li, said a student who helped organized the protest.
The same student ironically called Kelly’s forced silence “a powerful demonstration of free speech.”
This year Brandeis and Brown tie for a Muzzle Award for best (or worst) censorship of a guest speaker. Regardless of who is holding the duct tape, these campus actions communicate a clear message: if we don’t like what you have to say, don’t bother coming here.