Heckler's Veto Claims Two More Scalps

Two depressing datapoints from the world of higher education

Yesterday, by way of illustrating the climate at the university he attends, my son sent me the following piece from The Wall Street Journal by Mary Jane Rein, the former head of Clark University’s Strassler Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The piece explains why she is now the former head of that institution rather than still running it: because she felt her position had been rendered untenable by the university’s lack of support when her own graduate students attempted to exercise a heckler’s veto over an event that she had organized on another campus.

The event, co-sponsored by a history professor at Worcester State University and the Jewish Federation of Central Massachusetts, invited a reserve officer in the Israeli Defense Forces to speak about his experience as one of the first responders to the massacres perpetrated by Hamas on October 7th. Some of the attendees at the event showed up in order to disrupt it, by shouting, pulling a fire alarm, and otherwise preventing the speaker from speaking. Among these were some of Rein’s own graduate students, who, in addition to trying to disrupt the invited speaker, shouted at Rein not to use her title because the Strassler Center did not support her views. After the event, these students berated Rein, demanding she resign her position and threatening to have her investigated for an opinion piece she had written.

According to Rein, she did not resign because of these events, but because of the university’s response to them, which was not to discipline the students in any way but to warn her not to mention her position or her affiliation with Clark when involved in events off campus. She found this restriction incompatible with how other faculty were treated in other circumstances, and felt strongly that the university was trying to muzzle her, tacitly endorsing the heckler’s veto applied by her students. Therefore, she found her position untenable, and chose to resign and go to another university rather than continue her work at Clark.

Clark University has disseminated an official response, which makes several arguments. First, that it could not discipline the students because they were not on campus, and it can only discipline them for off-campus activities that violate the law which their behavior at this event, however discreditable, did not. The students would have been disciplined had the event happened at Clark. Second, Rein was not restricted from speaking or from organizing events off campus, but merely asked to make clear when she was acting solely in her private capacity, so as not to give the impression that she was acting on behalf of the university that employed her.

I, of course, am not privy to whatever conversation happened between Rein and her employer. It’s possible that Rein overreacted or was even looking to leave and using this as an excuse. But I’m at a loss to understand why the university would have responded the way it did unless it was, in fact, feeling threatened by the heckler’s veto itself. If they thought the event was a reasonable thing for Rein to have helped organize, they could easily have addressed the campus afterwards, condemning the alleged behavior of the hecklers (without naming anyone or endorsing the allegations as factual), and making clear a few basic tenets of liberalism: that part of being a liberal institution is recognizing and accepting that people can have wildly divergent views, even views that might seem abhorrent to some; that inviting someone to speak is not an endorsement of their views, so Rein’s views could not be inferred from the fact that she invited someone from the IDF to speak at an event; and that, indeed, even knowing the speaker’s nationality and institutional affiliation, one cannot presume to know the substance and import of his speech without hearing him out.

In the context of a statement like that, surely the university could also say that faculty and administration are allowed to speak on issues of the day, but that they do not represent the university in doing so. But absent that context, it really does sound like they were saying to her “look, if you want to get yourself into situations like that, it’s your business, but keep us out of it.” And I can readily understand why she might find that stance made her position untenable.

Meanwhile, on the same day, the following news story hit about the valedictorian at USC, Asna Tabassum, being denied the right to give a speech at commencement. Why? Because she had posted inflammatory material denouncing Zionism as an ideology and calling for Israel to be abolished as a country. Those posts got around, and the university received threats from individuals who aimed to disrupt commencement if she was allowed to speak. The university felt that the only way they could reasonably allow her to speak was if they implemented significant new security procedures that would themselves disrupt commencement, so they decided to cancel her valedictory address.

Although this was not an action by the government, it amounts to a version of the other, original meaning of the “heckler’s veto” — not a situation where hecklers successfully shut down a speaker, but a situation where an authority preemptively shuts one down for fear of violent or disruptive action by hecklers. Again, I wasn’t in the room where those discussions happened; it’s possible that there’s more to the story than we know. But based on what has been reported, this really does seem like a straightforward case of a university baldly caving to threats. Either they substantively agreed with the hecklers that someone with Tabassum’s views should not be “platformed” by the university—or they simply didn’t think protecting speech was nearly as important as having a pleasant commencement. Either conclusion strikes me as thoroughly appalling.

I feel that way, to be clear, even though the post in question strikes me as historically obtuse to say the least. Having views that I think are ill-conceived and ignorant, though, is not a disqualification for speaking at graduation, not even if those views wind up giving aid and comfort to people I think are genuinely dangerous and terrible. The standard that self-appointed pro-Israel activists have adopted for what constitutes objectionable speech cannot conceivably be applied in a neutral way to other topics; it’s outlandishly over-broad and as obviously designed to enforce silence and conformity as the Chinese Communist Party’s standards for discussion of Taiwan. Those activists are, of course, free to apply those appalling standards however they choose in their own interactions. But a university cannot give in to them without fundamentally compromising its core commitments.

Naively, I still thought that should be obvious. But it’s not obvious, and the best evidence is the story out of Clark, because that’s a story about the heckler’s veto being wielded by self-styled progressives, and the fact that at this late date these people still haven’t figured out that this is a simply catastrophic tool for them wield is simply mild-blowing to me. They haven’t advanced their cause, nor have they changed any minds (certainly not Rein’s). All they’ve done is tarnish the reputation of their university and the Center where they are studying. I think the actions of the hecklers in the USC situation will also backfire ultimately, because I think Israel is digging itself a terrible hole and they’re helping protect the supply line of shovels. But that’s not the way they see it. In their own terms, I think their action was successful. That’s the fundamental asymmetry, and if the illiberal left can’t see it by now I suspect they never will.

Free speech—not just in the formal sense of non-censorship by the government but in the substantive sense of actively seeking the widest scope for open and civil discourse—remains foundational to liberalism, because without it justice—anyone’s conception of justice—cannot be both peacefully and effectively pursued. The university ought to be precisely the place where that perspective is held most dear; if it isn’t, then they really are just places for professional training. People like Asna Tabassum need to hear from Israelis, real ones, in order to grapple with their understanding of history, because that is the only way they will ever be able to advance the Palestinian cause they claim to cherish. And the prospective graduates of USC need to hear from Asna Tabassum, not because of what she has to say, but because they need to know that the pieces of paper they’re about to receive actually mean something.