Tuesday, April 2, 2019

A Blackwater Brouhaha at Beloit College


By Jonathan Marks
Friday, March 29, 2019

Erik Prince founded and once ran the private military firm, Blackwater. The firm no longer exists under that name because, among other things, some of its people were implicated in and eventually convicted of the killing of fourteen Iraqi civilians. Prince is at the moment best known for his connections to President Trump, which drew him into Robert Mueller’s investigative web.

Prince avoided indictment, but he could not avoid the protesters who shut down his talk at Wisconsin’s Beloit College this week.

This story is in some ways the same as all the rest. Beloit’s Chapter of Young Americans for Freedom invited Prince. Students felt “unsafe” because members of the firm Prince headed killed people in Iraq twelve years ago. Let’s not belabor the point that this nebulous idea of safety could in principle be extended to any number of speakers with tenuous connections to ventures that possess a military component. The only threat to public safety that resulted from Prince’s invitation to campus came from one of his liberal critics. That student was briefly banned from campus over social media posts that Beloit College deemed intimidating.

Meanwhile, at Tulane University, three students were arrested for arson after they set fire to a sign on the door of a fellow student involved in the libertarian student group, Young Americans for Liberty. We don’t know for sure whether the crime was politically motivated, but we do know that the YAL student was specifically and publicly identified by an anonymous group out to “expose” YAL as racist and misogynist. That’s what I call “unsafe.”

It’s hard, of course, to criticize from a distance. Perhaps there is more here than meets the eye. But Beloit College explicitly warns its students that they risk serious punishment when they disrupt public lectures. The school’s student handbook explains that “willful obstruction of the normal processes essential to the function of the college” is “prohibited behavior.” No one, according to university policy, “has the right to disrupt another’s speech or presentation.”

Those who engage in prohibited behavior “may face disciplinary action such as, but not limited to probation, suspension, or expulsion.” The college has opened an investigation, condemned the behavior of the students who prevented Prince from speaking, and stated that its “core principles” are at stake. It shouldn’t be hard to identify the students since at least some of the demonstration was captured on video and one of the disrupters has been giving interviews. Plainly, she thinks the college will do nothing.

But they’d better do something. The Manhattan Institute’s Heather Mac Donald is due to speak in April. She has been shut down on occasion because some students consider her a “white supremacist fascist.” You see, she has criticized the Black Lives Matter movement.

The time to establish deterrence for this sort of behavior is before a speaker has been prevented from speaking. The college had ample notice of the controversy surrounding Erik Prince. It had security present, and, if news accounts are to be trusted, only about a dozen students actually “rushed the stage,” which was empty at the time. No student was escorted out. There are not even reports of any official getting up, grabbing a microphone, and reminding students of the college’s policy on demonstrations and the possible consequences of violating it. Perhaps we’ll learn in coming days that administrators did everything they could to prevent the disruption, but right now it looks like they blew it.

I’ve been a critic of President Trump’s recent executive order on campus free speech. Disruptions of this sort, never great in number, declined dramatically in 2018 in part because college administrators have gotten better at forestalling them. Prince himself suggests that the cancellation of his speech at Beloit proves that President Trump is right: “President Trump will defend free speech and I think the college will be hearing from the court soon on this because enough is enough.”

Beloit College still has a chance to prove him wrong.

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