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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