I’m okay with UC Berkeley students going “full Berkeley” every time a bigoted fascist is allowed to speak at their University. I know Bill Maher doesn’t agree with me. I know there are countless hot-takers out there eager to get in their “special snowflake” columns about Millennials who don’t like ouchy words. I know that the alt-right rules America, and it’s fashionable for them to call out the “intolerant left.”
But I think students expressing that they don’t like somebody is speech that is just as protected as whatever hate-spewing bile Milo or Ann Coulter or Donald Trump has to say. My free speech includes my right to shout over your free speech.
However, a public university should not be in the business of squelching public speech. If students at Berkeley invite someone to speak, Berkeley officials should not be in the business of choosing which speakers are allowed based on the content of their talk. Berkeley students, go nuts. Berkeley administrators, stand down.
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That might seem like a fine distinction, but it’s how I get to the point where I can support the lawsuit the Berkeley College Republicans filed against the school, on Monday. The Los Angeles Times reports:
According to Harmeet Dhillon, a lawyer representing the students, Berkeley has adopted an unwritten policy under which it declares certain speakers as “high profile” and then restricts when and where they can appear on campus.
In case you haven’t been following along — and it’s worth noting that the alt-right supremacists who control the country have spent more time talking about this than anything Trump has done in the last week — the Berkeley College Republicans invited Ann Coulter to campus to speak. Her fee was paid in part by the Young America’s Foundation, which is some kind of right-wing non-profit.
Coulter was supposed to speak this Thursday, but the Berkeley campus kind of erupted, as it does, and so the University decided to move Coulter’s speech to May 2nd, when the University said it could provide better security.
The problem is that May 2nd is during finals week, and the new venue the school offered Coulter is off-campus. AND, the school changed her prime-time slot to a midday appearance, which likely further decreases the chances that anybody can attend.
Taken together, it sure looks like Berkeley has done everything it can to suppress the Ann Coulter talk. Which is stupid. The way to deal with Ann Coulter is to ignore her the way one might ignore a misbehaving child who threatens to run away. Ann Coulter only exists because people react to her presence. She’s not worth rioting over; I wouldn’t even spit at her because my fleeting saliva is more important to me than anything she has to say.
The Berkeley College Republicans, and their YAF sugar daddies, think that what Berkeley is doing to Coulter is illegal. They allege that Berkeley is selectively enforcing an unwritten rule. From their complaint:
Defendants, acting under color of state law and according to a pattern and practice, have enacted the unwritten or unpublished High-Profile Speaker Policy, and engaged in viewpoint discrimination by selectively enforcing the policy’s unreasonable time, place, and manner restrictions on BCR and YAF, with the effect of marginalizing or banning the expression of conservative viewpoints on the UC Berkeley campus.
Suing over an “unwritten or unpublished” rule is… challenging. A Berkeley spokesperson responded to the suit saying, “Nobody here understands what they are referring to.”
But whether or not the College Republicans have a case, they certainly have a point. The University can’t have one policy for evil people, and one for regular people, because the University can’t be in the business of designating who is evil. That is for their students to decide.
If you are a school, you have to trust that you are educating your charges well enough that they can decide for themselves whether Ann Coulter is a turd molded into human form animated by a feckless God. Let her speak! Let the students burn her in effigy.
Then let everybody get back to study for finals so they can get the grades they need to sell out like their parents before them.
Republican students sue to allow Ann Coulter’s speech this week at UC Berkeley [Los Angeles Times]
Elie Mystal is an editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.