Audience deserves as much protection as speakers do

CORRECTION: Ken Waltzer should have been identified as a history professor, James Madison College.

Interestingly, Oxford University’s debate society is hosting David Irving, the Holocaust denier, at a forum Monday night along with Nick Griffin, leader of Britain’s far-right British National Party, a radical opponent of all immigration to Britain. This misguided event in the name of giving all people of all views a platform has rightly been condemned by the chairman of Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission as “an absolute disgrace” and “a juvenile provocation.”

A similar situation prevails here at MSU. In the past year or so, MSU Young Americans for Freedom, or YAF, and the MSU College Republicans, in the name of free speech, have brought to campus the same Nick Griffin, as well as Chris Simcox, leader of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, which “polices” the U.S.-Mexico border. Tom Tancredo, radical immigration opponent, also has spoken here.

The faculty advisers to the YAF and College Republicans, William Allen and Frederick Fico wrote in the Lansing State Journal on Nov. 25 that MSU now stands against free speech since its Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives has begun an investigation into these events, including the role of the faculty advisers. They are partially right. Access to the campus and full free speech for speakers is a value that must be protected at MSU — within the boundaries defining the rights of the audience as well as the rights of the speaker. But they are wrong in claiming that free speech is all these events are or have been about. It is dissimulating at best to plan and sponsor such provocations, then simply claim it is only in the name of free speech.

Why should observers not find in the pattern of these events a deliberate movement to create polarization on campus, provoke students, especially minorities, and actively promote exclusionist perspectives? Are YAF and the College Republicans adding to the dispassionate, analytic discussion of the immigration issue? The exclusionist views, if enacted, can cause real harm. Historically, such views have had horrible outcomes. Jews out; alien strangers out; the nation must be preserved. It is absolutely right, especially in the context that such events provoke disorder, and given that YAF proudly calls itself “green berets” for conservatism, that MSU’s Office of Inclusion and Intercultural Initiatives wonders what is going on — just as in Britain, those charged to maintain a society of equal rights, are concerned about Oxford.

In a university that aims to help prepare students to make their way in a world more closely knit together, and to provide leadership in that world, it is right to raise a question: What is happening in our midst and why? The appropriate response, of course, is more free speech, including calling what is happening by its appropriate name.

Ken Waltzer

history professor, dean of James Madison College and director of Jewish studies