On Monday, acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan was scheduled to speak at Georgetown University Law Center, where I attend school, for a conference focused on immigration law and policy. McAleenan presides over the DHS, a department that has received plenty of criticism in recent years, and it wasn’t a popular decision to invite him to campus. But it seems entirely reasonable to include the head of the DHS in the conference because he is, after all, in a prime position to actually affect immigration policy.
This reality is apparently irrelevant for the irate mob of students that shouted him down and tried to prevent him from speaking altogether. Despite multiple pleas for the students to halt their protests, these students persisted until McAleenan eventually decided to leave, leading to no conversation and no question-and-answer session.
This isn’t the first time angry leftist students have squashed a speech, and, generally, they’ll point to their right to free speech. Yet, in reality, such a tactic is not a valid exercise of their right to free speech but a thinly veiled attempt to suppress speech and the exchange of ideas altogether.
This ritual is all too common on college campuses, and it’s the rhetorical equivalent of book-burning. Conservative writer Kevin Williamson points out in his latest book, The Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mob Politics, that the practice of book-burning is designed to signal that certain ideas aren’t welcome in the public square and to intimidate those who think differently.
In the eyes of these protesters, McAleenan’s ideas are so toxic that even engaging with them in a public forum is “normalizing” them. Thus, the event should be canceled, they think. This is a fundamentally un-American view.
In the United States, we uniquely and correctly understand expression as a fundamental right that precedes government. The right to protest has a multitude of benefits, which include sparking social change. On a broader scale, Hong Kong is utilizing this tactic to push back against an autocratic regime and ought to be commended for doing so.
My fellow students seem to think they’re doing the same thing as the protesters in Hong Kong. Of course, they’re not. They’re not oppressed, they’re at institutions that afford them the opportunity to access powerful figures such as the highest ranking official in the Department of Homeland Security.
It was clear that many of us wanted to hear what McAleenan had to say, whether we agree with his views or not. When a school official told the protesters to be quiet, a great number of those in the audience softly cheered. But these interested students, many of whom were certainly of a liberal persuasion, lost out, because ideological intolerance was simply louder.
Shortly after the event, Georgetown Law Dean William Treanor released a statement expressing his discontent with what happened, noting that the behavior of the protesters is in conflict with Georgetown policy.
Indeed, part of the university’s speech policy plainly states, “Actions that violate this policy include disrupting events to prohibit other students from hearing the views of an invited speaker.” If Georgetown is serious about fostering a climate that values open discourse, then they should enforce their policies. Holding these students accountable is a good place to start.
Protesting is a fundamental right. Yet there ought to be limits as to where such protests are permissible, so people cannot infringe on the rights of others. Protesting outside the building would’ve been fine, but allowing the conduct to take place in the same room is tacitly enabling the derailment of the event altogether.
School administrations shouldn’t sit idly by while students see their intellectual development stunted by their wanna-be authoritarian peers. If administrators have policies to deal with this sort of behavior, then they ought to enforce them. If not, then they should consider enacting policies to deal with disruptive protesters, whether it be through allowing security to remove disrupters, punishing students afterwards, or a mix of the two. Anything less would be antithetical to the school’s alleged commitment to free speech and open dialogue.
Ethan Lamb (@realethanlamb) is a Young Voices contributor and a law student at Georgetown University.
