Speech By Princeton's Robby George About Free Speech Is Shouted Down At Washington College • TaxProf Blog

Chronicle of Higher Education, A Professor Spoke About ‘Campus Illiberalism.’ Students Shouted Him Down Over His Anti-LGBTQ Views.:

This month, Robert P. George gave a campus talk about what he sees as a growing intolerance of certain viewpoints in higher ed.

“At some colleges and universities, speaking invitations to dissenters from campus orthodoxies are not issued,” the Princeton University professor wrote in prepared remarks he shared with The Chronicle. Those who are invited can be disinvited or pressured to withdraw, he wrote. Or “they are interrupted” or “shouted down.”

Some students who disagreed with George’s views on LGBTQ rights and abortion disrupted the speech. The event — at Washington College, a small liberal-arts institution in Maryland — ended early.

George declined to comment beyond sharing a copy of the speech, titled “Is There a Cure for Campus Illiberalism?” His remarks describe “the unwillingness of so many members of college and university communities” to engage with “arguments that challenge” their existing beliefs.

Protests of campus speakers are nothing new. But the circumstances of the Washington College event are a striking example of how fraught campus-speech issues have become in the current political moment, as states pass restrictions on LGBTQ rights and abortion access that many students oppose.

George is a conservative legal scholar who directs Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions and serves on the board of the Heritage Foundation, a right-leaning think tank. He has written and spoken about his opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion, and expansions of transgender rights.

While George’s lecture at Washington College did not address those issues, some students say that his affiliations and beliefs meant that he shouldn’t have been invited to the campus.

During the event, a small group of protesters entered the room. They shouted and played loud music, preventing George from finishing his prepared remarks. Campus security officers had been briefed that a demonstration could take place, but they did not intervene. College policy directs officers not to intervene in nonviolent protests, said Brian Speer, a Washington College spokesperson.

Speer said that administrators stepped in to try to de-escalate the situation, encouraging the group to allow George to speak and challenge him with questions after the lecture — but the protest continued. The Chronicle spoke with two people who attended the event, Speer and a student, who said that George sat to the side at a table during the disruption.

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, known as FIRE, wrote a letter to the college arguing that security officers should have intervened and stopped the protest.

Michael J. Sosulski, Washington College’s president, condemned the disruption in an email to the campus, and said that protesters would be “held accountable” for violating the student honor code. Sosulksi had previously declined students’ demands to call off George’s speech.

George’s speech on September 7 was billed as the inaugural Lawrence W. Swanstrom Memorial Lecture. Joseph Prud’homme, an associate professor and director of the Institute for Religion, Politics, and Culture at Washington College, invited George and served as the event’s moderator. Prud’homme did not respond to a request for comment.

Inside Higher Ed, A Speech About Free Speech Is Shouted Down:

A conservative Princeton University professor tried to give a speech this month at Washington College centering on the need for campus free speech. Students disrupted his talk and succeeded in ending it.

It was another example of what are often called student shoutdowns or “heckler’s vetoes”—though the meaning of that phrase is contested—disrupting conservative speakers. Perhaps most prominently this year, in March, Stanford University students disrupted a talk by Judge Kyle Duncan of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

This month’s Washington College incident, first reported by The Star Democrat and later by The Chronicle of Higher Education, featured Robert George, who didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Tuesday. He’s the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton and directs Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions, which recently released a new set of proposed academic freedom and free speech principles.