Document View

The American Association of University Professors has published a policy statement that defends the right of campus groups to invite provocative speakers to their universities. The statement comes a year and a half after a US presidential campaign that was rife with campus-speaker controversies and cancellations.

Copyright American Library Association Jul 2006

The American Association of University Professors has published a policy statement that defends the right of campus groups to invite provocative speakers to their universities.

The statement, which was approved by the association's Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, comes a year and a half after a U.S. presidential campaign that was rife with campus-speaker controversies and cancellations. Many of those controversies involved Michael Moore's Slacker Uprising Tour, an effort by the documentary filmmaker to mobilize college students against President Bush's re-election.

In the fall of 2004, Moore was disinvited from speaking engagements at California State University at San Marcos and at George Mason University. Administrators at Florida Gulf Coast University also postponed an October 2004 speech by Terry Tempest Williams, an environmental writer critical of President Bush, until after Election Day. Around the same time, a spate of conservative commentators, including Ann Coulter and William Kristol, had pies thrown at them during campus talks.

"The university is no place for a heckler's veto," the AAUP statement said. But it reserves most of its criticism for administrators who clamp down on outspoken visitors.

"College and university administrators have displayed an increasing tendency to cancel or withdraw funding from otherwise legitimate invitations to noncampus speakers," the statement says. It notes that administrators who want to cancel an appearance by a firebrand often deploy one of several standard arguments. They say they are worried for the safety of the speaker, they cite concerns over a lack of balance in university discourse, or they say that by inviting a partisan speaker to their campus, the university risks violating its tax-exempt status.

"These reasons for canceling outside speakers are subject to serious abuse," the statement says. "Their proper application should be limited to very narrow circumstances that only rarely obtain." The statement then tackles each of those arguments in turn.

"Only in the most extreme and extraordinary circumstances can the near certainty of imminent danger justify rescinding an invitation," it says in regard to concerns over the safety of controversial speakers.

With respect to balance, the statement says, "So long as the range of a university's extracurricular programming is educationally justifiable, the specific invitations of particular groups should not be vetoed by university administrators."

And on the question of a university's tax status, the AAUP says that "overly restrictive interpretations of Section 501(c)(3) have become an excuse for preventing campus groups from inviting politically controversial speakers." It goes on to say that "invitations made to outside speakers by students or faculty do not imply approval or endorsement by the institution of the views expressed by the speaker." Reported in: Chronicle of Higher Education online, April 28.