 |
   |
  |
|
|
|
|
Center for the Study of Popular Culture
by Daniel J. Flynn - November 1998
While conference organizers welcomed the Columbia community to attend the conference without registering, the event’s primary participants were to be undergraduates from schools around New York City and the Northeast. Students journeyed from as far away as Washington, D.C. and Boston to attend the conference. Accuracy in Academia paid the university in excess of $11,000 for food and meeting space, had a contract, and informed Columbia officials three months in advance who the speakers might include, even adding that some might be deemed "controversial." This did not deter Columbia President George Rupp from derailing the event, however, as he instructed the school’s security force to block off the area where the meeting was to be held, setting up several checkpoints to inspect for identification. Thus, although black racist Khalid Muhammed, Soviet mouthpiece Angela Davis, and human bullseye Salman Rushdie have been able to speak at Columbia without incident in recent years, Dinesh D’Souza, Candace de Russy, John Leo, Reginald Jones, Reed Irvine, and other AIA speakers supposedly posed too much of a security threat.
The arbitrary action by the university followed a Friday evening dinner speech by Ward Connerly. A group of 140 students and scholars packed the East Room of Columbia’s Faculty House to hear the leader of the movement to abolish racial preferences and quotas discuss recent triumphs in the states of California and Washington. About as many left-wing activists protested the event. Their behavior disgusted even some who sympathized with their viewpoint. A self-described "liberal" student, Jasper Cooper, complained in the Columbia Spectator that demonstrators indiscriminately hurled epithets at anyone entering the building. "When protesters called me a bigot, they were assuming that anyone who would even listen to Mr. Connerly’s speech was racist." This protest—loud and often obnoxious, but peaceful—by students who opposed Connerly served as the pretext for administrators to cave in the next morning and censor the following day’s schedule.
"We’re not censoring your event," Faculty House Director John Hogan insisted piously, noting that it was the audience and not the speakers who would be denied entry to the conference. University officials on hand denied that President Rupp had made the decision to pull the plug and refused to give a reason as to why the gathering had been forced off campus. Presidential Delegate Ed Sullivan admitted that he had "no cogent explanation for it." Director of Security George Smartt, taking responsibility for the decision, held, "I am not required to make my explanation." After days of stonewalling, Columbia finally admitted that President Rupp gave the go-ahead on banning the students from meeting. During the event, in fact, Rupp made a mysterious trip to the conference, telling a reporter, "I don’t even know what ideas are being discussed." Yet he was hardly the naif he pretended to be. As chairman of the Association of American Universities, Rupp took the unprecedented step of using the group’s money to take out full-page newspaper ads supporting racial preferences and quotas. The connection between support for affirmative action and censoring the event was made explicit by the beginning words of the university’s official statement of explanation for its actions: "Columbia University is firmly committed to affirmative action and has long followed affirmative-action programs in admission of students and the recruitment of faculty and staff."
Even prior to Connerly’s address the school took extraordinary steps to prevent the gathering from taking place. Seven hours before Friday’s speech was to begin, security chief Smartt informed conference organizers that they would have to hire 20 of his security guards priced at more than $39 an hour or the event would be canceled. This sort of a shakedown operation is not unusual for universities to use against conservative groups. But the price of the protection racket was high—over $3,000—and even then Smartt wouldn’t guarantee that the event would proceed. In addition, the guards made it clear that they wouldn’t provide security for the conference itself, but would police the separate, university-sanctioned protest of the event sponsored by various student groups. Accuracy in Academia, therefore, was being forced to pay to monitor the actions of those attempting to shut them down. But organizers agreed to pay Smartt to guarantee that the conference went forward.
On the morning after Connerly’s speech, as students arrived for Saturday’s session, they were turned away by the same security force they had already paid to "protect" them. "In the former Soviet Union you would expect something like this because it was a totalitarian country," observed Catherine Lev, a Fordham Law School student and Russian immigrant, who was turned away by Columbia security. "In the United States, however, it is very surprising that a university would stamp out a group’s right to gather and speak. I thought I escaped totalitarianism when I left Russia only to find it glaring right back in my face here at Columbia University."
Those assembled to hear the speakers were forced to meet in Morningside Park. The catered lunch that Columbia was paid to provide yielded to pizzas and sandwiches purchased with organizers’ pocket money. Park benches and concrete were utilized as the makeshift auditorium’s seats. There were no microphones, but passersby congregated to listen to the speakers.
The approximately 80 protesters that reconvened on Saturday were predictably triumphant about having forced administrators to capitulate. Chanting "Ha! Ha! You’re Outside \ We Don’t Want Your Racist Lies," demonstrators held up signs which read, ACCESS DENIED, WE WIN: RACISTS NOT ALLOWED AT COLUMBIA, and THERE’S NO PLACE AT THE TABLE FOR HATE. Twenty minutes into Dinesh D’Souza’s address, the protesters began to shout him down. The predominantly white mob of Ivy Leaguers, mimicking their abuse of Connerly the previous night, effectively silenced the lecture with shouts of "racist" and "bigot" hurled at the Indian immigrant. "We got [D’Souza] into Morningside Park, which Columbia doesn’t pay attention to anyway," proclaimed activist Adrienne Brown, who took pride in preventing the author of Illiberal Education from speaking. "This is an alcove where homeless people sleep and piss." Franklin Amoo added, "I’ll do whatever needs to be done [to stop the conference], in order to make sure they know their sentiments are not shared."
One Columbia undergraduate who registered for the conference but did not come explained, "I did not attend the conference for a number of reasons, the most important being that I did not feel it would be good for my academic future and safety." Another student expressed outrage at the actions of his school and remarked that he wanted to write to the school paper, but was "afraid" to because his "sister has just applied to Barnard College and I do not want that type of attention."
Who had the student activists and their supporters in the administration silenced? Were they militia members or KKKers? No. One is a best-selling author; two are trustees at the largest public university systems in America; another is a former writer for Time magazine and the New York Times who currently calls U.S. News and World Report home; yet another is a professor of geology at Brooklyn College and a research affiliate at Yale.
What the university demonstrated was that Columbia’s support for diversity, like its commitment to tolerance and sensitivity, is a fraud. The following week, a student named Jesse Sanford had a column in the Columbia Spectator condemning the notion that "driving the conservatives off campus violated their freedom of speech," a position that he labeled "a dark, dangerous point of view" especially because "the right wing is growing more powerful on a daily basis." It doesn’t take an Ivy League administrator to figure out where this student got his ideas.
A pamphlet handed out to new students purports that "Columbia University prides itself on being a community committed to free and open discourse and to tolerance of differing views." The course catalog testifies that the school aspires to be a "community of discourse." While this umbrella of tolerance applies to such courses as "Pirates, Boys, and Capitalism" or "Gender and Deviance," it doesn’t cover points of view that dissent from the smothering orthodoxy that covers Columbia like an invisible fog.
Daniel J. Flynn is editor of Campus Report and executive director of Accuracy In Academia.
