Controversy simmers over university’s invitation to former 70’s radical to speak at colloquium

First, colloquium organizers at the University of Massachusetts invited Raymond Luc Levasseur — a founder of the United Freedom Front, a radical 1970s group that bombed buildings, robbed banks and killed innocent people — to speak at an event called “The Great Western Massachusetts Sedition Trial: Twenty Years Later.” The subject was that state’s most expensive trial: that is, Levasseur’s own trial. Protests immediately erupted from those upset at what they saw as the legitimizing of domestic terrorism. Then, earlier this month, the forum’s organizers yielded to the pressure and canceled his appearance. Some denounced this initial episode as a violation of free speech. But was it really?

The Argument

No, this was not a violation of Levasseur’s right to free speech. One of the great misunderstandings of the last few decades has been this creeping notion that free speech means we must all sit in polite silence while hideous opinion is spewed everywhere around us. As far as the First Amendment goes, it simply forbids the government to interfere with any citizen’s right to say anything (freedom of speech) or to write anything (freedom of the press). And it bears noting that the “media” have no special constitutional right. The word “press” in 1789 meant “printing press” — the machine, in other words; its definition as a collective noun for the news media wouldn’t emerge for another century and a half.

The First Amendment is the highest expression of the founders’ belief in the value of the back and forth of debate. And that’s what took place at the University of Massachusetts. Librarians at the school invited Levasseur: people upset by the invitation (including the widow of a police officer murdered by members of the U.F.F.) protested his participation; the university publicly caved. This was not a case of free speech being stifled. It was the triumph of free speech. Dan Clawson of the sociology department at the University of Massachusetts was quoted as saying that when “a talk gets canceled because of outside pressure, that is itself a form of terrorism,” but he gets the process of free speech exactly wrong.

Battles like the one over Levasseur’s participation in an open forum are how we define the outer limits of what should be acceptable as public speech. In this case, there was a very public give and take. And a kind of line for what is legitimate commentary in our republic was once again established. All good. And it needs saying: it would also have been all good had the university mustered the courage to stand up to its critics and permitted Levasseur to speak. Constantly improvising the boundaries of acceptable thought and speech lies at the very heart of the founders’ notion of the marketplace of ideas. Battles over free speech produce winners. That’s how debate works. What the First Amendment did not mean to enshrine is what we have too often become: an incoherent nation of receding soapboxes on which each of us is free to mount and shout.

This issue gets sticky when a government entity is involved in the debate. The University of Massachusetts is a public institution. Is the retraction of the invitation prior restraint? It’s hard to make that claim when the same entity made the invitation in the first place. The crucial feature of these debates is that they be transparent and that both sides get to make their best case in the open. When the Ku Klux Klan or Nazis demand the right to march in some town, there is always a hue and cry. Typically the permit is granted and the parade proceeds, followed by the counterrally — typically much larger than the racist or the anti-Semitic one, and again, the boundaries of acceptable speech are reaffirmed. A more ordinary free-speech quarrel occurred when Sean Hannity invited an Obama critic, Andy Martin, onto his show before last year’s election. The host must have known that some people would be offended by giving a platform to a man who once called a judge a “crooked, slimy Jew who has a history of lying and thieving common to members of his race.” Hannity took a lot of heat but happily defended Martin’s appearance, saying, “On Fox, we actually interview people of all points of view.” And yet, Martin’s name appears to have fallen out of the producer’s Rolodex. That, too, is a triumph of free speech.

One of the worst ways to handle a free-speech battle is to do what Columbia University did after inviting Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak. No doubt, some people thought it would be provocative to give a forum to the president of Iran, who was notorious already as someone who claimed to be unsure if the Holocaust occurred and had intimated that Israel should be destroyed. Columbia’s president, Lee Bollinger, refused to back down and stood by the invitation. (All good so far, free-speech-wise.) Then he decided to ambush Ahmadinejad in his introductory remarks by citing his many ignorant statements and trashing the very speaker he’d invited. It came across as cowardice. But the virtue of free speech was redeemed by Ahmadinejad himself through his weird remarks. In Iran, “we don’t have homosexuals like in your country,” Ahmadinejad said, sounding not so much like a provocateur as the doddering uncle at Thanksgiving reminiscing about simpler times long ago that everybody else at the table knows never existed.

Another reason that the Levasseur affair was not a crisis of free speech is that it was ultimately a lame attempt at academic provocation anyway — the intellectual equivalent of yet one more artist making a sculpture of Jesus out of, say, spent condoms in order to enrage Christians and cause a controversy we’ve seen a dozen times before. It doesn’t signify daring so much as lack of imagination. Levasseur spent two decades in prison, and anyone who has spent time with convicted criminals knows that they have very little original to say about what they did because most of their prison time was spent rewriting their heinous actions into that jailhouse language that makes their crimes sound not quite as bad as they were. Levasseur may have been at the center of the subject of this conference, but that’s what makes him the least-interesting interpreter of his own actions. I wonder how its members would react if some right-wing academic group invited Terry Nichols — the collaborator in the Oklahoma City bombing — to a conference on the history of antigovernment violence. Intellectually sound, or publicity stunt?

But then, most recently, another group at the University of Massachusetts reinvited Levasseur to speak. Again, all good. The fight was back on, and the protests were too. Levasseur, who was living on parole in Maine, had previously asked for and received permission to go to Massachusetts. With the new invitation, he had to request permission again from the U.S. Parole Commission to travel. This time, it was denied with no real explanation and no transparency. Just a low-level, faceless, government bureaucrat deciding to end the controversy for both sides and, yes, stifle free speech. Not just Levasseur’s. Everybody’s.

To rub it in, Jack Wilson, the president of the University of Massachusetts, took a page out of Lee Bollinger’s “Profiles in Cringeworthiness” and said, “We are pleased by this outcome because we never believed that Raymond Luc Levasseur was an appropriate speaker for the University of Massachusetts.”