Illiberalism Is Expensive

After rioters shot fireworks at buildings, attacked students and smashed windows during a Milo Yiannopoulos appearance at UC Berkeley in February, the university has beefed up security in response to threats of violence against controversial speakers. Yesterday, when Yiannopoulos appeared briefly on the campus once again, the university deployed a hefty police force to keep the peace, reportedly at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

According to a New York Times op-ed by Colby professor Aaron Hanlon, this was a mistake; Yiannopoulos should have been barred from appearing on campus so as to satisfy the anarchists threatening mayhem and eliminate the need for extra police. Moreover, it is hypocritical of conservatives to defend the alt-right troll’s First Amendment rights because “conservative politicians have traditionally warned against reckless public spending.” More:

Should public institutions be spending taxpayer money allocated for higher education on speakers who aren’t there for teaching and learning?

I’m intimately familiar with the right-wing tactic of framing anything less than free speech absolutism as “against free speech,” in part because I practiced this tactic as a conservative college student. It’s easy to declare that if low-value speakers like Mr. Yiannopoulos want a campus platform, it’s censorship if a school doesn’t give them one. But as we are seeing with Berkeley, the reality is that “free speech on campus” is not resource-neutral.

Let’s get the caveats out of the way: Yes, Milo is a grotesque troll, and yes, campus conservative groups would be better-advised to invite speakers “like Walter Williams and Yuval Levin,” as Hanlon suggests (though I’m less certain than he is that such speakers wouldn’t also sometimes need extra protection). The long-running collapse of the campus Right into anti-PC trolling and provocation is deeply unfortunate—almost as unfortunate as the campus Left’s intensifying illiberalism and contempt for free debate.

But let’s also be clear about what Hanlon is proposing, in practice: He is proposing that if students or outside groups can make sufficiently credible threats of violence, then they ought to be granted control over what events may and may not be held on a university campus. If Hanlon were consistent, and alt-right thugs threatened to attack people and destroy property outside of a La Raza or Black Lives Matter event at UC Berkeley, he would call for the university to shut down the event rather than secure it—at least if he judged that some such speakers “aren’t there for teaching and learning.” Something tells me that critics of Berkeley’s costly security measures in the case of Yiannopoulos would forget their concerns in such a scenario, recognizing the profound perversion of letting violent criminals (whatever their motivations) set the agenda for a great university.

Is Milo a speaker of “low educational value,” who doesn’t add to the campus learning environment, as Hanlon asserts? Absolutely. But what is the educational impact of no-platforming speakers whenever the most radical agitators show that they have the means to do harm to people or property? That is anti-educational; a far greater threat to learning than the presence of any peaceful speaker, no matter how odious. Once a university declares that as a matter of policy it makes its programming decisions based on violent coercion rather than any neutral process or standards, it is not a university at all.

So no, Berkeley’s decision to drop the equivalent of a handful of sports scholarships on police overtime did not amount to “reckless public spending”; it was a crucial affirmation of the core principle of a free society, which is that disagreements must be channeled through representative institutions and not unaccountable violence, whether by states or political factions. It’s sad that the anti-liberal currents in America are so strong that such expenditures are necessary. Like any social pathology, illiberalism is ultimately costly to taxpayers. But so long as the it persists with such force and power, public universities need to keep bearing those costs. If they start forfeiting to mobs, the pathology will get worse, leading us toward a country of chaos and sectarianism that will cost much more to police than Sproul Plaza.

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