My campus had a speaker event that got shut down after 15 minutes because of a fire alarm pull.

It happened last Thursday at our student union, and the fire department showed up to find no actual fire. The speaker was a journalist who wrote a book on political polarization, and the whole thing felt like a cheap trick to stop the talk. Has anyone else seen a protest tactic that obvious at their school?

3 comments

3 Comments

stellawood23d ago

Oh come on, is this really worth all that paperwork? I mean yeah, it's annoying when someone pulls a fire alarm to shut down a talk (happened at my school a couple years ago with a professor who had spicy takes on free speech). But filing a formal complaint feels like overkill to me. The administration probably already knows it happened, and they're not gonna launch some big investigation over a 15 minute delay. Honestly, the real issue is that someone was so threatened by a journalist talking about polarization that they had to resort to a prank. That says more about the state of discourse than any complaint form ever will. Maybe just let it go and move on with your life, you know?

victorb511mo ago

File a formal complaint with campus security, they have to log false alarms and investigate. It puts pressure on the administration to actually address the disruption. That's the only way to make sure there's a record of what happened.

rodriguez.jordan1mo ago

Honestly, that's a solid plan. My usual move is just to grumble to my roommate about it (which fixes exactly nothing, obviously). Filing something official sounds way more grown-up than my strategy of just hoping it stops. I should probably try that next time, instead of just adding it to my list of low-key campus annoyances, right next to the broken laundry machine.