Shoutout to that professor who warned us about inviting a controversial speaker and got ignored

Back in 2019 at a school in Ohio, we had this big debate about inviting a known anti-immigration speaker to campus. A poli sci professor named Dr. Reyes told the student group flat out, 'If you bring him, you're just giving him a stage to spread hate and nothing good comes from it.' Half the students thought that was censorship and fought to have him anyway. He came, gave his talk, and next day there were protests that turned into a 3-hour standoff with campus police. Two students got suspended for throwing stuff. Now looking back, was he right to warn us or was that just an excuse to block free speech? What do you all think - do we sometimes need to hear the bad stuff to fight it, or is some speech just not worth the hassle?

2 comments

2 Comments

riverhill2d ago

Actually youve got the timeline a bit off here. That speaker event was 2018 not 2019. I remember because it was the same semester the library renovation started. Dr. Reyes was right about one thing though - the guy didnt bring any new arguments, just recycled his same tired talking points from cable news. The protests werent even about his speech itself, they were about the fact that the student group secretly used mandatory activity fees to fly him in without a proper vote. That detail always gets left out. The two kids who got suspended werent just random protesters either, one of them threw a water bottle at a photographer and the other shoved a campus safety officer. So its not exactly a clear cut free speech vs censorship story when you look at what actually happened.

white.alex2d ago

Whoa hold on, I gotta push back a little on the mandatory fees part. I mean yeah the student group probably should have been more upfront about the funding, but that feels like a separate issue from whether the speech itself should have been allowed. The university sanctioned the event and the group followed whatever rules they thought they had to. And the water bottle thing and the shoving, those happened because people got worked up over the speaker being there in the first place. If the university had just said no to the event, none of that would have happened. So I still think the core of it is about free speech, even if the details around the edges are messy.