The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Alex Morey) discusses the incident; I also commented on this yesterday morning on AirTalk (with Larry Mantle) on a radio station in Los Angeles; For more on the material the valedictorian had apparently posted online, see this Daily Mail story (James Gordon). An excerpt from the FIRE piece:
The University of Southern California canceled a scheduled commencement address by valedictorian Asna Tabassum on Monday following criticism of Tabassum’s online commentary about Israel.
In an email to the campus community, USC Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Andrew T. Guzman said canceling the speech was “necessary to maintain the safety of our campus and students.” due to “substantial security risks and disruptions at the outset.”
But with no sense that USC actually received threats or took steps to protect the event short of canceling it, this instead seems like a move calculated to appease critics — without creating new ones by openly censoring the student or stripping her of her status as valedictorian.
Of course, no student has the right to be valedictorian. At USC, it is an academic honor that USC may award as the institution sees fit. But once USC selected a student for this honor, it canceled her speech based on criticism of his point of view it certainly implicates the climate of campus discourse in important ways.
USC is a private university that makes First Amendment-like promises of free speech. It is also bound by California’s Leonard Law, which requires private, secular colleges and universities to afford their students the same expressive rights that students at the state’s public colleges enjoy.
Implicit in the idea of a campus committed to robust speech rights is that administrators will not censor their students just because they hold controversial opinions.
In this case, USC should have been aware of any real security threat, with administrators first doing everything in their power to provide adequate security to the event so it could proceed. Canceling it should be a last resort. And they should avoid at all costs ultimately doing what they did here: capitulating to a heckler’s veto….
I should note that the Leonard Law probably does not extend to this situation, because it only generally prohibits private universities from “subjecting a student to disciplinary sanctions” on the basis of constitutionally protected speech. I doubt that revoking a student’s invitation to give a speech at a university-organized event would be considered a “disciplinary sanction.” But I agree that this was probably a bad decision on USC’s part, largely for the reasons FIRE mentioned.
To delve deeper into the heckler’s veto point, the behavior that is rewarded is repeated: if all it takes to cancel an event is that “the discussion related to [the event] has taken on an alarming tenor,” which simply encourages people with all kinds of opinions on all kinds of issues to try to shut down speakers by simply producing more “alarming” chatter. What if there really were threats so serious that the USC felt it had To stop the event despite this risk, USC should have at least expressly said that there were such serious threats and emphasized that it had called law enforcement so that the threaters could be caught and punished.