Campus Report Staff

Participants in an Accuracy in Academia conference were barred from meeting at Columbia University hours before the gathering was to take place. A peaceful demonstration served as the pretext to censor the event. Columbia President George Rupp gave his approval to the decision.

Columbia University, according to a brochure given to freshmen, "prides itself on being a community committed to free and open discourse and to tolerance of differing views." However, university administrators failed to live up to that promise when they banned a conservative conference that was to take place on campus last month.

AIA had signed a contract with, and paid thousands of dollars to, the Ivy League university to hold "A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education" in Faculty House, a campus building, on the weekend of November 13 and 14.

Friday night’s keynote address by Ward Connerly, who was fresh off of the election victory of his Washington state initiative banning racial preferences in public education, contracting, and employment, was met with approximately 125 noisy but peaceful protesters. The students stood outside Faculty House holding up signs, chanting, and heckling entrants to the building. Citing such "violence," the administration decided to bar all non-Columbia students from campus for Saturday’s day-long session, which was to feature Dinesh D’Souza, John Leo, Candace de Russy, Reginald Jones, and other speakers. This would effectively cancel the conference, as students from around the northeast had traveled to Columbia for the event.

Campus security director George Smartt, after meeting with university president George Rupp and other administrators Friday night after the event, called AIA Chairman Reed Irvine at around midnight to inform him of the decision. When conference organizers arrived Saturday morning, Smartt declared, "The contract that you have with Faculty House is being altered by me." When they pressed Smartt for an explanation, he replied, "I’m not here to tell you how I reached my decision, only to tell you what my decision is."

As conference participants arrived to campus on Saturday, they were met with the spectacle of barricades, locked-down buildings, padlocks, and over a dozen security personnel guarding the area. AIA was forced to hold the day’s speeches across the street in Morningside Park. Security officials cautioned against holding the event in the park, as they wouldn’t be able to "protect" attendees, but organizers replied that that was precisely the point—Columbia security had done more to disrupt the event than did the protesters.

The student protesters, in a rare admission of their true agenda, and perhaps savvy with respect to the university’s treatment of ideas with which it disagreed, claimed victory for banishing the conservatives. Junior Adrienne Brown told the student daily, the Columbia Spectator, "We got [D’Souza] into Morningside Park, which Columbia doesn’t pay attention to anyway. This is an alcove where homeless people eat and piss."

Roxanne Smithers, president of the Black Students’ Organization, could hardly contain her glee: "I thought it was great. They were entirely dislocated. The black people have been dislocated for years, and they were dislocated for a couple of hours. It doesn’t equalize it, but it’s a start." Some of the signs the students held up on Saturday read "Access Denied," "We Win: Racists Not Allowed at Columbia," and "There’s No Place at the Table for Hate."

Even with D’Souza relegated to Morningside Park, the students successfully shouted him down. All but a few attendees were prevented from hearing his talk about the legacy of Ronald Reagan. Franklin Amoo, a freshman who attended Saturday’s protest, said, "I’ll do whatever needs to be done [to stop the conference], in order to make sure they know their sentiments are not shared." Of D’Souza, Brown added, "we just don’t want him on our campus."

The Columbia administration has adopted a sweeping racial preference scheme throughout the university, and Rupp has been one of America’s most aggressive proponents of their use. As chairman of the Association of American Universities (AAU), he purchased full-page ads in the New York Times and other publications in spring of 1997 proclaiming the group’s support for "continued attention to diversity in university admissions." This raised eyebrows and made national headlines because the AAU had typically focused on apolitical, academic issues. In May, he debated Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice on the subejct on Court TV.

His advocacy of affirmative action reached an almost bizarre pitch. Not only did he not bother to suppress his views on the subject when he was asked about the would-be conference—for administrators claimed that their basis for canceling the event was a concern about public safety and not about content—but he actually made sure that he reiterated his position. Not only did this become redundant quite quickly, but none of Saturday’s speches even discussed affirmative aciton. In an interview with the Spectator, Rupp took no responsibility for canceling the event, but reminded readers of his record as AAU chairman and added, "The university does not endorse ideas expressed at any conference."

A subsequent Office of Public Affairs statement explicating the administration’s rationale for canceling the conference, which was rife with distortions and inaccuracies, begins, "Columbia University is firmly committed to affirmative action and has long followed affirmative action programs in the admission of students and the recruitment of faculty and staff."

On November 19, the Spectator ran another story that explained, "Following on the heels of recent student protests against individuals advocating the end of affirmative action, University administrators said Columbia is committed to maintaining diversity on campus." In short, the administration’s handling of the situation defied logic: On the one hand, it claimed that the decision to cancel the conference had nothing to do with its content. Yet in the ensuing days, the university deployed all of its public relations mechanisms not to explain why the conference was cancelled or offer any trifle of apology, but to affirm and reaffirm its support for racial preferences.

The university’s official position is that it had no idea of the controversial nature of the speakers, and that if it had, it would have recommended an alternative venue for the conference. Thus, the reason that the event was cancelled was out of concern for public safety. But this claim is dubious for several reasons. On Friday afternoon, seven hours before the conference began, Smartt told AIA that, due to the controversial nature of the speakers, it could hold the conference in Faculty House, but it would be required to hire twenty security guards, at a cost of thousands of dollars. Moreover, Smartt denied AIA’s request to move Saturday’s events to a larger room on campus. Smartt and Associate Vice President for Public Affairs Virgil Renzulli also used a claim that they were expecting "400-500" protesters on Saturday as a basis for barring the event from campus. It is unclear how they arrived at such a figure; as it turned out, about 75 students protested Saturday’s events.

Khalid Muhammed, Angela Davis, and Salman Rushdie (a man marked for death) have all spoken at Columbia recently without "security" concerns trumping freedom of speech. Yet the first time conservatives speak at the school all semester they are forced off campus.

Administration officials used Friday night’s protest as a pretext to cancel Saturday’s events. On Saturday morning, Smartt claimed that the protesting students had attempted to forcibly enter the building, and that they expected further "violence" on Saturday. However, this was also quickly exposed as a subterfuge, as the university’s own subsequent statement said, "Columbia security personnel observed a non-Columbia student urging the demonstrators to storm the building," but the effort got no further. The Spectator—which had run an editorial denouncing Connerly, D’Souza, and AIA and urged students to protest—also noted, "The protesters huddled around Faculty House prepared to storm the conference Friday night, but refrained in favor of planning their actions for Saturday’s speeches."

It seems clear the administration had made its decision that conservatives have no place at Columbia’s table on Friday, prior to consulting with AIA. Conference organizers proposed several compromises that would enable the conference to proceed, such as hiring even more security, moving to a different room on campus, or admitting only those on AIA’s pre-registration list in addition to Columbia students. Administrators, however, refused outright to even consider any alternatives.

In addition, they made no effort to explain why excluding the conference registrants but not the protesters (whose ranks consisted of mostly Columbia students) could possibly achieve the stated goal of ensuring an orderly event. University administrator Ed Sullivan even told Irvine that he could find "no cogent explanation" for the university’s "solution." It appeared as though the administration first decided that it had no interest in providing a forum for conservative and anti-preference speakers, and then flailed as it tried to find some grounds on which to exclude them.

To be sure, Columbia’s transparent motive was not lost on conference participants. Catherine Lev, a Russian immigrant who attends Fordham University law school, poignantly remarked, "In the Soviet Union you would expect something like this because it was a totalitarian country. In the United States, however, it is very surprising that a university would stamp out a group’s right to gather and speak. I thought I escaped totalitarianism when I left Russia only to find it glaring right back in my face here at Columbia Univeristy."

D’Souza, who is not immune to controversy surrounding his speeches, said that he had "never seen anything like this." Leo, who was scheduled to speak about "the lack of free expression on the modern politically correct campus," was equally frustrated: "once the politically correct people start howling about the wrong sort of speakers, administrators usually fall in line and find a way to cancel or discourage the talks."

Columbia Journalism School student Stephen Hayes, in a Washington Times Op-Ed, called on Rupp to explain "the odd coincidence—if that’s what it is—of his activism on the issue [affirmative action], and the celerity with which Columbia denied Accuracy in Academia the right to hold their conference."

Incidents of rambunctious students protesting and even shouting down conservative speakers on college campuses are frequent. University security forces can also usually be counted on to protect those who would disrupt conservative speakers and do nothing to protect the speakers. However, such an instance of a university administration simply censoring a conservative conference is rare, to say the least.

D’Souza noted in his speech that as the wave of opposition to racial preferences and quotas grows in America, administrators find the threat to their orthodoxy ever expanding. "You see the group of protesters across the street?" he asked during his remarks. "They see our very small group as dangerous, and they’re right." Indeed, judging by the Columbia administration’s response to "A Place at the Table," conservatives should find a silver lining in the cancellation of their conference—their ideas are winning.