When a mob of students attack a professor, how do administrators react? Well, that depends.
If the professor tilts just about anywhere to the Left, the school generally will tilt with him but if the prof leans anywhere right of center, or even rightward towards the center, university officials might be more indulgent towards student demonstrators who mob him. Arguably, it’s not a one-size-fits-all policy but then it might not be terribly Constitutional either.
The City University of New York (CUNY), for example, is sort of a work in progress.
“CUNY School of Law Dean Mary Lu Bilek called the recent student-led protest against conservative law professor Josh Blackman ‘limited and reasonable’ and maintained that it did not violate university policy,” Robby Soave write on the Reason.com blog. “The dean is dead wrong.”
“She’s wrong about the protest, and she’s wrong about university policy. As I reported last week, Blackman—an associate professor at the South Texas College of Law—was attempting to speak to students at CUNY when a group of activists crashed the event, surrounded him, and heckled. They accused Blackman of a litany of unfounded crimes, labeling him a white supremacist, a racist, and an oppressor. The professor’s controversial opinion is that he believes President Donald Trump was correct to end the Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which permitted some illegal immigrants to remain in the country without fear of deportation. Blackman believes that DACA was enacted in a way that violated the rule of law, though he supports the DREAM Act, which would install a similar system in a different way.”
“The student-activists made it impossible for Blackman to speak for about eight minutes, and after that they left. Bilek told Inside Higher Ed that since Blackman was only disrupted for the first 10 minutes of a 70-minute speech, his rights were not violated.”
