Heckling, counter-speech, and heckler's vetoes (again)

UC-Hastings Fed Soc invited Ilya Shapiro to speak, but he was shouted down by the audience (several videos in links). FIRE labeled this a heckler's veto. The Hastings administration condemned the students because "the act of silencing a speaker is fundamentally contrary to the values of this school as an institution of higher learning; it is contrary to the pedagogical mission of training students for a profession in which they will prevail through the power of analysis and argument." And it is threatening to enforce conduct-code provisions for disrupting the event, while continuing "efforts to ensure that we equip all community members with the knowledge and skills to engage respectfully, thoughtfully, and sensitively with each other and with a wide array of theories, identities, political viewpoints, and perspectives."

I have discussed the uncertainty about the lines among counter-speech, heckling, unprotected counter-speech, and hecklers' vetoes. But what I wrote here bears repeating and elaborating. The protesting students were in the wrong, but for narrow reasons. And it cannot be resolve by invoking the dreaded heckler's veto.

The students did not engage in a heckler's veto. They engaged in heckling, a form of Bradneisian counter-speech. Were Shapiro speaking on an open campus sidewalk and the protesting students shouted back from an adjoining sidewalk, this should be the result. Same if the students remained outside the room or outside the building producing similar noise. There is nothing improper in heckling or attempting to "shout down" a speaker.

The protest crossed the line and lost its protection via the neutral rules of the classroom forum,. Those rules presumably granted Shapiro (and the student group that invited him and reserved the room) a greater expressive right than the dissenting audience members; those neutral rules made Shapiro and Fed Sco preferred first speakers. The source of the heckler's veto is not the protesting students or the attempt to shout Shapiro down and prevent him from being heard. The source lies in the administration failing to remove the disruptive students or otherwise control the situation; governmental inaction or failure to protect deprived him of the ability to speak. The government could have shut the protesting students up or removed from the room; it can sanction them after the fact. The removed students cannot claim their speech rights were violated; by heckling in that time and place, they engaged in civil disobedience, an unlawful act for which they must be willing to pay a price. The open question is whether post-event sanction of the (improperly) protesting students is sufficient to overcome the charge of a heckler's veto; I would say not, but this is a separate question.

I continue to reject the administration's command for respectful, thoughtful, and sensitive engagement with competing viewpoints and theories. Shapiro, like any first speaker, bore no such obligation--he could say whatever he wanted and need not listen to or respectively engage with any disagreeing audience member or what she had to say (I am not saying Shapiro would have approached it this way, only that he bore no obligation to hear and engage with any audience member). The administration was wrong to impose such an obligation on the heckling students. The students were in the (legal) wrong because of the forum rules, not because of some broader compelled commitment to respectful dialogue to which only they are subject.