The same day, however, the University of Wisconsin System Board of Regents passed a Republican-backed policy aimed at punishing students who disrupt campus speakers. Although the policy at the University of Wisconsin is aimed more at shielding outside speakers invited to campus, rather than university addresses, it’s an escalation in the students-versus-administration battles of free speech that have dominated media coverage of higher education for the last year.
The policy at Wisconsin leaves no doubt that the board there wants to see significant punishments for students who disrupt speeches: students found to be “disrupting the expressive rights of others” twice are to be suspended, and those who are found to have disrupted a speech a third time are to be expelled.
Offending students are those who engage in “violent or other disorderly misconduct that materially and substantially disrupts the free expression of others.”
I’m not going to lie, I like this policy a lot. In theory. It’s reasonably gracious with its three-strikes policy, and it cracks down on something which has been happening a lot and which is extremely caustic for public discourse. Particularly in the wake of the disruptive protests against the ACLU recently, it’s clear that something is wrong on campus, and this aims to address that without pushing too hard against the people who would protest peacefully.
In practice, whether this is good or not depends on both the precise wording of the policy (which I haven’t found) and how it’s applied. There’s a big difference between chanting with bullhorns to drown out a speaker, and sitting in the front row with your back turned and a T-shirt with “Fuck This Speaker” written on it. But colleges having some recourse against something like this is long overdue.