9. Disinvited Speakers
When political pressures causes a speaker to be “disinvited,” it endangers liberty directly by silencing a speaker and indirectly by indicating to everyone that certain ideas are deemed off-limits. Two of these cases in 2001 involved government departments, which raises troubling questions about whether academics are also facing violations of their academic freedom in the distribution of government contracts, as often occurred in the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts during the early 1990s. Disinvited speakers represent only a small part of the intolerance of dissenting views, since it is far more common to never invite a dissenting speaker.
9(a) Massachusetts Department of Education: Alfie Kohn was invited to give the keynote address at a conference in Northampton, Mass. in May, 2001. However, a Massachusetts Department of Education official demanded that organizers rescind Kohn's invitation because Kohn has been critical of high-stakes testing, or else the state would withdraw $28,000 in funding for the conference. Organizers canceled Kohn's talk and his workshop.
"It appears that the Massachusetts Department of Education is so fearful of criticism of the MCAS test that it's willing to suppress the expression of contrary viewpoints. That fact ought to alarm all of us, regardless of our position on the validity or value of the test itself," Kohn said.
Department of Education spokesperson Heidi B. Perlman said, "He was invited to come in and speak on something that was completely off the topic, and that was something that we felt was completely inappropriate. This wasn't a conference about MCAS, this was a conference about charter schools. We simply didn't think that his presentation had anything to do with the conference." Kohn and the American Civil Liberties Union sued on Dec. 13, 2001.
(Associated Press, 12/16/01)
9(b) Department of Labor: Alfred Ross of the Institute for Democracy Studies was dropped as a conference speaker at a trade association of corporate anti-discrimination officers after the Bush Labor Department insisted that he be disinvited or they would boycott the conference. Ross planned to criticize the Heritage Foundation, where Labor Secretary Elaine Chao and Kay James, head of the Office of Personnel Management, had worked. Ross considers the Heritage Foundation one of the groups in the “battle to turn back the clocks on the civil rights gains of the last four decades." Labor Department officials threatened to boycott the entire conference unless Ross was banned.
(New York Times, 8/21/01)
9(c) College of Southern Idaho: administrators disinvited Jeremy Rifkin, who was scheduled to speak at the Oct. 3, 2001 Success Breakfast sponsored by the college and the Twin Falls Area Chamber of Commerce. College President Jerry Meyerhoeffer said the school did not realize Rifkin's views on agriculture when he was invited, although Meyerhoeffer had seen tapes of Rifkin discussing biogenetics. Farm groups threatened to boycott the event. "We are an agriculture community," Meyerhoeffer said on Aug. 27, declaring that the college had a partnership with local agriculture organizations. "I think us bringing him in would be a violation of that, based on what I've read." The Idaho Dairymen's Association and Idaho Cattle Association praised the decision. "It sends a chilling, chilling message to students and faculty that the free sharing of ideas is not welcome, and that there always is a censor in the wings," said Rifkin.
(AP, 8/31/01)
9(d) Ohio University: Activist Art Gish, who has been involved with the Christian Peacemaking Team and nonviolent protests in Palestine, was disinvited from a May 6, 2002 public seminar about the Middle East. Gish, who was disinvited because other speakers expressed concern about having him speak, attended the event wearing a gag.
(The Post, Ohio University, 5/7/02)
9(e) City University of New York: Conservatives, upset that Cornel West was invited to speak at a conference on the legacy of Sidney Hook, threatened a boycott in an effort to have him disinvited. Hilton Kramer, John Patrick Diggins, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and Irving Kristol all promised to boycott the event and sought to convince the Olin Foundation to withdraw $5,000 in funding for the conference because they dislike West, who discussed Hook’s work in his 1989 book, The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism.
(Chronicle of Higher Education, 7/5/02)