Last Thursday, the Star-Advertiser published an online photo of me with the caption, “A man interrupts a talk by Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens during a campus appearance.” The lead in to the piece stated that Kirk and Owens were leading a “campus free speech event to promote the marketplace of ideas against the tide of campus censorship and safe spaces that prevent students from hearing all perspectives.”
I want to explain why, for the first time after 15 years as a high school and collegiate debate coach and seven years as a university professor, I chose to interrupt a public speaker and ask for cited evidence on inflammatory claims.
It was a difficult and painful decision. I love informed and impassioned disagreement. I have devoted my life to helping students of every possible political and intellectual position refine their ability to think through and arrive at their positions logically, with data, and communicate that position clearly and persuasively.
However, the university is not, and should not be, a place where all ideas are equally supported. We do not have representatives of the Flat Earth Society on the faculty of the Geography Department. We do not seek out scholars that devote their lives to disproving the existence of the Holocaust. Students are free make these arguments but the university should not be required to provide auditoriums or allow their proponents to run the events.
A point of view is not worthy of university resources until scholarly dialogue has demonstrated its value through research or peer-reviewed scholarship or demonstrable application to the improvement of peoples’ lives.
At the event, Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, said without warrant or any historical justification, that Islam was responsible for all of the current slavery in the world. Owens made the equally warrantless and inflammatory claim that without a wall, the U.S. will become Mexico — despite widely known data from nonpartisan organizations that Mexican nationals have been leaving the U.S. in greater numbers than entering since 2009.
Are Kirk and Owens woefully uninformed speakers or paid surrogates for inflammatory political propaganda? Only their consciences know for sure, but neither deserves to be supported by the university.
Other participants at the event, such as the leader of the Hawaii chapter of a nativist gang, The Proud Boys, championed the Turning Point speakers and attacked the physical appearance of a student brave enough to face the screaming crowd with a critical question. The chapter’s founder has posted images of that student, inviting others to join the shaming of her for her weight; public comments have been kept on his web page over the past days encouraging more, similarly degrading comments. Since circulating a draft of this letter I have received a deluge of hateful and threatening messages, many of them from self-identified Proud Boys on Facebook.
The university failed in its responsibility to our intellectual community of students when it agreed to allow two paid surrogates — whose job it is to whip crowds into a hateful frenzy — to moderate their own event. Twitter has permanently banned The Proud Boys for being a “violent extremist group,” and Turning Point USA has been caught funneling cash into campus student elections at Texas State University and trying to influence elections at the University of Maryland, College Park, and University of Oregon.
We should support the student-led effort to ban The Proud Boys and Turning Point USA from campus. Also, contact UH President David Lassner (david@hawaii.edu and 956-8207): tell him that the university should always moderate events. We do not invite amateur physicians to the medical school to tell us how vaccines cause autism; why would we invite Turning Point USA to educate our students on free speech? And why wouldn’t we interrupt such uninformed positions — which are engineered to denigrate people of color, women, indigenous peoples and sexual minorities?
Jairus Grove is an associate professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Hawaii-Manoa. The views expressed here are his own.
