Dr. Austin Lane, the president of Texas Southern University, was recorded on video inviting Black Lives Matter protesters back into a room from which they had just been evicted for blocking the speech of Texas State Representative, Briscoe Caine. Dr. Lane claimed that he did this because the meeting was not properly scheduled. He than had Representative Cain escorted out for his “safety”. [Of course, if he had not ordered campus police to let the violent demonstrators back into the room, there would have been no threat to Cain’s safety.] -GEG
It’s no surprise that progressive groups like Black Lives Matter want to shut down free speech on college campuses—but they shouldn’t be getting help from school officials to do it.
In at least one recent case, they did. This week, the president of Texas Southern University intervened to shut down a Federalist Society event featuring Republican state Rep. Briscoe Cain at the TSU law school. Dozens of Black Lives Matter protesters crashed the event, shouting, “When a racist comes to town, shut it down!” and other slogans meant to smear Cain, a member of the conservative Texas House Freedom Caucus. The protesters were eventually cleared from the room, but no sooner had they left than TSU President Austin Lane arrived on the scene, invited the protesters back in, and had Cain escorted from campus by police under the pretext that it was for his own safety.
The school’s official (and unconvincing) excuse was that the event was unsanctioned because the Federalist Society isn’t an registered student organization and “proper scheduling procedures were not followed.” Yet James Douglas, the interim dean of the Thurgood Marshall School of Law at TSU, told The Dallas Morning News that the law school’s branch of the Federalist Society, which had invited Cain to speak, went through all the proper procedures. “We have a process here in the law school, and they went through our process,” Douglas said. “The speaker had a First Amendment right to be heard by the students that invited him.”
What’s more, emails published by The Blaze show that university officials were in touch with the president of the TSU chapter of the Federalist Society, Daniel Caldwell, and that the group is indeed listed as a registered student organization. Cain released a statement saying, “The explanation given by the university is blatantly inconsistent with the administration’s approval of the event for months. Black Lives Matter was not protesting the paperwork not being filed properly, they wanted to silence speech they disagreed with, and the University allowed it.”
This isn’t the first time students affiliated with Black Lives Matter have silenced free speech on college campuses. Last week, a group of protesters crashed an event at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, rushing the stage and preventing the invited speaker from continuing. The irony is that the invited speaker was a representative from the American Civil Liberties Union who intended to speak on the subject, “Students and the First Amendment.”
The difference is, at TSU the university president was colluding with Black Lives Matter to silence free speech and forcibly shut down a duly sanctioned event. Nor is it the first time that TSU has caved to the heckler’s veto. Back in May, the school canceled a commencement speech by U.S. Sen. John Cornyn amid outrage over the Republican senator’s support for the Trump administration.
Not that the suppression of free speech by university officials should come as a surprise. The entire anti-free speech movement on college campuses was inculcated and encouraged by left-wing university professors and administrators who hate the idea of the First Amendment and have worked to ensure that dissenting—which is to say, conservative—opinions are excluded or silenced on campus.
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