If I was a graduating senior about to matriculate at the Capstone, I simply wouldn’t go to President Donald Trump’s “commencement” speech.
I wouldn’t be getting my degree on the stage, so it’s not really a commencement address. (Hence the sarcastic quotes.) Trump is a terrible speaker, prone to rambling, inane nonsense. Hell, he can’t even hold his own supporters’ attention, much less mine, again, a hypothetically graduating senior who’s never been inclined to support him or his ideas.
So I’d stay home. Or enjoy my last day as a college senior in Tuscaloosa at a place like the Houndstooth or the Alcove. Or I’d do just about any other damned thing imaginable than actually attend the Trump “commencement” speech, even though UA President Stuart Bell and Nick Saban have been added to the bill — perhaps in an attempt to (if you believe social media scuttlebutt) pump up the currently soft demand for tickets.
But because we live in a pluralistic democracy, one where the University of Alabama is a state university bound by the implicit promise of the First Amendment, staying at home or at the local watering holes are not the only options available to UA students. They can protest in one of two specially designated areas — a sterile, artificial limitation that’s probably only legal when imposing security concerns override the fundamental notion that all (most?) of America should be open to free expression and free ideas even when we might find such speech unpleasant and personally discordant.
And, of course, students can decide to attend what will certainly be an awkward mess, with Saban and Bell politely setting the table for what will be Trump’s typical self-obsessed meandering torrent verbal goop. Some of those students in attendance will undoubtedly be fans — as a graduate of the institution, I am under no illusion regarding its general conservative bend — but some students will certainly be there to protest in any number of ways.
Yet as the university made clear in an email to attendees, they will be expected to act right.
Or else.
According to the email that was shared with AL.com, attendees may not heckle, display signs nor use noisemakers that might otherwise disrupt the occasion. To be fair to the administration, that’s only right, if for no other reason to preserve the right of those people who wish to hear what the man has to say. However, it’s what the university says above and beyond that simple mandate that transgresses from the plainly reasonable into the overtly hostile.
For those students who do protest, who do step a bit too far outside of the reverent rapture President Trump will demand, they face, as the email states, “expulsion, arrest and/or an immediate campus ban.” Furthermore, “[d]egrees may be held pending the outcome of student conduct proceedings.”
The threat could not be more clear. Attend the speech and protest, says the university’s administration, and you risk forfeiting the thing you have spent the last four or five (or six or more) years of your life working toward. Thus, the left-of-Trump student who wants to attend and express themselves with something that would be less than a full disruption of the speech (say intermittent laughter or jeers or the classic and silent turning their back to the lectern) is faced with yet another choice: go and express themselves and therefore put their degree on the line or stay silent in the face of the university’s ultimatum.
The dilemma is a classic example of a chilling effect on free speech, a government regulation or policy that — while sensible or plausible on its face — encourages silence or milquetoast, mewling speech rather that robust debate because of the consequences that might befall the speaker. In the landmark New York Times v. Sullivan libel case for example, the Supreme Court found that libel judgements awarded to public officials that were premised only on negligence represented a chilling effect on public discourse because reasonable publishers might avoid discussion of important public events if they thought they could be easily dragged into litigation.
It’s the specter of consequence, the looming presence of “be quiet or else” where the chilling effect is real. As another example from the same era, in Dombrowski v. Pfister, the Supreme Court barred the state of Louisiana from bringing charges against civil rights advocates under state laws nominally designed to combat communism. It wasn’t a successful prosecution the plaintiffs were necessarily worried about; rather, they sought an end to the state’s continued harassment that was successful in drying up donations and scaring off potential members.
“So long as the statute remains available to the State the threat of prosecutions of protected expression is a real and substantial one,” the court wrote. “Even the prospect of ultimate failure of such prosecutions by no means dispels their chilling effect on protected expression.”
Trump has a right to speak and be heard, yes, but that shouldn’t come at the expense of dissenting expression that would not fundamentally disrupt the speech. (As if Trump couldn’t steamroll through anything.) Promising to hold up someone’s degree if they say the wrong thing is a cowardly decision that caps off a week of bad choices. Yet consistent with the Supreme Court’s warnings throughout the decades, it will certainly be enough to keep some would-be protesters in line.
Some students, though, may not be deterred. Those hearty few may have the clarity of conscience and the moral fortitude to power through the university’s pitifully transparent threat.
To those students, I have but two words:
Roll Tide
