Public Enemy (24 page)

A particularly despicable note in that campaign was written by Frank Smith, who lived in Cheyenne and was active in the Wyoming Patriot Alliance: “Maybe someone could take him out and show him the Matthew Sheppard [
sic
] Commerative [
sic
] Fence and he could bless it or something.” He was referring to Matthew Shepard, the young gay man who was tortured and murdered in 1998, left to die tied to a storm fence outside Laramie.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Ron Micheli released a letter he’d sent to the trustees asking them to rescind the invitation, and Matt Mead, another gubernatorial candidate, said that while he was a self-described “fervent believer in free speech and the free exchange of ideas,” allowing me to speak would be “reprehensible.” He concluded that I should have “no place lecturing our students.”

I told the folks who had invited me how sorry I was that all of this was happening to them, but I thought it would surely pass. Certainly, no matter what a couple of thugs threatened to do, I thought not much would happen. We should stand together and refuse to accede to these kinds of pressures to demonize and mostly to suppress students’ right to freely engage in open dialogue. After all, a public university is not the personal fiefdom or the political clubhouse of the governor, and donors can’t be permitted to call the shots when it comes to the content or conduct of academic matters. We should not allow ourselves to collapse in fear if a howling mob gathers at the gates with flaming torches in hand; in fact, that’s when standing up and pushing back become absolutely necessary. I wouldn’t force myself on the university, of course, but I felt that canceling would be terribly unfair to the faculty and students who had invited me, and would send a big message that bullying works. It would be the equivalent of a book burning, and would be one more step down the slippery slope of giving up on the precious ideal of a free university in a free society.

No good. The university posted an announcement of the cancellation of my visit with a long and rambling comment from President Tom Buchanan that began with the obligatory assertion that academic freedom is a core principle of the university, but quickly added that “freedom requires a commensurate dose of responsibility.” We are charged to enact free speech and thought, he wrote, “in concert with mutual respect.” The heckler’s veto had worked perfectly.

I suggested that I show up on campus—no announcement, no security, no fanfare—and stand respectfully in front of the student union with a big sign saying, “Let’s Talk.” I would engage anyone who happened to walk by and chat about anything that came up.

Those who thought that the university “caved in to external pressure,” President Buchanan went on, would be “incorrect”:

That twisty sentence qualified him to write for the
Nation
, for while it was impossible to know definitively what he was calling the “episode” that would provide the opportunity to critically evaluate matters—it might have been the public lecture itself or the cancellation of the lecture, it might have been the barbarians at the gates threatening to burn the place down or the foundations and wealthy alumni warning that funds were in the balance—it still had an unmistakable Orwellian ring: we canceled that lecture as an expression of our support for lectures! And it was eerily similar to the warrior classics: we destroyed that village in order to save it! Work will make you free! War is peace!

One of the truly weird qualities of the Buchanan statement was the hole in its center, the deafening silence concerning why the campaign against me was organized in the first place. I’d been an educator and professor for decades and the hard Right had accelerated the lunacy against thousands of folks—activists and artists, commentators and humorists, academics and theorists—who were, like me, open and outspoken radicals. Wherever possible they’d mounted campaigns exactly like the one in Wyoming. I suppose I was a more convenient target than some. Often university officials stood up on principle and resisted the organized gangs; sometimes they compromised, restricting access to talks and surrounding me with unwanted and unnecessary police protection; and sometimes, as in Nebraska and Wyoming, the university bowed deeply, then turned and ran.

Of course I hadn’t been invited to speak about the sixties or any of this, and it’s unlikely any of it would have come up without active campaigning and noisy thunder from a tiny crowd of right-wing zealots in the midst of a presidential election. I would have focused my talk in any case on the unique characteristics of education in a democracy, an enterprise that rests on the twin pillars of enlightenment and liberation, knowledge and human freedom. We should all want to wake up and pay attention, to know more, I would have argued, to see more, to experience more in order to do more—to be more competent and powerful and capable in our projects and our pursuits, to be more astute and aware and wide awake, more fully engaged in the world that we inherit, the world we are simultaneously destined to change.

To deny students the right to question the circumstances of their lives and to wonder how they might be otherwise, or to deny them the freedom to read widely and to speak to the broadest range of people, as Buchanan was doing, was to deny democracy itself.

I was contacted by Meg Lanker, an undergraduate who was just back from serving in the military and had been active in opposing the cancellation of my talk in Wyoming. She was a fighter on every level. “I’m going to sue the university in federal court,” she told me during our first conversation. “And I’m claiming that it’s
my
free speech that’s been violated—I have the right to speak to anyone I want to, and right now I want to speak to you.” She was young and unafraid, smart and sassy, her dreams being rapidly made and used—no fear, no regret. I liked her immediately.

Meg’s approach struck me as quite brilliant—students (and not I) were indeed the injured party. “Inviting you wasn’t necessarily an endorsement; I check books out of the library all the time that aren’t pre-approved. Let’s talk, and who knows, maybe we’ll have a big argument. But we have a right to have you here, and they can’t stop us.”

She contacted David Lane, a marvelous people’s lawyer and legal street fighter from Denver, and he filed an injunction against the university. Suddenly, there we were in court before a conservative federal judge. President Buchanan took the stand to complain about security and, when the judge nudged him to remember the First Amendment, said, “But doesn’t security trump free speech?” The judge patiently explained that if that were true there would never have been any dissent—including the civil rights movement—in our history. He ruled that the university must accommodate my talk, taking whatever security precautions it felt were prudent. He went so far as to issue a written opinion, giving his ruling the weight of history and legal precedent.

My family thought that for me to travel alone across Wyoming was a bad idea, so Chesa, studying for law school finals, volunteered and became the designated hitter. He flew in to meet me at the Denver airport, where we rented a car and drove together to Laramie. I wasn’t sure he added much muscle, but we had a lovely drive together and lunch at a dive outside of town with the lawyers and the dissident students, toured the campus with Meg, sat on benches drinking coffee in the beautiful Dick and Lynne Cheney Plaza, and knocked on President Buchanan’s door, but he’d gone home early, so I left him a copy of the US Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

That night, close to 1,100 people braved a blizzard and showed up for my talk. I wanted to think that they all came to hear what I had to say about justice, democracy, and education, but I was realistic enough to know that I’d have likely had an audience of fifty students without all the drama. There were no pickets and no protests, lots of media, and a lovely surprise: Curt Minter, my sister-in-law’s father and a retired bishop, as well as the former minister from the United Church of Christ where I’d been confirmed decades before, drove a couple hours to stand in solidarity. I almost didn’t recognize Curt because he was dressed in a dark suit with a clerical collar—unusual for him.

“What a great surprise!” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“The Lord moves in mysterious ways,” he said with a wink and a smile gesturing with his Bible. “If any of the crazy Christians get out of hand, He wants me to set them straight.”

When I was finally introduced, I could practically feel the letdown in the audience—who’s that old professor wobbling across the stage, and what happened to the scary terrorist we were expecting?

I wanted my talk that night to stay true to the original invitation, but with modifications fitted to the changed situation. I talked about the principles of education in a democracy, and argued that much of what we call schooling is based too often on obedience and conformity, the hallmarks of every authoritarian regime throughout history—it banishes the unpopular, squirms in the presence of the unorthodox, and hides the unpleasant. There is no space for skepticism, irreverence, or even doubt there. While many students long for an education that is transcendent and powerful, I said, administrators like President Buchanan seemed ever ready to police the boundaries of thought, to see that we stayed on track, reducing education to a kind of glorified clerking that passed along all the received and certified wisdom of the day without doubt or question.

In Wyoming the main victims were truth, honesty, integrity, curiosity, imagination, and finally freedom itself. And the wider but hidden victims would include the high school history teacher in Laramie or the literature teacher in Cheyenne who would immediately get the message: be careful what you say; stay close to the official story; stick to the authorized text; keep quiet with your head down.

I told them that there would be times in their lives when they would have to break the rules in order to stand up for justice and humanity, when there would be no court of last resort beyond their own consciences and free minds, and that it was important to exercise that capacity every day—a little anarchist calisthenics to stay in shape for the big games to come. The young people cheered that line.

I finished by evoking Bertolt Brecht’s play
Galileo
, where the great astronomer sets forth into a world dominated by a mighty church and an authoritarian power: “The cities are narrow and so are the brains,” he declares recklessly, and he feels himself propelled toward revolution. Not only did Galileo’s radical discoveries about the movement of the stars free them from the “crystal vault” that church dogma insistently claimed fastened them to the sky, but his insights suggested something even more dangerous: that we too were embarked on a great voyage, and that we too were free and without the easy support that dogma provided. Here Galileo raised the stakes, and the establishment struck back fiercely. Forced to renounce his life’s work under the exquisite pressure of the Inquisition, Galileo denounced what he knew to be true, and was welcomed back into the church and the ranks of the faithful, but exiled from humanity—by his own word. A former student, confronting him in the street, said that many on all sides followed him, “believing that you stood, not only for a particular view of the movement of the stars, but even more for the liberty of teaching—in all fields. Not then for any particular thoughts, but for the right to think at all. Which is in dispute.” The link was clear, and the warm response that night encouraging.

A year later the conservative student club at Wyoming invited Ann Coulter to speak as an antidote to whatever radical ideas and left-wing contaminants I’d left around the place. She was paid $20,000—$10,000 from a wealthy anonymous donor (think Dick and Lynne Cheney)—and there wasn’t a single threat of cancellation. Meg and her crew resisted their first impulse and decided not to picket the event. Instead they launched a website and built a social network where folks could pledge a set amount of money for the Matthew Shepard Foundation for every minute that Coulter spoke. I pledged $5 a minute. Meg raised a huge banner outside the auditorium that read: “The Ann Coulter Rainbow/Queer Tour—Keep Talkin’ Ann!” with the website listed below. Ann was ninety minutes late, and toward the end of her talk, referred to Meg’s guerilla campaign as she shut up and ended the fund-raiser at twenty-six minutes. The Matthew Shepard Foundation made $10,000 that evening.

Keep talkin’!

Meg and the students at Wyoming buoyed my spirits, but the attacks kept coming and I ached for more people to assemble in my defense. I’d always maintained a pretty strict no-whine zone around myself—moaning and wailing and wallowing in self-pity had always seemed to me to stand in the way of activism, and I tended to think the antidote to bitching and belly-aching was to get up and do something. Whining struck me as self-defeating in general and pathetic in almost every instance, but, damn—I began to feel little cracks developing in that stone wall, and I craved an angel to speak up for me personally. I really did. Like everyone else I can be both tiresomely familiar and also shockingly unpredictable to myself at times, and now all I desired was for someone to step up and plead my case: Look, folks, you’re mistaken about this guy; he’s a good person, really.

Yes! Yes! Listen to the fantasy person speaking on my behalf—I’m a good guy!

Pathetic, self-defeating, and desperate.

A putatively radical gathering called the Rouge Forum canceled a talk I was scheduled to give because one of the other left-wing presenters—George Schmidt—said he would refuse to attend if I were there. “It’s you or him,” they explained to me, and he was apparently being unpleasantly adamant.

“Well,” I said calmly, “George is the one urging exclusion, not me. You should tell him there’s no way you can participate in a blacklist, even if it comes from the Left, or you could always invite him to respond to my talk. I can’t cancel myself for you.”