Two detestable speakers are coming to USC. University officials need to explain it | Opinion

If you follow the University of South Carolina’s X account, you know that Tuesday was the first day of classes for thousands of students, that next Saturday is the first Gamecocks football game, and that two speakers who peddle hate and white nationalism, despite their denials and obfuscation, have been invited to talk on campus Sept. 18.

One is a bigot who was once removed from a speaking role at the influential Conservative Political Action Conference for “condoning pedophilia,” and the other is the founder of the Proud Boys, an organization that Attorney General Merrick Garland said “played a central role in setting the Jan. 6 attack on our Capitol into motion.”

This will cause a firestorm on campus, and USC has so far responded only with weak social media replies, not a formal statement from an official, as it should if it respects its community, its “Carolinian Creed” and a growing number of people upset about how organizers have already insulted and disrespected Vice President Kamala Harris.

I won’t share any of the duo’s racist, bigoted or misogynistic comments from over the years or repeat what organizers and “roastmasters” Milo Yiannopolous and Gavin McInnes are calling the Democratic presidential nominee or the juvenile promo code they’re using to give 20% discounts on those tickets that run from $49 to $299.

But the speakers’ past, and presumed future, nasty rhetoric is notable at a university that now proudly has a statue of basketball superstar A’ja Wilson, whose grandmother was not allowed to walk on campus. The university didn’t have a Black athlete on an athletic team until 1969, and it didn’t name its first building after a Black person until 2022.

The university and the nation have come a long way in terms of acceptance, but unapologetic intolerance persists as the speaking duo’s terrible, misogynistic treatment of Harris shows.

On Thursday, the USC X account replied to three critics of the event — one with 1,000 followers, one with 2,000 and former state Rep. Bakari Sellers, who has 414,000 — to say that the speakers are sponsored by a student group, not the university; that the appearances “do not represent an endorsement by the university,” and that the university “makes resources available to any student who wants to become more engaged in issues they care about.”

“Your excuse is lame,” Sellers replied. “I expect some accountability on this asap.”

X user @heatherafx’s response went further: “Ultimately I’m a very minor person because I don’t donate hundreds of thousands, but I will no longer be donating the thousands I do annually until people spewing hate speech like this are not given a platform by [USC President] @MichaelAmiridis and @UofSC under the guise of ‘free speech.’”

Amiridis or someone high up at USC should write an open letter to the campus community, as UC Berkeley Chancellor Nicholas Dirks did in 2017 ahead of a planned Yiannopoulos visit to that public university, using not 280 words but nearly 1,400 to thoughtfully explain what the university accepts and expects, condones and condemns.

To be clear, the hateful interlopers’ rhetoric is wrong, but they probably hope USC cancels the event so they can make waves and money, if not a legal case, out of this. Like it or not, free speech protects this event — and should.

Leaders from Barack Obama to the American Civil Liberties Union have long defended free speech, even vile speech from groups like the Ku Klux Klan. And the Supreme Court has long upheld it, including famously in Edwards v. South Carolina in 1963, when it declared states may not “make criminal the peaceful expression of unpopular views.”

The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression specifically notes that hate speech, with narrow exceptions such as unlawful incitement, true threats, intimidation and discriminatory harassment, cannot legally be “censored, punished, or unduly burdened by the government — including public colleges and universities.”

FIRE also says that the First Amendment amounts to a broad guarantee of “freedom for the thought that we hate,” as Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in 1929. More recently, Chief Justice John Roberts characterized it this way in 2011: “On the facts before us, we cannot react to that pain by punishing the speaker. As a Nation we have chosen a different course — to protect even hurtful speech on public issues to ensure that we do not stifle public debate.”

As president in 2015, Obama told a group of students, “I don’t agree that you, when you become students at colleges, have be to coddled and protected from different points of view.... Anybody who comes to speak to you and you disagree with, you should have an argument with them. But you shouldn’t silence them.”

In 2017, ACLU lawyer Lee Rowland broadened the point at a TedX talk. “Yes, there is power in hateful words,” she said. “But there is also power in sass — in unwillingness to be goaded into a fight or to play the role of censor.”

Regardless of how university officials weigh in, students face a choice: Should they show up? Speak up? Stand up? Do they ignore this or engage? That may be dictated by the content and timing of the university’s official response, but it’s something students will have to consider as more learn about this and more people complain.

In 1990, the Carolinian Creed was established as USC’s value statement. It says that Carolinians on campus will practice personal and academic integrity; respect the dignity of all persons; respect the rights and property of others; discourage bigotry, while striving to learn from differences in people, ideas and opinions; and demonstrate concern for others, their feelings, and their need for the conditions which support their work and development.

Some of those aspirations are now coming into conflict with the arrival of two detestable speakers.

But as Rowland so eloquently has said, “You can decide when to counter-protest, when to stage an alternative event, and when to ignore ideas unworthy of debate. The very choices you make for confronting — or ignoring — speech you abhor can become benchmarks for how you handle conflict throughout your life.”

Send me 250-word letters to the editor here, 650-word guest essays here and email here. Say hi on X anytime.