Holding the Speaker Hostage

By LANCE MORROW

Heckling is both a primitive art form and a kind of low-grade amateur guerrilla warfare, a nonviolent intellectual terrorism. Done properly, it produces roughly the effect achieved by releasing a bagful of garter snakes and rats in a cathedral: a spiritual shambles, the sermon in ruins, the bishop standing speechless at the altar.

Some sentimentalists, of course, think of heckling as a democratic dialogue, a roughhewn give-and-take of language. But it can turn strident and ultimately sinister. The shriek from the floor can become a different medium altogether. It turns into street theater. Anarchy crashes the hall, like a motorcycle leaping through the window and blasting down the aisle toward the podium. The sound is an anti-language, a gust of obliterating noise from below that is designed precisely to subvert the process whereby words arrive as ideas at their destination in people's brains.

When practiced at certain universities, heckling to silence and expel the intruder achieves a tribal quality; it becomes a gesture of group solidarity, a way that certain zealots in the academic capsule reaffirm the received wisdom of their tribe and symbolically slay the stranger. As such, it is after all a comparatively harmless practice. If academe were more profoundly primitive, undergraduates might have to initiate themselves into the group by, say, ritually mutilating a Republican.

Some politicians, notably the British, cultivate an amiable relationship with hecklers. A man would shout "Rubbish!" during one of former Prime Minister Harold Wilson's stump speeches, and Wilson would imperturbably answer, "Sir, we will get to your area of special interest in just a moment." Other politicians have got down to the darker possibilities. Once in 1921, Adolf Hitler led a gang of Brownshirts into a meeting that was to be addressed by a Bavarian federalist named Ballerstedt. "We got what we wanted," Hitler said. "Ballerstedt did not speak." Hitler explained, "The National Socialist Movement will in the future ruthlessly prevent, if necessary by force, all meetings or lectures that are likely to distract the minds of our fellow countrymen."

The distractions in U.S. halls have increased lately. Disruptive little creatures have been loose--not at political meetings, where hecklers may have more legitimate business, but in university auditoriums. Two months ago in Berkeley, the cradle of the Free Speech Movement in 1964, a group of them managed to jeer U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick from the stage, temporarily. She canceled her lecture scheduled for the next day. The student senate, in a masterpiece of smug non sequitur, sent a letter of regret that observed, "We cannot help but find it somewhat inconsistent that you feel such great concern for your own freedom of speech while blithely accepting ... so much misery and lack of freedom throughout the world."

Kirkpatrick ran into similar trouble at the University of Minnesota last month. Even before she began her speech, student protesters shouted epithets and chanted, "Murderer! Nazi! Fascist, go home!" (The "Nazi" vocabulary is promiscuously adaptable.) Smith College invited Kirkpatrick to be its commencement speaker this spring, and prepared to award her an honorary degree. The school then decided it could not guarantee decorum if Kirkpatrick came to speak, and so she withdrew.

Other speakers have had trouble lately being heard in academe. Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, now, improbably, a conservative born-again Christian, was drowned out by several hundred screaming protesters when he tried to speak at the University of Wisconsin. Saudi Arabian Oil Minister Sheik Ahmed Zaki Yamani began a talk at Kansas State University. A roar of protest erupted from the back of the auditorium. The hall had to be cleared for 80 minutes.

Finally last week, the American Council on Education, joined by the American Association of University Professors and three national student organizations, decided that the spectacles had grown both embarrassing and morally dangerous. The groups issued a statement that condemned heckling that silences speakers on college campuses. "Unless there is freedom to speak and to teach," the statement said, "even for those with whom we differ on fundamentals, and unless there is freedom for all to listen and learn, there can be no true college or university."

Both students and teachers are casting an apprehensive eye toward this spring's graduation ceremonies. Some administrators are afraid that the crowd manners of the '60s are on the way back. They may be. The operative logic then, as now, was what might be called the Doctrine of Overriding Outrage. This doctrine holds that the issue at hand--U.S. policy in El Salvador, for example--is too important to be left to the flaccid (two sides to every question) processes of free speech and calm discussion. Why tolerate ideas that are so obscenely wrong? History is not high tea. As the Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse wrote in his essay Repressive Tolerance, under the free-speech practices of a liberal regime, "the stupid opinion is treated with the same respect as the intelligent one, the misinformed may talk as long as the informed." History is not the MacNeil-Lehrer Report either. Should one grit one's teeth and recite the First Amendment when, say, American Nazis decide to march in a Chicago suburb (Skokie) inhabited by many Jews who survived the Holocaust? Suppose that a man (William Shockley) wishes to tour American lecture halls suggesting that blacks are inherently inferior to whites?

The Doctrine of Overriding Outrage also rests on the submerged premise that since the established power owns the microphone and podium, the process of so-called free speech is part of the problem, not the solution. The heckling zealot wishes to reroute the entire discussion: hijack the issue and force it to a wilder jurisdiction. Hecklers take ideas hostage.

Those who disrupt, of course, are almost always a tiny minority of the audience. They achieve theatrical results far out of proportion to their size. They traffic in a publicity of anger, not in ideas. For too long, universities have, rather sweetly, rather weakly, feared to come down hard on those whose screaming silences speakers. Administrators did not wish to be thought intolerant of dissent; they do not want to interfere too much with youth supposedly acting out its ideals. They need the character to enforce the prerequisites of intellectual inquiry. They need to think more clearly about an essential distinction: if a disrupter is removed from the hall and arrested, it is not the disrupter's opinions that are being censured, but the disruption. A society that will not defend its basic principles of order is off on a brainless drift. If free speech has meaning, it must be defended against both cretins and idealists.

--By Lance Morrow This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.