Does an invited speaker at university have the right to speak without disruption? Do the people who want to prevent a hated invited speaker from speaking have the right to disrupt the event to prevent the hated invited speaker from speaking? Harvard has apparently come up with a middle ground.

A quick note before we begin—Harvard University is committed to maintaining a climate in which reason and speech provide the correct response to a disagreeable idea. Speech is privileged in the University community. There are obligations of civility and respect for others that underlie rational discourse. If any disruption occurs that prohibits speech the disrupters will be allowed for up to 10 minutes. A warning will be issued to all disturbers at the 5-minute mark explaining that the protesters are disrupting the event and ask them to stop. Any further disruption that prevents the audience from adequately hearing or seeing the speakers will lead to the removal of the disrupters from the venue.

On the one hand, this compromise would seem to ensure that the speaker gets to speak, with the proviso that ten minutes will be forfeited to disruption. On the other hand, this is an open invitation to disruption, and presumes that the disrupters will be disruptive rule followers, falling silent upon reaching the ten minute mark. And should they fail to obey the rule, they will be removed from the venue, which isn’t exactly a penalty likely to incentivize compliance with the rule.

If the purpose of the rule is to pretend to accommodate the “free speech” rights of those who are adverse to the speaker, it falls short of any cognizable goal. Free speech isn’t on the clock. It doesn’t end when the bell dings ten minutes. And it seems to obvious to say, but the nature of disruption isn’t adherence to rules, but rejection of rules.

What respectable protester stops protesting when the clock runs out? What respectable protester’s purpose in protesting is served because a rule says he’s getting tossed out of his protest of whatever he believes to be so existential as to be compelled to protest in the first place? It emits the odor of a ten-minute performance, after which the next act gets to take the stage.

But the accommodation at Harvard, beyond institutionalizing the heckler’s ten-minute veto, overlooks the principle problem. If a speaker is invited to speak, then his free speech is dominant. After all, that’s the point of the presentation. That’s the point of a university’s claim of being open to a civil and respectful presentation of ideas, whether or not some may find them disagreeable.

This isn’t to say that protesters can’t protest. Protest away, kids. Just not in a manner that disrupts the invited speaker from speaking. Do it outside the venue. Do it before the speech, after the speech, during the speech in a way that does not disrupt the invited speaker or those who want to hear what the speaker has to say.

Harvard, however, doesn’t want to be the mean ol’ university that tells its students they can’t do what they want, so instead of taking a principled stand, they’ve succumbed to the newly popular mechanism of threading the needle, giving both sides some of what they want sufficient to make them feel “seen” while simultaneously accomplishing nothing beyond a cool performance of utter pointlessness. If the disrupters can’t shut down the speaker, what’s the point?  They haven’t silenced ideas they hate, but at most held them off for ten minutes. Whoop-de-doo.

On the flip side, the invited speaker will take the stage, wave at the protesters, smile for ten minutes while expressing no thought beyond tolerating the angry kids until the bell rings and they sit back down or walk out. Or continue protesting and put Harvard in that awkward position of having to ask them politely to leave the venue, followed up by sad faces should they not comply. After all, are they really going to bring in some muscle to drag these disrupters out by the scruff of their neck while they scream, “owww” and risk radiculopathy?

It’s understandable why universities, even one as august as Harvard, desperately seek a means of skirting any principled stance as to free speech. It would make their consumers sad, and supporters of their consumers angry, causing them to hurl accusations of intolerable moral wrongs. Of course, everything these days gets shoehorned into being an intolerable moral wrong.

And yet, the one wrong that no longer seems to count for much is violation of the proposition that the right of an invited speaker to speak, undisrupted for ten minutes or any other time frame, is the only principled position to take. They can’t have that at Harvard. After all, what message would it send their consumers if the administration at Harvard suddenly embraced principles?