"Every few minutes during (his) talk, the same thing happened," the Web site Inside Higher Education reported. "A student would get up, shout something critical of Israel, be applauded by some in the audience, and be led away by police."
Michael Oren, the ambassador, "was repeatedly forced to stop his talk," Inside Higher Ed continued. "He pleaded for the right to continue, and continued. University administrators lectured the students and asked them to let Oren speak. In the end, 11 students were arrested..."
That Oren was able eventually to continue gave him an edge on Tancredo, who ultimately abandoned his effort last April to speak in the face of the student heckling in Chapel Hill, behavior strongly criticized by UNC administrators.
Unlike administrators at UNC and Irvine, some Muslim groups have supported the hecklers in California, arguing that such interruptions and disruptions should be viewed as another form of free speech.
That led Inside Higher Ed to pose the question: "Is interrupting a campus speaker ever a form of free expression?"
To which my response is, how can you possibly answer that question in the affirmative?
This is spoken as one who came of age in the turbulent 1960s, when protesters often tried to silence their foes. Those who did so were wrong then, and those who would do so are wrong now.
Let's be clear: Protest is not only constitutionally sanctioned, it is a vital part of our democracy. Let pickets raise all the ruckus they want outside a speaking venue. Let them silently press their point during a speech, as student protestors did a few years ago as they mutely held a banner on stage even as Duke President Richard Brodhead continued his address to students at a lectern a few feet away.
As UNC Chancellor Holden Thorpe said last year after the Tancredo protest, "there's a way to protest that respects free speech and allows people with opposing views to be heard."
But in a culture that in some ways is reprising the intensity of the '60s, that's a thought more honored in the breach than in the observance.
Wednesday night, a panel at Duke University's Nasher Museum of Art tackled some of the tensions around free speech, free press and editorial outspokenness. The panel was in conjunction with the museum's current exhibit, "Lines of Attack: Conflicts in Caricature."
The current atmosphere has led, speakers noted, to an increasingly polarized debate in which intensity and entertainment value sometimes lead to speakers shouting out, and listeners tuning out, opposing views.
Today in the media, the increasing segmentation of audiences as Web sites and broadcast outlets proliferate is contributing to the trend, speakers noted.
Kevin Martin, the UNC alumnus (with a master's degree in public policy from Duke) who until early last year headed the Federal Communications Commission, noted that segmentation has meant that outlets are pushing toward the edges of the political spectrum in search of an audience.
Increasingly, opinionated news sites are preaching to the choir. "People have a tendency to go to sources of information with which they agree," Martin said.
The communications revolution of this generation -- like those of earlier generations -- is transforming civic discourse and upending old traditions. It is true we've survived earlier upheavals (for Richard Nixon in 1960, John F. Kennedy's quicker grasp of the potential of television was certainly game change, for example.)
Still, the tendency of modern political discourse to be channeled toward true believers by true believers, and the extent to which that reflects and contributes to a virulently partisan debate, is troubling.
Robust debate is critical to our political system -- as is compromise. If the former rises to toxic status and cripples the latter, we are in for a difficult and corrosive time in our politics.
Bob Ashley is editor of The Herald-Sun. Contact him at (919) 419-6678 or by e-mail at bashley@heraldsun.com.
