Columbia kicks conservative conference off campus

Human Events, Dec 4, 1998 by D'Agostino, Joseph A

Columbia University President George Rupp kicked a conservative conference off campus November 14 after local leftists protested some of the speakers. The conference, sponsored by Accuracy in Academia (AIA), continued out of doors in a nearby public park.

In AIA's I3-year history, "Nothing like this has ever happened before," said AIA head Reed Irvine.

AIA's conference, "A Place at the Table: Conservative Ideas in Higher Education," featured two especially controversial speakers: black California businessman Ward Connerly and author Dinesh D'Souza. Connerly was the chairman of the successful effort behind California's Proposition 209 banning race and gender preferences in state and local government, and also assisted in this month's victory of a similar ballot initiative in Washington state.

D'Souza, whose family is from India, wrote Illiberal Education, attacking the politicization of university education, and The End of Racism, which argues that no racial minority's failure to succeed in America today can be attributed to racism.

Less than seven hours before the conference was set to begin, said AIA Executive Director Dan Flynn, Columbia demanded $3,200 for security costs on top of the amount the group had already paid the school under a contract to rent its facilities. "So we paid the extra $3,200," said Flynn.

Your ID Card, Please

Inside Columbia's Faculty House on the evening of Friday the 13th, Connerly spoke on "The Truth About Race in Academia" at a private dinner held the day before the public conference was to begin. On the Manhattan streets outside the faculty club, 100 to 150 protesters yelled and carried signs saying, "End Institutional Racism" and "There's No Place at the Table for Hate."

According to Columbia spokesman Virgil Renzulli, "Someone [among the protesters] suggested that they take over the building and there was a crush for the door. So we locked the door and I was one of the people locked in for over an hour. We couldn't let anybody leave."

Flynn said that only one student said "we're coming in" and jumped over a railing, but then went back behind it immediately. "There was no real threat," he said.

Renzulli said that Faculty House was a poor location for a controversial conference. "The problem was that the facility cannot accommodate a large crowd," he said. "It cannot be secured."

The next moming, conference organizers learned that the university had decided to forbid anyone not possessing a Columbia University identification card from entering the conference room.

Flynn said that two-thirds of the registered conference attendees, including people from across the Northeast, were not Columbia students and had no Columbia ID cards.

So AIA decided to have its speakers address its conferees in Morningside Park, where Dinesh D'Souza was shouted down. "That hasn't happened to me in years," D'Souza, a veteran of the campus lecture circuit, said in an interview.

Renzulli said that the university did not learn of the nature of the conference until earlier in the week in which it was scheduled. He said that AIA booked its conference through the "catering manager" at Faculty House.

"AIA came in the way you'd have a private wedding or a private dinner," he explained. He also said that the AIA conference was not held at the invitation of any organization or student group affiliated with Columbia.

Since "we were expecting three to four times the number of protestors on Saturday [as demonstrated on Friday] and the conference's room was too small for that many people," Renzulli said, "university security" imposed the ID-only rule. Asked who made the final decision on the rule, Renzulli said, "Of course it went up to the president and others."

Irvine said, "I talked to some of the security guards and they said there was no problem."

Renzulli said that the school would be happy to host an AIA conference with the same roster of speakers if it came at the invitation of a Columbia student group and was held in "an appropriate facility which could be secured." He pointed out that D'Souza had spoken at Columbia before and that the university has promised to refund everything AIA paid it.

"You don't notify every department of an institution that you're coming. We organized the conference and planned it three months ago," Flynn countered. "I've been part of organizing events for four years. We told Faculty House that we'd have controversial speakers. We said Ward Connerly might speak, Pat Buchanan might speak." And "who's going to reimburse us for speakers' fees and for putting students up in hotels?" he asked.

Flynn said that many of the conference attendees did not come to Morningside Park due to confusion, the prospect of facing a day outdoors in mid-November, and the university security personnel's "telling people that th. conference was canceled." He laid the blame for what happened to one of the speakers squarely at the feet of Columbia's administration: "Columbia's more than tacit endorsement of censorship led to the shouting down of Dinesh D'Souza.... One university official said it's not my job to protect your free speech."