The gaggle of conservative Republicans who are apoplectic about Michael Moore's upcoming speaking engagement at Utah Valley State College is not alone. Their ideological fellow travelers in college towns elsewhere in the country where Moore is scheduled to appear are equally bent out of shape, and are using similar tactics to try to intimidate student program boards into withdrawing their invitations to Moore.
So far, in the name of free speech, many student boards are holding firm, as they should. But they are taking heat.
Meanwhile, Moore is laughing all the way to the bank, as the people who paint him as the anti-Christ drum up more publicity for him and video sales for his film, "Fahrenheit 9/11," which is devastatingly critical of President Bush's response to the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and his rush to war in Iraq.
At the University of Nevada, Reno, to cite one example, Moore is scheduled to speak Oct. 13, a week before his appearance in Utah. A wealthy donor to the Reno university first tried to talk the student government into canceling Moore's appearance, then offered to pay the expenses of a conservative speaker to debate Moore. To sweeten the deal, he also offered a $100,000 donation.
The students turned the donor down, and the university administration refused to intervene, arguing, correctly, that the students should be free to invite whomever they wish.
The donor has explicitly threatened to end his family's financial support of the university.
Similar tactics have been employed at UVSC. Jon Huntsman Jr., the Republican gubernatorial candidate, is subsidizing an Oct. 11 appearance by conservative talk jock Sean Hannity, to the tune of $10,000, in the name of balance.
As in Reno, enraged donors have threatened to shut their checkbooks to the college.
We say, the Moore, the merrier. Because of the students' invitation to Moore, and the controversy it has generated, students and others in Utah County will get to hear at least two perspectives, albeit both extreme ones, that they might not have heard otherwise. That's the beauty of free speech, and why it is protected by the Constitution's First Amendment. The people should be free to hear all views, then sort the fact from fiction, the animus from analysis, and make up their own minds.
Learning to do that, by the way, is what a college education is about, or should be. Which is another reason why the students at UVSC were right to invite Moore in the first place, and should stand by their decision now.
The donors who are threatening to withhold future support of the college apparently don't believe in the free marketplace of ideas. But without that freedom, UVSC would be a college in name only.
