William & Mary President Taylor Reveley has sent a message to the campus community after student protesters with Black Lives Matter forced an American Civil Liberties Union speaker to leave the stage at a planned event Sept. 27.
According to Reveley’s statement dated Sept. 29, ACLU of Virginia Executive Director Claire Guthrie Gastañaga was slated to speak about the First Amendment at the student-sponsored event.
While students attempted to ask Gastañaga questions, the protesters shouted her down, Reveley said in the statement.
“The anticipated conversation never occurred when protesters refused to allow the invited speaker Claire Guthrie Gastañaga … to be heard,” Reveley said.
On Monday, The Flat Hat, William & Mary’s student newspaper, reported the student members of a Black Lives Matter group were protesting Gastañaga because of the ACLU’s past defense of white supremacists’ and Ku Klux Klan members’ right to free speech.
College spokesman Brian Whitson said the protest was streamed on a Facebook page that is “presented as a local chapter of the BLM.” Whitson added there is no recognized Black Lives Matter student organization at William & Mary, and members of the local Black Lives Matter group have not pursued the “student organization” designation.
“We take this very seriously and we are taking measures to prevent it from happening again,” Whitson said. “… President Reveley reached out to Ms. Gastañaga the night of the protest to apologize for what occurred. William & Mary will continue to host events in the future that address and explore uncomfortable topics. They occur nearly every day, as they should at a leading university. That will not change.”
Reveley’s statement is copied below in its entirety:
“William & Mary has a powerful commitment to the free play of ideas. We have a campus where respectful dialogue, especially in disagreement, is encouraged so that we can listen and learn from views that differ from our own, so that we can freely express our own views, and so that debate can occur. Unfortunately, that type of exchange was unable to take place Wednesday night when an event to discuss a very important matter – the meaning of the First Amendment – could not be held as planned.
The event, sponsored by William & Mary’s student-run programming organization Alma Mater Productions (AMP), was entitled “Students and the First Amendment.” The anticipated conversation never occurred when protestors refused to allow the invited speaker Claire Guthrie Gastañaga, executive director of the ACLU of Virginia, to be heard. The protesters then drowned out students who gathered around Ms. Gastañaga seeking to ask her questions, hear her responses and voice their own concerns.
Silencing certain voices in order to advance the cause of others is not acceptable in our community. This stifles debate and prevents those who’ve come to hear a speaker, our students in particular, from asking questions, often hard questions, and from engaging in debate where the strength of ideas, not the power of shouting, is the currency. William & Mary must be a campus that welcomes difficult conversations, honest debate and civil dialogue.”
