The Irvine 11 were reportedly poised to file an appeal today of their misdemeanor conspiracy convictions for orchestrating serial interruptions of a UC Irvine guest speaker last year. Maintaining the line they have taken from the outset, the Muslim Student Association members contend that they have a First Amendment right to do what they did—not just shout from the audience, but shout from a script arranged by advance agreement by those who simply wanted to deny the speaker, the Israeli ambassador to the U.S., a forum on the campus. They will undoubtedly lose on appeal, for reasons earlier noted here. But Erwin Chemerinsky was right. The conspiracy prosecution will do nothing but refuel the smoldering antisemitism rife on the Irvine campus for much of the last decade. Instead of treating what the students did as a crime, a civil conspiracy lawsuit for damages could have been brought by anyone able to prove resulting injury. But the only plausible plaintiff would have been the university itself, contending that its reputation as a forum for all viewpoints—an aspect of academic freedom—had suffered, and perhaps its efforts to attain a diverse student body as well. Of course if the university had begun asserting those values years ago with a pointed rebuke to attacks on any minority instead of generalized pieties condemning “hate speech” as if it were the flu, the shoutdown might never have happened.
