After a year marked by campus confrontations between white nationalists and anti-fascist extremists, university administrators are preparing for a combative and potentially violent 2018 by beefing up security and examining the boundaries of their own commitment to free speech.

Administrators at many campuses told POLITICO that they are struggling to balance their commitment to free speech — which has been challenged by alt-right supporters of President Donald Trump — with campus safety, as white nationalists and left-wing provocateurs vow to continue the types of confrontations that have led to violence in Berkeley, California, and Charlottesville, Virginia.


Meanwhile, Richard Spencer, the white-nationalist leader who organized free-speech rallies on many campuses, told POLITICO that he plans to take his movement to more universities in 2018. He said he knows of efforts underway on at least seven campuses to get him to speak, and that he will use the full extent of the law to fight back against any universities that try to block him.

Spencer blamed antifa for creating the prospect of violent clashes, and said he shouldn’t be held responsible for heightened security costs, which can spiral to $500,000 or more per event.

“The cost is not coming from me directly. I’m just like any other speaker, like any professor lecturing on the Middle Ages. The cost is coming from the protest and the threats of violence coming from antifa,” Spencer said. “Universities, if they actually believe in a serious debate of ideas and philosophical inquiry, should be eager to pay such costs because the energy created by these events means this is an idea that is very powerful.”

White nationalist Richard Spencer and his supporters clash with Virginia State Police in Emancipation Park after the "Unite the Right" rally was declared an unlawful gathering Aug. 12, 2017, in Charlottesville, Va. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Image

College administrators, many of whom said they were proud of their commitment to free speech, nonetheless expressed deep concern for student safety, and lesser concern about security costs.

“It’s the No. 1 topic of the year, I would say, for folks in my business,” said Kevin Kruger, president of the Student Affairs Administrators in Higher Education, a group that specializes in the intersection of university policies and campus life.

The tension between free speech and safety has been visible on many campuses, Kruger said, and the prospect of “an event getting out of hand and the potential loss of life or injuries” and, to a lesser degree, reputational damage, has many administrators worried.



As newly emboldened white nationalists rallied in American cities and college towns in 2017, an underground leftist movement emerged to confront them, using some of the same aggressive and sometimes violent tactics. Check out the photo essay here.

Some colleges and universities are expecting increases in security funding, as they train campus police in mob control; others are scheduling student dialogue sessions and sending campus officials to training sessions on hate groups. Several universities are now requiring more notice before speaking events and have banned outside groups from reserving campus facilities without the sponsorship of a university-sanctioned group.

At Auburn University, for example, a new “critical conversations” series has featured speakers ranging from conservative Robert P. George to Derald Wing Sue, who wrote a book about microaggressions. At Middlebury College in Vermont, a committee has been formed to review events that may require additional security. The University of California-Davis uses a software monitoring program to track online chatter about upcoming events.

WHITE NATIONALISTS TAKE CHARLOTTESVILLE: Clockwise from upper left: White nationalist groups march with torches through the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 11, 2017; a counter-demonstrator uses a lighted spray can against a white nationalist demonstrator at the entrance to Lee Park the next day; a man makes a slashing motion across his throat toward counter-protesters; and people fly into the air as a vehicle is driven into a group of protesters demonstrating against the white nationalist rally. | AP and Getty Images

What’s most concerning to administrators is the fact that they must contend not only with rallies by one extremist group, but with their rivals on the other extreme. In past rallies, protesters on both sides have taken advantage of lax gun laws in certain states to bring concealed weapons to events, just in case violence breaks out.

“What we’re seeing now is the counterprotest — that has been a shift,” said Jeff Allison, director of government and external relations for the International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators. “Certainly the tone and volume has shifted ... over the last year. We’ve all witnessed that.”

In February, a violent backlash against a scheduled appearance by Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart journalist known for his anti-Islam views, left University of California officials with no choice but to cancel the event, they said. The school blamed “150 masked agitators” with igniting the violence, which included Molotov cocktails and fireworks launched at police.

Lesser-known skirmishes played out around the country from Middlebury College, where more than five dozen students were disciplined in May for shutting down a speech by a conservative author, to Olympia, Washington, where the campus of Evergreen State University was closed multiple times this summer amid security concerns after protests over racial issues.

In October, Florida officials declared a state of emergency and spent $600,000 on security at the University of Florida in Gainesville for a visit by Spencer after the university relented and allowed him to speak after the threat of a lawsuit. Spencer’s speech was mostly drowned out by hecklers but the event was largely peaceful. Afterward, however, three men — two of whom authorities said had ties to white supremacist groups — were arrested on charges of attempted homicide after one allegedly fired a gun into a crowd.

New Window TAKING ON HATE: Demonstrators clash during opposing rallies Aug. 27, 2017, in Berkeley, Calif. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Then, in November at the University of Connecticut, a speech by Lucian Wintrich, a conservative writer who was invited by the campus Republican group for a talk called "It's OK to Be White,” ended in chaos with students shouting at Wintrich and the speaker himself getting arrested over an altercation with an audience member.

“These challenges come in all directions and all contexts. They come from the left and they come from the right,” Frederick Lawrence of the Anti-Defamation League, testified in July on Capitol Hill. “They involve students. They involve faculty and they involve those outside the campus who affect the community as invited speakers and sometimes as uninvited agitators.”

Tensions are rising so rapidly that the tone and threat level on campus has increased sharply since December 2016, according to school administrators including Amy Smith, a senior vice president at Texas A&M.

In the weeks following Trump’s election, Texas A&M hosted Spencer, at a cost to the university of more than $60,000 for security, but organized a separate unifying event with 5,000 students, that Smith described as “beautiful,” at a different venue.

Today, Smith said, she’s no longer sure she would recommend a similar unifying event. After the violence in Charlottesville, Texas A&M administrators canceled another speech by Spencer scheduled for Sept. 11 at a “White Lives Matter” rally because they said they could no longer ensure students’ safety. Smith said university leaders were particularly alarmed by a news release from one of Spencer’s supporters that went out the same day a peaceful counterprotester was killed by a car driven by a man with alleged neo-Nazi sympathies in Charlottesville. The release said, “TODAY CHARLOTTESVILLE TOMORROW TEXAS A&M.” (The supporter, Preston Wiginton, told POLITICO he wrote the release before things got violent in Charlottesville.)

“I feel like sometimes we’ve lived 10 years in a year in how we’re dealing with these things because today I would be worried that you would attract the off-campus entities to the counterevent, and would that cause a safety concern,” Smith said. “There has to be a national dialogue among universities and across the country on how we can guarantee the ability to express your opinions and also to know that students can come to school and stay alive and well.”

Amid the turmoil, presidents from other large public universities joined Texas A&M in flat-out rejecting requests for Spencer to appear, arguing that in light of the violence in Charlottesville they couldn’t guarantee their students’ safety. That has in turn led to court challenges against universities such as Michigan State, Ohio State and Penn State by a Spencer supporter.

The supporter argues that antifa, by appearing at alt-right rallies and creating the threat of violence, is creating a “heckler’s veto” that constitutes “unconstitutional content discrimination.”

A judge ruled against Auburn University in a similar suit in April, declaring that the school didn’t prove that allowing a speech by Spencer would provoke violence. College administrators are watching the pending cases closely.

New Window An anti-Trump demonstrator beats on a pro-Trump supporter near Martin Luther King Jr. Civic Park in Berkely, Calif., on Aug. 27, 2017. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Janet Napolitano, the University of California president and former Homeland Security secretary in the Obama administration, said, “One gray area of the law is at what point can a university say no to a speaker because of the security costs and what kind of showing would a court require to defeat a First Amendment claim because, while the University of California has spent a great deal, the pocketbook is not endless.”

“Right now, there’s simply no guidance from the courts on this,” she said.

In California, university leaders have taken the view that campuses are the place where students should be exposed to new ideas — even ones they don’t like, so they are picking up security costs. At the Berkeley campus, that’s meant spending nearly $1.4 million on additional costs for security for speaking events, Napolitano said. A large chunk of that was spent to prepare for a “free speech week” planned by Yiannopoulos and a conservative campus group in September that largely fizzled.

Napolitano acknowledged that supporting even very provocative free-speech rallies on campus is not a position shared by everyone in the university community, and that there’s not an “insignificant percentage” of students who believe that the First Amendment doesn’t cover hate speech. She said a new UC center on free speech to be based in Washington will explore how to best teach students about the Constitution.

“We have a real education issue before us to educate students about what the First Amendment means and to make sure that they understand that once you start policing speakers based on the content of what they are going to say that sets a horrible precedent,” Napolitano said.

Napolitano’s stance comes amid a time of heightened recruitment on campuses by white supremacist groups, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Young people today, polls show, are also less supportive of unrestricted free speech than the generations before them. In a recent Harvard poll of college students, only a little more than half said that opportunities to hear highly controversial speakers adds value to the educational experience.

Steven Leath, president of Auburn University, said the tone in Washington and elsewhere hasmade it harder for students to understand that you can disagree with someone and still like the person — a message they are trying to get across with the university’s speaking series.

“What we’re trying to do is to teach the students you can have civil discourse, that you can disagree with each other without being disagreeable,” Leath said.

New Window Demonstrators clash during opposing rallies Aug. 27, 2017, in Berkeley, Calif. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO

Mark Bray, a lecturer in history at Dartmouth College and author of “Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook,” said many of the students opposing speakers like Spencer don’t view their opposition as being anti-free speech. Instead, he said, many believe that white supremacists are taking advantage of universities to “normalize” their hateful and racist views, which in turn dehumanize others.

In particular, Bray said, the antifa movement “refuses to grant white supremacist or fascist politics the status of being worthy of debate or conversation, and argue these kinds of groups and politics ought to be shut down from the very beginning before they have the smallest opportunity to grow.”

Antifa members often take careful steps to conceal their identity, but are closely vetted by the group’s organizers, Bray said, likening the time commitment to a second job.

Nonetheless, Bray said, most of the counterprotesters showing up at alt-right rallies aren’t members of antifa. Rather, they represent a confluence of people inspired by immigrants’ rights, Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street and environment movements, he said.

After speaking to some antifa leaders, Bray said he estimates that fewer than half of the counterdemonstrators in Charlottesville were antifa members.

“Some of the trickiest part is that you don’t always know. They are people who don’t want to be identified,” Bray said.