Last February, UC Irvine (UCI) invited Michael Oren, Israeli Ambassador to the United States, to speak on the subject of US-Israeli relations.
Students from the campus’ Muslim Student Union (MSU) protested the ambassador’s presence, heckling and disrupting his speech with cries of “Michael Oren, you are a war criminal!” and “MASS MURDER IS NOT FREE SPEECH!”
Repeated interruptions, which drew both support and derision from the audience, were met with unheeded pleas for some semblance of calm, and eventually resulted in the removal and arrest of 11 students. Charged with disrupting a public event at the university, UCI suspended the MSU for an academic quarter, put the organization on a two-year probationary period, and ordered them to complete one hundred hours of community service.
The 11 students arrested and charged by the university—two from UC Riverside—received undisclosed individual disciplinary actions due to federal privacy laws. However, last month, one year after the incident (and after the MSU served its suspension), the Orange County District Attorney’s office has filed criminal misdemeanor charges against the “Irvine 11” for disrupting a public meeting and engaging in a criminal conspiracy to do so.
The prosecution of the 11 students seems like overkill, especially in the wake of the university’s administered punishments. The students face up to six months in jail due to the nature of the charges. A graduate school application with suspensions and other disciplinary measures noted on record will likely prove to be serious impediments to furthering any of the students’ prospective educational careers, to say nothing of criminal charges.
Indeed, over 100 UCI professors and faculty signed a letter addressed to Orange County D.A., Tony Rackauckas, calling on him to drop the charges against the students. University discipline, according to the letter, was “sufficient.”
This is not an approval, tacit or otherwise, of the students’ behavior, which was, by most accounts, obnoxious and infuriating. While the students and their supporters have cried foul over what they perceive as a violation of their freedom of speech, they fail to acknowledge that by interrupting Mr. Oren, they were violating his right to the same.
UCI School of Law Dean Erwin Chermerinsky, in a lecture given months before Oren’s visit, addressed the very topic of First Amendment protections. In his lecture, Chermerinsky was careful to note that at the university, free speech was protected in areas considered public forums, while within enclosed spaces, university policies mandate a specific time, place and manner for which speech is allowed. Oren’s speech was given in at UCI’s Student Center, which falls into the latter.
“You have the right—if you disagree with me—to go outside and perform your protest,” said Chermerinsky. “But you don’t get the right to come in when I’m talking and shout me down. Otherwise people can always silence a speaker by heckler’s veto.”
The actions of the “Irvine 11” failed to meet those criteria, and after receiving their punishment, they, the MSU, and the UCI campus seemed to move on. However, last month’s announcement of criminal charges have brought the entire ugly affair to the surface a year later.
This is a shame for the UC Irvine campus, whose newspaper, New University, expressed dissatisfaction with the charges, and in an editorial stated, “Most…on campus thought we had moved on from the controversy and had put the issue to rest.”
UCI has previously combated charges of anti-Semitism on campuses after a slew of complaints in the early- to mid-2000s brought about an investigation by the Department of Education, which were eventually dismissed in 2007. The campus has been described as a “hotbed of tension” between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian groups—both among the most active found on college campuses in the U.S.—and the Orange County D.A.’s office has only served to reignite the passions on both sides.
Controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian situation will remain a point of contention for many, especially in the academic world, and students must recognize that freedom of speech is not limited to one person or group’s opinion.
However, Orange County District Attorney Rackauckas’ prosecution of the “Irvine 11” is disproportionate to the students’ offenses, which, though reprehensible, remained peaceful in nature and did not threaten, advocate, or commit any violent acts. Applying criminal law against nonviolent protests on campus sets a dangerous precedent, as the letter from UCI professors and faculty stated.
Rackauckas asserted that the actions of the students demonstrated “a clear violation of the law, and failing to bring charges against this conduct would amount to a failure to uphold the Constitution.”
Does prosecuting a group of students who protested nonviolently (and who failed to stop Oren from speaking) require the meager resources of the state’s criminal justice system?
Filing the charges is a matter entirely at the hand of the prosecutor’s discretion, and in this case, we feel that the punishment does not fit the crime. The “Irvine 11” have already been punished appropriately, and threatening their futures further is unnecessary.
