The UMass Police Department (UMPD) and University administration once again proved their unwillingness to uphold freedom of speech and support intellectual diversity, with their ineptitude on full and magnificent display during the contentious and widely discussed hate crime speech by conservative Don Feder in the Cape Cod Lounge on Wednesday, 11 March 2009.

Reminiscent of its inability to maintain safety and order at the Andy Card die-in fiasco in April 2007, the UMPD’s performance this time around bordered on criminal negligence as 6 officers and one sergeant dreadfully but perhaps unsurprisingly failed to police an event centered on the importance of free speech.  The UMass Republican Club, of which I am Vice President, paid $735 for the services of the aforementioned officers and in return received nothing more than argumentativeness, disagreement and one colossal hassle – not from the foolish and intolerant leftist disruptors – but from the officers on duty and under oath to enforce the Massachusetts General Laws.  So bad was the performance of the highly paid and inaction-inclined officers that two Athletic Department (and Republican Club) donors immediately revoked financial support of athletics and the University as a whole, with one of them writing: “Once a speaker is allowed to come on campus and give a speech then I think it is incumbent upon the institution to require the person to be allowed to complete the speech - otherwise do not allow such speeches for any group.”

The other now-former donor, a retired professor of psychology, wrote:

“I am reassessing my financial support of UMass Athletics in light of events surrounding an event sponsored by the University of Massachusetts Republican Club, as reported in today’s [paper]. The invited speaker was literally shouted down by those unwilling to hear something they did not wish to hear and to make certain that no one else would hear it either.”

This paper and I personally applaud the important message sent by these two gentlemen, said message being that the University must make every effort to ensure that an invited speaker be able to deliver his speech unmolested by angry protestors.  And UMass routinely fails in this regard by compelling student groups to pay for the luxuriously salaried police out of their own budgets rather than fund police details for potentially disrupted events.  Doing so means that events like Feder either never happen in the first place if they sponsoring group lacks the money to fund the UMPD, and thus do not contribute to the intellectual marketplace of ideas on campus, or they are forced to pay astronomically high prices for police whose collective bargaining agreement with the school means that 1.5 hours of work, no matter how inept and shoddy, legally equals 4 hours of pay.  Something is egregiously wrong with this equation, and the worst-case scenario -- well-paid police funded by a cash-strapped student group ignoring repeated violations of state law for fear of being accused of police brutality and at the command of nearby University administrators -- played out to the dismay of community members and well-meaning students in attendance a few Wednesdays ago.

Furthermore, the University -- as embodied by the police and other officials on-hand -- failed in its duty to enforce the Code of Student Conduct and state law statutes covering harassment and disruption of public events against the student protestors.  Don Feder repeatedly asked the police to intervene as he was rudely shouted down, but they failed to even entertain his pleas for assistance, instead opting to ask me and other event organizers to remove the disruptive protesters.

The University’s mission is to provide an affordable and accessible education of high quality and to conduct programs of research and public service that advance knowledge and improve the lives of the people of the Commonwealth, the nation, and the world.  Implicit in this mission statement -- and explicit in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and the Massachusetts Constitution -- is the fundamental principle that one’s reasonable freedom of speech shall not be abridged.  By reasonable I mean that Don Feder’s right to freedom of speech in the Cape Cod Lounge earlier this month was absolute insofar as the Republican Club had reserved the room, procured the microphones and sound equipment, and generally established the space as the site of their event.  The freedom of expression of the leftist radicals legally ought to have been curtailed consistent with the “time, place, and manner” restrictions placed on freedom of speech in a plethora of 20th-century United States Supreme Court cases. Moreover, consistent with Massachusetts law, when Don Feder publicly declared that he felt as though he was being harassed to the point where continuing his speech wasn’t feasible, the UMPD ought to have arrested the most boisterously yelling and sign-waving disruptors.  To make the job of the duty-averse UMPD officers easier than it already was, Republican Club members were readily handing out copies to them of the state statute whose violation was clearly and presently occurring.  A simple message needed to be sent: Obnoxious and criminal disruptions of the event would not be tolerated and Feder’s freedom of speech would trump the protester’s right to behave like degenerate miscreants thereby allowing the invited guest to contribute to the intellectual diversity of the campus -- by offering a conservative perspective on hate crime law -- and therefore help advance the educational aspect of the University’s mission statement.

But this was not to be so.  Instead, what the attending audience got to witness was the free speech of a prominent conservative get curtailed by the very same hypocritical leftist fascists who proclaim to want an equality of rights for all (that agree with them); a police department’s miserable uselessness in full blossom (and as a law and order conservative whose instinctive respect for the police is high, I was quite disheartened and dismayed); and the reluctance of lazy bureaucrats (University administrators) to take the initiative to defend what is right, just, and legal.  Wow, this combination of incompetence, militant liberalism, and institutionalized crookedness sounds pretty similar to an accurate characterization of the Deval Patrick administration.  Only in Massachusetts.  Only on Planet UMass, where respect for free speech and intellectual dynamism are routinely the biggest losers and must be in hiding.

Brad can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it