The president of Boston University on Wednesday published a forceful statement chastising students for heckling the commencement speaker at their graduation last week.
“Our students were not picking a fight,” the president, Robert A. Brown, wrote in BU Today, an in-house publication. “They were attempting to implement the cancel culture that has become all too prevalent on university campuses.”
The university had invited David Zaslav, chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, to address graduating students and their families. Members of the Writers Guild of America have been on strike for nearly a month after contract negotiations with eight major Hollywood studios, including Warner Bros. Discovery, fell apart. The guild represents television and film writers, who are demanding better pay and regulations on the use of artificial intelligence.
According to Brown, Zaslav was invited “long before” the strike began.
As Zaslav spoke, protesters booed and chanted, “Pay your writers!” Some turned their backs to him. Others jeered profanely. Zaslav, an alumnus of the university’s School of Law, continued his speech and was awarded an honorary degree.
In his statement, Brown apologized to Zaslav for the “unruly” behavior of the students, who he noted were only a minority of the 23,000 commencement attendees.
The attempt to silence a speaker with obscene shouts is a resort to gain power, not reason.
“The students who were appallingly coarse and deliberately abusive to Mr. Zaslav were entitled to attend commencement because they were being awarded degrees that they earned from Boston University,” Brown said. “They sought to make a statement, out of passionate conviction, but in the moment, they forgot that in a liberal democracy, personal autonomy and freedom of speech come with responsibilities,” including “respect for the speech rights of others.”
Brown said his office had received hundreds of emails before commencement calling on the university to disinvite Zaslav. The messages, which were largely identical, asked the university to “cancel” the speaker, the president said.
“The attempt to silence a speaker with obscene shouts is a resort to gain power, not reason, and antithetical to the mission and purposes of a university,” Brown said.
With his sharp critique of students’ speech, Brown joined a handful of campus leaders who have recently taken more forthright positions in defense of free expression. That group includes the dean of Stanford Law School, who upbraided students for shouting down a conservative federal judge invited to speak by a student group, and the president of Cornell University, who shot down a student-council resolution that demanded mandatory trigger warnings on class materials.
Brown is stepping down in July after leading Boston University for 18 years. A spokeswoman for Warner Bros. Discovery referred The Chronicle to a statement Zaslav made on the day of commencement. It expressed gratitude to the university, support for the writers, and hope that the strike would be resolved soon.
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