This morning, my first call was from James Devitt at NYU’s press office. He wanted to know if I still had any questions; I said at that point all I really wanted to know was if last night’s event had been closed to press, and he said that it had been.
Eugene Volokh was more curious, and:

Here were his responses, with quotes noting his literal words (emphasis mine).
(1) “NYU has to be concerned with its students’ safety and well-being, which are among the factors that drove our decision in this matter.”
(2) The decision was also based partly on NYU’s “larger obligation as a university to the sensibilities of its students,” many of whom are offended by the cartoons.
(3) As to the policy, “No-one’s speech was curtailed.” “If you read the policy, it talks about speakers’ speech being curtailed, and to the best of my knowledge none of the speakers were the cartoons’ authors.“

Volokh notes the absurdity of these arguments as they relate to speech, but there are two elements he’s missing:
1) The university was only responding to the “sensibilities” of one group of students, but failed to consider that a certain other group of students might feel its own “sensibilities” had been tampered with when it was disallowed from engaging in common free speech.
2) More importantly, the suggestion that students’ safety was an issue is largely ignored by Volokh, but incredibly important. After all, it must be asked, in what regard might the administration be concerned for student safety, and which students would it be concerned? There’s no reason at all to assume that the Muslim students faced any potential violent reaction. The only students that could then be said to be facing a diminution in safety are those who organized the event. And that only became an issue when students wrote letters that said things like:

These same cartoons have led to riots and protests, and many deaths across the world, and now an OSA club wants to bring them here to NYU.
[…]
If these ideas themselves are not a deterrent for putting up the pictures, then the possibility of the tension and problems they might cause should serve as a reason to stop the displaying of the cartoons.
[…]
In addition, NYU’s location would subject such an event to massive worldwide media attention. In the long run, no one will remember that a small club with only 20 or so members showed the cartoons, but rather it will be said that NYU allowed such an event to take place, making NYU look bad across the world, as NYU does have facilities across the globe, including parts of the world heavily populated by muslims.

Now, that sounds to me like an implied threat of violence — not violence from the student who wrote the letter, but from those the student can reliably assume to have the same objection to the cartoons as he does. Follow the logic: no one will pay attention the event itself, only to the fact that NYU hosted the cartoons, the cartoons have resulted in violence in many areas, and you can be assured that their display will lead to media uproar — in part because of our protest, and that may lead to violence in Muslim areas — which includes NYU facilities.
The student who wrote the letter wasn’t making an explicit threat of violence, but was capitalizing on a perceived threat of violence in a very explicit fashion — and apparently he did so quite well, as students’ safety became a consideration in the administration’s decision to treat the event as it did.

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 30th, 2006 at 6:10 pm and is filed under Muslim. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.