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‘Instead of removing the disruptors, the university chose to escort Laffer out of his own lecture‘
Nearly seven years ago, a campus speech hosted by conservative students featuring famed economist Arthur Laffer abruptly ended as vocal leftwing protesters interrupted his talk and campus police got involved.
Next week, a jury is scheduled to decide if that shutdown in November 2019 was a violation of students’ First Amendment and equal protection rights.
The lawsuit was filed in 2020 on behalf of Young America’s Foundation and College Republicans against the State University of New York at Binghamton administration and progressive student activists involved in the incident.
After years of preliminary motions, the remaining defendant is John Pelletier, who served as the campus chief of police at the time. Attorneys for Alliance Defending Freedom allege Pelletier chose to appease activists and shut down Laffer’s speech rather than defend the conservative students’ First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
The law firm seeks to recoup the roughly $35,000 it cost to host the event along with attorneys fees and punitive damages, said ADF attorney Tyson Langhofer in an interview Wednesday with The College Fix.
He said Binghamton University has policies on the books that are supposed to protect students’ free speech rights, but argues those rules were actively ignored in this case. He said the legal battle is important because a favorable decision may help sway campus officials nationwide to actually enforce their campus free speech policies.
“If we have government officials who are unwilling to protect people’s rights … those rights are worthless,” Langhofer said. “Policies mean nothing unless we have government officials who are willing to enforce the law on an equal basis, that’s what the Equal Protection Clause was enacted for.”
SUNY Binghamton’s media relations division and Pelletier’s attorney did not respond to The College Fix for comment this week.
In court documents, Pelletier, who is now retired, argued it was Laffer’s choice to leave, and also he and campus officers made their decisions to protect campus safety.
“There is a genuine dispute of fact as to whether this was a Government-induced ‘restriction’ – whether Pelletier ‘ordered’ Dr. Laffer to leave, or whether Dr. Laffer left on his own accord,” U.S. District Judge Lawrence Kahn wrote in a preliminary ruling last year.
“Multiple witnesses, including Dr. Laffer, affirm a Government-induced restriction, and the Laffer Video does not contradict this characterization,” the judge wrote.
Langhofer told The Fix that the police chief also met Laffer at the airport and pressured him against coming to campus, citing the protesters’ well documented plans to disrupt the event.
As Young America’s Foundation has previously stated about the controversy: “Instead of removing the disruptors, the university chose to escort Laffer out of his own lecture. The university’s use of a heckler’s veto violates the students’ constitutional rights.”
A few days before the incident, leftist protesters had also overwhelmed a small group of College Republicans who had set up a table to promote the speech by Laffer, a world-renowned conservative economist known as the father of supply-side economics.
In a video of the incident, a crowd of student counter-protesters is seen yelling expletives, making threats, and destroying the conservative students’ materials in a mob-like confrontation.
There are also several videos of the Laffer incident. The progressive activists were also allowed to stay in the lecture hall after Laffer and the conservative students were no longer present to engage in their preferred speech for more than an hour, Langhofer said.
“This is really a kind of a test of,” he said. “Are we willing to hold government officials accountable when they are unwilling to enforce the law as it’s written?”
VIDEO: Unruly campus activists shut down speech by ‘father of supply-side economics’ Arthur Laffer
