UMass Protests Free Speech
“You know I feel like I’m in a time machine…I’m back at Boston University in 1969,” said Don Feder, editor of Accuracy In Media’s Boycott the New York Times, at a recent speaking engagement. “As I said, that’s it,” he said and left the microphone.
Feder’s comments were quickly followed with cheers and cat-calls by students and protestors at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
According to the Socialist Worker, approximately 150 UMass Amherst students and community members celebrated their ability to frustrate a paid guest speaker whom they argued was guilty of hate speech.
“Hate speech leads to hate crimes,” read one female student’s sign. Also in evidence were posters which read “Abolish hate,” “free speech [does not equal] hate speech,” and one which defined hate crimes.
Later, as Feder considered whether to stop his talk, protestors chanted in unison “Speak, Don speak!” and, later, “Don’t come back! Don’t come back!”
Feder was invited to UMass to speak on the issue of hate crime legislation for a lecture entitled, “Hate Crimes: It’s Not What You Think.” However, if members of the UMass Coalition Against Hate are to be believed, those who purvey hate on campus shouldn’t be allowed to speak.
“On March 11, around 150 anti-racist students and community members confronted conservative writer Dan Feder [sic] at the University of Massachusetts and forced him to end his speech early,” writes Michael Fiorentino for the Socialist Worker, which defines itself as “a national newspaper founded in 1977 and published by the International Socialist Organization [ISO].”
“Feder was invited by the UMass Republican Club to give a talk that essentially denied the existence of hate crimes,” he asserts.
The protest was arranged by the Coalition Against Hate, which brings together groups including the ISO, Radical Student Union, and Pride Alliance, according to Fiorentino. Masslive blogger S.P. Sullivan added another group to that list: the Campus Anti-War Network.
Sullivan indicated that his blog entry “relies heavily” on information from Sam Butterfield, a writer with the Massachusetts Daily Collegian.
“Afterwards, organizers of the Coalition Against Hate met to discuss the next steps for the movement to win a campus that is safe for women, people of color and people of different sexual orientations. Our message is simple—the UMass community refuses to be silent in the face of bigotry,” writes Fiorentino (emphasis added).
Caught in the Crossfire
While protestors expressed their antipathy toward Feder’s (unheard) message, the reaction to his speech stems from twin controversies on campus: the Jason Vassell case and a recent publication by a campus publication, The Minuteman.
Greg Collins, president of the UMass Republican Club, had told the Daily Collegian that “We brought Don Feder, first and foremost, to challenge the assumptions of Justice for Jason supporters and politically correct liberals on campus that hate crimes are legitimate forms of crimes.”
However, at the speech itself, Collins said that “this speech will not specifically address the Justice for Jason movement nor the actual circumstances surrounding the incident.”
On February 27 Gary Laponte for the Socialist Worker that UMass students were founding the Coalition Against Hate in response to the allegedly racist writings of “The Silent Majority,” which recently relaunched the Minuteman after a one-year hiatus.
“An ad-hoc coalition of students at [UMass] came together and, on a few days’ notice, organized a ‘Speak-Out Against Hate’ February 25 to protest a racist right-wing newspaper,” wrote Lapon. His complaints were that the publication’s articles
• made fun of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer (LGBTQ) students by describing them as the “LGBTQWRSTYZ community,”
• making fun of Barney Frank’s economics and sexuality. (Lapon misquotes the article),
• criticizing Kassell for not acting like a man and controlling his temper in the face of racial slurs,
• and allegedly stereotypical and bigoted characterizations of Massachusetts upcoming transgender civil rights bill.
“ALL OF [sic] this is enough to make African Americans, LGBT people, women, immigrants and other oppressed people on campus feel attacked and unsafe,” wrote Lapon. However, Lapon mischaracterized and misquoted several of the aforementioned articles, which can be read here.
Vassell, an African-American UMass student, is currently on trial for stabbing two white men nine times after they hurled racial epithets at him. The Associated Press reported on March 16 that one of the men, John Bowes, was “acquitted of civil rights violations” but “convicted of disorderly conduct and sentenced…to one year of probation” and a $200 fine.
In contrast, Vassell awaits trial for aggravated assault. Justice for Jason (J4J) argues that he “was the victim of a racist hate crime. Since then he has been further victimized by a racist prosecution,” the District Attorney and local police.
However, as Lesley Tanner reported for CBS3 Springfield news on February 18, “prosecutors say a twelve-minute surveillance video tells a different story.”
“Vassell is allegedly wearing a mask in the tape and at one point prosecutors say he left the dorm lobby, before returning to repeatedly stab the two men,” reported Tanner. “Despite the description of the video, supporters say their view of Vassell hasn’t changed.”
In their latest issue, Minuteman writers accuse Dan Keefe, a J4J leader, and other students of illegally using student government funds—which are paid for by student dues—to help a non-university entity sell t-shirts to raise money for Vassell’s attorney’s fees.
Keefe is an administrator on the Coalition Against Hate’s Facebook page and undoubtedly connected to the protests. UMass Republican Club vice president Brad DeFlumeri is co-managing editor of The Minuteman along with Alana Goodman.
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Bethany Stotts is a staff writer at Accuracy in Academia.
Bethany Stotts
