Would decent people --intelligent students at a university-- truly buy into these arguments? I think not.

What's to fear, then?

The best approach is to actually invite them to make a presentation and thank them profusely for coming. I would start the presentation with a sustained five minute applause.

Imagine, then, the message that would be sent to, say, a white supremacist speaker who, after being received in this fashion watches the entire venue slowly and quietly empty without saying a word until they are speaking to a bunch of empty chairs.

A voluntarily empty hall, not by force, not by burning down the town, is the best vaccination against these people.

So, yes, this means opening the doors to what we might consider to be hateful. Unless we have a fundamental lack of faith in the quality and intelligence of the student body the best approach is to let these speakers in and let them experience talking in an empty room.

Maybe a few will want to listen to them. So what?

Intelligent, quiet and non-violent rejection, that's the way to do it.

Say a student group invites the genocide advocate, because they've got time for that. Then another student group wants to protest, because they've got time for that. There are the student groups who will want to protest your way and the student groups who will want to yell so loud that the speaker can't be heard, and these groups won't agree. People will start complaining to the faculty advisors about X inviting Y and Z shouting down Y and W not standing up enough to Y and X, and it will get out on social media, and you'll read about the brouhaha a few days later when the event is cancelled because the admin just doesn't want to deal with the headache and the costs.

I tend to agree with you that the empty hall is the best vaccination. It just requires a coordination among the student body that would be remarkable, that would require real leadership from someone who saw this all coming. People are so mired in the day-to-day that this leadership is generally lacking. How to foster it, if that's what we want?

Silly idea: Each group gets to pick one speaker to invite. They all have to accept what other groups picked. If group A wants to boycott group B's choice then both speakers are eliminated and they both have to choose new speakers. Yes, it will be carnage at first, but very soon everyone is going to realize they have to play nice with each other or nobody gets a speaker, ever.

Then there's education. Each group has to publish a one page summary profiling the speaker and what he/she will discuss. This will serve to allow others to decide whether they want to go listen or not.

Finally, occupancy. If a speaker can't attract a certain audience size, say, 25% of available seats, the group's rating is reduced which means other groups have priority over them.

It's a complicated mish-mash of stuff. I know. And probably impossible to implement. The point is that there must be a way to game-ify this business of speakers on campus in order to avoid conflicts and operate under a set of well understood rules. Prohibit all demonstrations in the name of tolerance.

The idea is to support free speech while having some kind of a self-regulating system that does not require yelling and screaming at each other or worst. There's also a degree of forced tolerance, which, sad to say, is necessary. Universities have become almost the worst example of intolerance and bigotry in our society. They have to force themselves to peacefully allow other ideology to have a stage. This is important.

This doesn't mean endorsing anyone at all.

With regards to the funding available to pay for travel for speakers, I think the regrettable reality is that if we are going to respect the concept of free speech we need to accept the idea that we have to listen to those we might consider to be repugnant. At least for a little bit.

Free speech does not guarantee an audience. If we invite and pay for a white supremacist to give a speech, applaud them at the start of the speech and just walk out without saying a word...well, these people need an audience. They'd catch on pretty quickly that you made complete fools out of them with this move.

The university might waste some money the first year this approach is taken. Very soon the crazies are going to come back and say "no thanks, not interested in giving a talk". In other words, invite them, house them, feed them, even embrace them and take a picture with them...and then give them an empty room to talk about anything they want to talk about.

Simple, peaceful and, I think, very powerful. The crazies would have no audiences but intelligent contrasting ideas would and that's exactly what you want.

You want students to not live in an echo chamber yet you want a degree of control of the quality of the material they are exposed to.

Also, another quick point: The empty hall treatment completely disarms the crazies. In sharp contrast to that, rioting in the streets, burning cars and vandalizing businesses generates huge media attention and elevates the crazies. In other words, the protest is actually great marketing for the nut-case whereas the empty hall treatment ridicules them and makes them irrelevant, nobody will be interested in covering them at all.

I think that, with modifications, this is a good strategy.

The origin of the term 'genocide' arose out of eugenics ('geno'). Eugenics was primarily 'educated' people making fancy sounding (though largely incorrect) arguments which started with justifying sterilization and ended up justifying euthanasia for the 'greater good'.

Critical thinking is not the default state of humans in any group and otherwise decent people have bought into dangerous ideas before.

You've got the etymology confused. 'geno-' comes from Grk 'genos', which means race/tribe. Genocide refers to ethnic killings. Eugenics ('eu' good + 'gen-' race/tribe) refers to the goal of achieving 'better races' and methods to achieve them. Unfortunately those methods involve pruning perceived bad seeds.

They come from the same root word, but genocide isn't derived from eugenics.

This book spent some times talking about it and I thought it was interesting: http://www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Gene/Siddhartha-Mu...

Of course, the speakers with the most universally unpalatable views aren't going to get invited (by student groups) because they won't get enough attendees to fill an auditorium or be worth the hassle. But that's unrelated to whether the university should allow it.

This is not an easy problem, and 'open calls to violence' are not a trivial solution.

I also fear universities which seek to over-represent minority points for the sake of balance, in the same way that news programs often do.

Abortion rights

Abortion opponents

Trade agreements

etc.

No, it's an abusive act though.

The simple answer to your question is: The definition of violence by the courts is physical.

And it's probably a good decision. Otherwise the rabbit hole will take us bad places.

Of course with this in mind, it's significantly harder to oppose Trump's proposal to defund Berkeley (or whichever college). Why is taxpayer support for a political advocacy group somehow sacrosanct?

The issue is the unwillingness of those attending to take advantage of the full diversity of views and life experiences that university life has to offer.

Most importantly though you are taking a simplistic all or nothing approach where any (perceived) transgression disqualifies the entire history of knowledge seeking and sharing of ideas.

Socrates was also a professional troll. Should he (if he were not mortal) be barred from universities?

As for Milo, I've never watched him until yesterday. I saw a bunch of journalists claiming he supported pedophilia, yet refusing to quote him or even link to the video. So I figured I was being mislead (I was!) and watched the actual video.

While he is full of hyperbole, flamboyance and ridiculousness, he's also making valid points mixed in with it. For example, one of his major points is that the left wing identity politics is just a rhetorical weapon, not a real principle - that's why a "flaming queer" like him isn't allowed to hide behind it.

LOL @ Socrates being a professional troll. I feel like I'm being trolled when I read stuff like this...

So you were citing the treatment of someone whom "who had never watched until yesterday" in support of your claim about Universities and open acceptance of ideas. That's a pretty good summation of how ideologically driven your arguments are.

It sure didn't stop him from trying to hide behind "being a child abuse victim" to excuse his behavior. But that just makes him a hypocrite, what makes him a troll is that whatever "valid points" he has serves the interest of provocation, not discussion.

I favor free speech, free thought and open inquiry even for ideas that I feel are harmful or dishonest. I want universities to be bastions of these values.

For example, although feminists are far more dishonest than Milo and far more hostile to open inquiry and free thought, I still favor allowing them to speak at universities. They should even have the right to criticize specific individuals (like Milo was going to) and argue against the very freedom that allows them to speak.

My knowledge of a specific speaker is completely irrelevant, because the argument I'm making has nothing whatsoever to do with who the speaker is or the content of his talk.

I've been on a bunch of these little committees. It's a combo of who has a bee in their bonnet, what speakers fit the schedule, and who will talk for free or for cheap if we can't get funding for high-profile speakers. We've managed to get Nobel Prize winners because they were in town for another speaking engagement at the right time and we could broker a deal. You seem to imply that there's a big institution-wide agreement to serve some institution-wide set of interests. On a mundane level, this simply isn't true. You're seeing the outside of a bunch of misfit cats scrapping for meager amounts of cash and drawing some pretty grand conclusions. Patterns emerge out of this system but they're not, in general, intentional or under the control of any single entity.

Your scare quotes indicate that when you say "censorship" you mean "the right to choose which points of view I/we will legitimize," I guess? Or "not censorship at all as it turns out?"

Dissenting views need to be given a platform, even if they make some students uncomfortable.

Should newspapers be forced to print my letters to the editor, even if they are a bunch of fevered ravings, because my incoherent hate-screeds need to be given a platform?

If you want to promote unpopular points of view, you may have to build your own platform. And 2017 is actually the best time in history for this very thing, and people who do no-kidding advocate genocide seem to have no trouble banding together and making their arguments available to anyone who's interested.

All I said is that we need to step back and reassess what is being denied a platform, today, and whether we're denying too much speech a platform and dismissing too much speech as "fevered ravings."

What does it mean to you when you say that something has been "denied a platform?" It seems to me that the very notion depends on the assumption that ideas have some sort of natural right to an audience and outside support.

But your unpopular ideas do not entitle you to special outside help. You may have to build a platform for your unpopular idea, as was the case for so many once-unpopular ideas in history. That's what it means to be unpopular. It might be a lot of work. Nobody owes your idea a donation of that work.

The notion that some ideas are "denied a platform" today is both inaccurate and incoherent. No one has the right, the authority, or the power to "deny a platform" to a particular idea in general.