When does protesting college speakers go too far?

DAYTONA BEACH — Silencing people with differing opinions has become a pattern on college campuses.

The most recent instance was at Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, where Betsy DeVos faced a barrage of non-stop boos during her commencement speech Wednesday. During the Education Secretary's entire 20-minute speech and any time her name was mentioned, the audience heckled her, some screaming "get the [expletive] out" and "shut the [expletive] up." Angered by her past remarks that historically black schools are the "real pioneers when it comes to school choice," graduates turned their backs to the stage and raised their fists to the ceiling.

"Let’s choose to hear one another out,” DeVos said in a failed attempt to persuade the crowd. “I am here to demonstrate in the most direct way possible that I and the administration are fully committed to your success and to the success of every student across this great country.”

University President Edison Jackson interrupted DeVos at one point and threatened to mail the graduates their degrees if they didn't stop. DeVos sympathizers scolded the students for showing disrespect.

But experts say that was the whole point.

"The whole purpose of protest is to be rude," said Pamela Oliver, professor of sociology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. "It's not like they hadn’t warned the college that they (the students) were upset about it."

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While Oliver considered the protest pretty tame — "its noisy, but it's not the black bloc, they're not out breaking windows or throwing blocks" — that isn't always the case.

Protesters at Middlebury College in Vermont vandalized a car and injured a professor when Charles Murray, described by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a white nationalist, came to speak in March. Protests against Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos' visit to University of California-Davis ended with one man shot.

At schools across the nation, students have jeered commencement speakers and college visitors they don't agree with — in some cases, blocking them from campus completely.

Students argue that they are just exercising their freedom of speech. But experts say, sometimes the protests go too far, tiptoeing the line between free speech and civil disobedience, which can be punishable by law.

"People get confused. Of course it's not free speech to stop speech," said James Weinstein, a professor of constitutional law at Arizona State University. "Now, that might be civil disobedience. If some neo-Nazi was coming to campus to advocate for the re-enslavement of blacks and extermination of Jews, and you wanted to stop that — is that a matter of civil disobedience? We could have that discussion, but it's certainly not free speech."

Quashing events with controversial speakers, as was the case at the University of California-Berkeley where conservative commentator Ann Coulter backed out of a speaking engagement in April, also hampers productive conversations, he added. If we don't listen to each other, Weinstein warned, things are only going to get worse in an already divided time in history.

"I think there's a line between legitimate protest and shutting down an event," said Weinstein. "It isn’t proper for them to try and stop the presentation of ideas that they find offensive or evil, and it certainly isn't promoting free speech.

"It's no more free speech to stop an event than to throw a smoke bomb in the place."

Harold Pollack, a public policy professor at the University of Chicago, agreed there's a fine line between protesting and preventing speakers from being heard.

“If they invited a Holocaust denier to the University of Chicago, I would turn my back on that person, boo them, but I wouldn’t prevent them from speaking,” Pollack said. “From a strategic point of view, the stupidest thing you can do is elevate these figures. The focus is on the misbehavior of those protesting, rather than the low quality of the ideas [the speaker] has to offer in public debate."

Do controversial figures have a right to speak at public universities?

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Even speakers who spew what some consider hate speech have the right to speak, argued Weinstein.

Truman State University in Missouri came under fire in April for inviting Robert Spencer, who runs the conservative website "Jihad Watch" and has been classified as a an extremist and anti-Muslim propagandist. It was the same story at Texas A&M when Richard Spencer, who's considered one of the founders of the alt-right movement and a white supremacist, spoke on campus.

"In this country, that kind of speech is legal. We have no hate speech exception in the first amendment," said Weinstein. "Even stopping the most virulent Nazi on campus isn’t free speech; it is civil disobedience."

But simply booing speakers, as was the case at Bethune-Cookman — although students and alumni did petition school administration to dis-invite her — is usually well within the rights of protesting.

Bethune-Cookman alumnus and current vice president of the American Federation of Teachers Fedrick Ingram, who protested DeVos' visit, was proud of his fellow B-CU Wildcats.

"In the spirit of Mary McLeod Bethune (the school's founder and civil rights activist), I wouldn't expect anything less," said Ingram after the ceremony. "We should never squelch a collective voice of people trying to do the right thing."

The NAACP has since called for the firing of President Jackson and Chairman of the Board Joe Petrock, who said they hoped the event could be a teachable moment, for inviting DeVos in the first place.

College students have a long history of protesting commencement speakers they don't agree with. Dating back to the 80s, students have challenged the likes of Sen. Rick Santorum, First Lady Barbara Bush, New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Satanic Verses author Salman Rushdie, Sen. John McCain, Vice President Dick Cheney and President Barack Obama.

New legislation could change that. In Illinois, Tennessee, Colorado and Arizona, a bill that would prevent colleges and universities from dis-inviting speakers and force them penalize students who obstruct such events is picking up steam.

"Loudly booing, being rude to people, signs with obnoxious pictures or caricatures of Trump or people you disagree with is a long tradition of American protest,” said Pollack.

Caroline Glenn is the Education Reporter at FLORIDA TODAY. Contact her at caglenn@floridatoday.com or 321-576-5933, and follow her on Twitter @bycarolineglenn and like "Education at Florida Today" on Facebook.