Although Penn State had repeatedly said it would not cancel a controversial speaking event on campus, the university took action just before it began on Monday.
Citing “the threat of escalating violence,” Penn State canceled a student group’s speaking event featuring “professional troll” Alex Stein and Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes. The university announced the news around 7:20 p.m. on Monday after large crowds formed near the Thomas Building where the event was set to begin at 8 p.m.
At 7:07 p.m., the university’s emergency alerts channel urged students to avoid the Thomas Building, calling the crowd an unlawful disturbance and claiming those who remained would be subject to arrest. Nearly an hour before the university issued a warning, Stein appeared before the crowd outdoors and attempted to agitate those in attendance. A protestor eventually spit on him.
In a statement, Penn State said its police force determined it needed to cancel the speaking event in the interest of campus safety. The university said demonstrations outside the Thomas Building “regrettably turned violent.” The university did not specify how it turned violent, but shortly before 7 p.m. a group of masked individuals entered the crowd and deployed pepper spray on protestors.
Before the cancellation, police brought horses outside the Thomas Building to serve as a barrier between crowds of protestors, adding to the already-substantial law enforcement presence on campus. Some officers wore riot gear.
Multiple people at the scene reported the use of pepper spray by individuals wearing all-black outfits who were not police or protestors. Video by independent journalists Ford Fischer and Zach Roberts showed the incident as it happened, and Penn State’s police department later said its officers did not use pepper spray.
As crowds began dispersing, some in attendance began chanting, “We are not afraid of the Proud Boys.” Protestors continued marching across campus, eventually passing the Willard Building while moving down Pollock Road.
As the protest dispersed, more than 100 people remained in the area around Thomas Building. At about 8:30 p.m., a line of police on horseback and in riot gear advanced to form a perimeter and push the remaining protestors back and out of the area.
Penn State widely accepts peaceful protest, the university statement said, but needed to step in when actions obstruct “the basic exchange of ideas” — a form of censorship no matter the reasoning behind it.
“The University expects that people engaging in expressive activity will demonstrate civility, concern for the safety of persons and property, respect for University activities and for those who may disagree with their message, and will comply with University rules,” Penn State’s statement said, seemingly placing blame on protestors.
It was not immediately clear if any arrests had been made.
Some participants in the protest said that the event should not have been permitted, but since it was, they were going to make their voices heard.
“What made it important for me to be here is just being a biracial student on campus … making sure that my sister, my mother, my Black family have a safe place to come to whenever they come to visit me on campus,” Penn State student Isabelle Ems said. “It’s making sure that all of the BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and people of color) students on campus have a safe place to reside and go to class, because it’s completely ridiculous that students felt like they couldn’t come to campus today and they couldn’t go to class because the university not only allowed but funded white supremacist fascists to come on to campus.”
Ems believed the protestors were nonviolent. She was among those who said it appeared to be a McInnes supporter who deployed pepper spray into the crowd.
“On the protestors’ side, it was very peaceful. Nobody was touching anybody; nobody was doing anything wrong,” she said. “They came onto our campus trying to express freedom of speech. Well, we have just as much a right to express freedom of speech from our side.”
“They want to say what they want to say; we have a right to stand up and speak our part,” student Makayla Lewis added. “That’s what I believe we did today, very well. We stood together and made our mark very clearly.”
The controversial event —a “comedy show” called “Stand Back and Stand By” in reference to former President Donald Trump’s message to the Proud Boys during a 2020 presidential debate — has been the subject of protest and outrage for weeks. Its mere existence drew harsh criticism from community groups, including the State College Borough Council and Penn State administrators, although the university refused to initially cancel the event.
Before Oct. 17’s Borough Council meeting, concerned citizens took issue with the Proud Boys’ history of violence and hate speech. The organization was largely present at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, for example, and played a role in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol. Individually, McInnes, who claims to have distanced himself from the organization, was banned from platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram for promoting hate speech and extremist violence.
Penn State officials said earlier this month they were in an “unenviable position of sharing space with individuals whose views differ dramatically” from the values of the university, adding it would take reasonable precautions to protect the safety of those associated with these activities. However, citing First Amendment rights, the university said it could not initially intervene to prevent the event from occurring on campus.
Charles Dumas, the longtime civil rights activist, actor and Penn State professor emeritus of theatre, said he felt the university took the right approach in not outright prohibiting the event.
“They allowed free speech to operate and I’m supportive of that…,” Dumas said. “What I’m also supportive of is the fact that there were hundreds, if not a couple thousand people who showed up to also express their free speech, their opposition to these folks showing up.”
Dumas observed some of the protest before going to the HUB-Robeson Center, where the Student Programming Association was hosting “Together We Are,” an event to counter the McInnes and Stein appearance. He said that he’s against the idea of “let’s shut them down,” and that the university is a “marketplace of ideas,” citing his own experience of being turned away from a college campus in the 1960s when attempting to protest against racial discrimination.
“I’m proud of our students, the ones who came out [to protest on Monday night],” Dumas said. “I hope that it ignites a fire in them to get more active and more involved in what’s happening in their lives. I hope they go out and vote. I hope they protest as much as they want to for the things that concern them. I hope they become more involved in learning what the Proud Boys, fascist racists that they are, are all about.”
Uncensored America, a student-run organization, hosted the founder of the far-right Proud Boys, which is designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center as a hate group and recognized by the Anti-Defamation League as an extremist group with a violent agenda. The student-run University Park Allocation Committee independently approved a budget of more than $7,500 in student activity fee dollars to fund the event.
Lewis said she does not believe Penn State should be using student dollars for events that make people of color, like herself, feel unsafe.
“Being Black, I should have a right to feel safe on my campus,” she said. “If they are willingly paying a white supremacy group to come out here and speak, that does not make me feel safe. That does not make me want to be here. I should not feel this way if I’m going to school and paying to come here to get an education, and they should not be making other students, just like myself and my friends, feel this sort of way. It’s not right.”
In a statement following the event’s cancellation, Penn State President Neeli Bendapudi again criticized McInnes and Stein, the latter of whom she said raised tension on campus by agitating protestors. However, the new university president also placed some blame on those who protested the event.
“Tonight, Stein and McInnes will celebrate a victory for being canceled, when in actuality, they contributed to the very violence that compromised their ability to speak,” Bendapudi wrote. “Tonight, counter-protestors also will celebrate a victory that they forced the University to cancel this event, when in actuality, they have furthered the visibility of the very cause they oppose.”
To close her statement, Bendapudi urged community members to avoid thinking violent protests are a reliable method for restricting free speech or gaining publicity.
“These are not ideas that we can endorse as an institution of higher education,” she said. “We cannot laud academic freedom and then abandon the constitutional right to free expression which undergirds academic freedom. Over the coming weeks, let us reflect on the role we must all play in encouraging vigorous debate and also upholding the values we hold dear.”
