2016 in review: Social and political issues touched a nerve at UCI
Milo Yiannopoulos, left, an editor for conservative website Breitbart.com, makes his entrance with a man in a Donald Trump mask during an event in June presented by the College Republicans at UC Irvine.
Issues concerning free speech, race and the presidential election ignited political passions around the country this year, and UC Irvine was right in the middle of it.
The club College Republicans at UCI met with protests when it organized a June on-campus event featuring gay conservative speaker Milo Yiannopoulos.
Yiannopoulos, an editor for conservative website Breitbart.com, showed up wearing a sleeveless police uniform and offered his critiques to an audience of 200 on issues such as racial profiling, which he said “saves lives,” and white privilege, which he believes “doesn’t exist.”
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Members of the College Republicans handed out pacifiers to dozens of students protesting the visit, signifying what a club member called the infantile nature of political correctness.
A barricade stood between the hundreds of people lined up to attend the event in a campus lecture hall and the protesters, who held signs with messages such as “Free speech [does not equal] hate speech.”
Pushing and shoving broke out between some protesters and Yiannopoulos supporters.
Shortly after Yiannopoulos’ visit, the university revoked the College Republicans’ room-booking privileges, citing a policy violation related to the private security hired to protect the speaker.
The restriction, originally set to last until the spring quarter of 2017, eventually was lifted because the policy the club violated was “a little less than clear on paper,” UCI Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Thomas Parham said in October.
The College Republicans regained their booking privileges in time to present Yiannopoulos’ return to UCI for a Halloween event where the club encouraged guests to wear their “most hilarious, most offensive, most culturally ‘appropriative’ costume.”
Hundreds of students opposed to the event signed an online petition that stated Yiannopoulos’ June visit “perpetuated violence against people of color,” and they asked Parham to call off the Halloween gathering.
Parham told the Daily Pilot that as a public institution, UCI is committed to upholding constitutionally protected rights of free speech and would allow the event to go on.
However, he said, “while we recognize the right of free speech, what we will not be neutral about is when we see the humanity of our university assaulted by narrative that we think is vulgar and inappropriate. That we will speak out on.”
Yiannopoulos’ October appearance — which rallied support for Republican Donald Trump’s presidential campaign — drew the UCI Police Department and student affairs staff before, during and shortly after the event. But there was no protest.
Upon Trump’s election the night of Nov. 8, hundreds of students marched on campus chanting “Dump Trump.”
The 90-minute march was one of several similar demonstrations at University of California campuses around the state.
Earlier this year, tensions arose between the UCI Police Department and the Black Student Union after the student group sent a letter to UCI administrators demanding that the department be dismantled because it wasn’t adhering to the concerns of black students about law enforcement’s treatment of African Americans.
University officials said they had no plans to abolish the police force but would encourage dialogue with the students.
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Alex Chan, alexandra.chan@latimes.com
Twitter: @AlexandraChan10
