Before Condoleezza Rice spoke to Claremont McKenna students last week, she also spoke at a private CMC event in Los Angeles. The event was a luncheon at the Biltmore Hotel hosted by the Res Publica Society, which consists of CMC’s most generous donors. About 500 Res Publica members, students, and other invited guests attended. Associate Vice President for Public Affairs and Communications Max Benavidez told the Port Side, “It was a private, donor, invitation-only event.”
Pitzer Professor Dan Segal received an invitation and paid $50 to attend. Prof. Segal was involved in the “Unwelcoming Condoleezza Rice” protest that took place later that day. According to his blog, he went to the lunch event to “circulate, as widely as possible, criticisms of Rice.” He did this by distributing information cards to event attendees. During the event, Prof. Segal tweeted ”CMC calls hotel security to stop free speech” and “LA PD called.”
Pitzer Professor Dan Segal, Director of the Munroe Center for Social Inquiry (Photo courtesy of Pitzer Collge)
So what happened?
Indeed, LAPD officers showed up at the private event. CMC officials said that they do not believe that someone from CMC made the call, and CMC officials requested that hotel security ask the LAPD officers to leave. Prof. Segal was not arrested, but he was asked to stop distributing the cards.
Mr. Benavidez summarizes the situation, “It’s my understanding that CMC requested to hotel security that they ask the LAPD to leave, and they would handle the situation as long as Prof. Segal would stop distributing his flyers to audience members in the lobby. Prof. Segal did stop distributing his flyers and that was the end of the matter.”
On Prof. Segal’s blog, he writes that it was “a small oddity, if not a wonder” that he is on the Res Publica invite list and received an invitation to the Rice event. Prof. Segal does have a long-standing relationship with CMC. He told the Port Side that his two children attended the Children’s School many years ago when it was affiliated with Scripps College. When the school was almost shut down, Prof. Segal was involved in the campaign to save it which resulted in its relocation to Claremont McKenna. He has been a professor at Pitzer for 26 years and was involved in the protest of Karl Rove’s Athenaeum talk in 2008.
During the reception at the beginning of the luncheon, Prof. Segal introduced himself to other attendees and handed out information cards describing Rice’s “crimes against democracy and…crimes against humanity.” According to Claremont McKenna Professor Audrey Bilger, Prof. Segal “was being very respectful, introducing himself to people and handing them an information card. He was not being disruptive.”
The card that Prof. Segal distributed to lunch attendees. (Click to enlarge)
Prof. Segal explained on his blog, “When I had done this just a small number of times, a large and muscular man, wearing an ear device and a small dangling microphone, appeared next to me, and promptly told me that I could not do what I was doing.” He continued to distribute the cards. Soon after, Prof. Segal heard the man speak “into his microphone and [say], ‘call the LAPD; code 2.’” Prof. Bilger also heard the security person call LAPD, and told the Port Side that she did not want Prof. Segal to be arrested. She went to inform everyone she thought could deescalate the situation, including CMC Associate Vice President for Development Steve Siegel.
On his blog, Prof. Segal writes, “During the entire time, only one person, a CMC faculty member, addressed the gentlemen with ear devices, and said it was wrong of them to threaten me with arrest for merely distributing a printed card.” Prof. Segal identified that person to the Port Side as Prof. Bilger. Prof. Bilger told the Port Side that she approached the security person and said, “This man is my colleague. He is not disturbing me.”
When he entered the dining room, Prof. Segal resumed distributing the cards and was again approached by a security person, this time, he says, accompanied by a CMC employee. Prof. Segal told the Port Side, “Pretty quickly, one of the hotel security persons (who had approached me repeatedly) came over with Steven Siegal [sic] and they both asked me to step outside, and I refused and went back over to my seat and sat down.” Prof. Segal later clarified that the person with an ear piece who presented himself as hotel security may not have been a representative of the hotel, but part of Rice’s security detail. The Port Side has been unable to confirm.
“Then the two of them rapid fire kept asking me to step outside, threatened to have me removed, threatened to have LAPD come in and arrest me, and one of them (I do not recall which of them) physically grabbed my remaining info cards,” Prof. Segal told the Port Side. “I told them that taking the cards would constitute theft, as well as a violation of my civil rights and the one who had grabbed the cards released them. I cannot say exactly what Steve [Siegel] did/said as distinct from the hotel person; they were together.”
Mr. Siegel recalls a different version of events. He told the Port Side that he arrived at the Biltmore after the LAPD had been called, and that a guest informed him of Prof. Segal’s actions. Mr. Siegel said he did not want anyone to be arrested.
Who called the LAPD? “I truly don’t know,” said Mr. Siegel. Mr. Benavidez told the Port Side, “As far as I know, no one from CMC called the LAPD. The LAPD was probably called by hotel security or hotel management.”
Another of Prof. Segal's tweets about the event.
Biltmore Hotel Director of Security Arthur Smith refused to comment, and the LAPD refused to release the identity of the caller to the Port Side. Mr. Siegel says he did see LAPD officers arrive to the scene, but they stayed in the reception hall and did not enter the dining room. Prof. Bilger told the Port Side that she saw two LAPD officers come toward the reception area.
According to Mr. Siegel, he approached Prof. Segal alone and asked him to stop handing out the information cards. “I asked him if he’d join me in the back of the room so we could talk,” Mr. Siegel said. Prof. Segal declined.
“Nobody came with me and at that time nobody grabbed his cards. I’m not saying that someone didn’t try before or after, but it wasn’t me and there was certainly no one with me,” Mr. Siegel told the Port Side. “My focus was on making sure that no one got arrested.”
If that was Mr. Siegel’s intention, it was not communicated to Prof. Segal. “The threats to have me removed and have me arrested continued until the event was over, and CMC employees participated in those threats,” Prof. Segal told the Port Side.
“CMC on every possible ground was not interested in arresting Professor Segal,” Mr. Benavidez told the Port Side. ”We just wanted an event that ran smoothly and allowed Secretary Rice to make her remarks and for our invited guests to hear what she had to say.”
Later, Prof. Segal tweeted, “Rice called on me to ask q, but microphone was not brought to me. Why?”
According to Prof. Segal, he sat at his assigned seat and listened to Rice’s talk. When she took questions, he raised his hand. At one point he believed that Rice called on him, and he stood up to ask his question. However, the student carrying the microphone, Ath Fellow Clare Riva ’13, gave it to another person in his vicinity.
Similar to Athenaeum events, preference for questions was given to students and Res Publica donors. But unlike Ath events, Rice attempted to call on individuals in the audience instead of letting the Ath Fellows choose the questioners. The person who received the microphone when Prof. Segal had stood up was not a student, but it is unclear whether he or she was a donor.
Riva told the Port Side, “It was very unclear who specifically she had called on in that area because there were multiple people, including Professor Segal, with their hands raised. I brought the mic to the person who was in the front of the section she had indicated and to me seemed like the person she picked out and was also closest to me to minimize downtime between questions.”
The Biltmore Hotel, where the event was held. (Photo courtesy of hotelsoftherichandfamous.com)
Prof. Segal told the Port Side that some lunch attendees attempted to ensure that he did not receive the microphone. “I stood up to accept the microphone that was being conveyed by a CMC student and, at the same time, some attendees in the table in front of me – to whom I had distributed information cards – audibly called out ‘no, no’ and ‘not him’ and ‘don’t give it to him.’ But the microphone never got particularly close to me; it was handed to someone else several tables away from me,” Prof. Segal explained. Riva said she did not hear these attendees’ objections.
Mr. Siegel confirmed that it was difficult to tell if Rice intended to answer Prof. Segal’s question, as there were quite a few people with hands raised. Mr. Benavidez agreed, saying “It is not clear where exactly she was pointing to.”
Prof. Segal told the Port Side that he planned to ask Rice “whether she accepted responsibility for conveying the authorization to torture fellow human beings and accepted responsibility for giving the US and global publics false intelligence on Iraq, to gain support for the U.S. invasion.”
When Prof. Segal sat down, he asked his table companions if they thought Rice had called on him. Of the three people he asked, Prof. Segal said “all agreed Rice had called on me, and one of them said they thought it must have been purposeful.” Prof. Segal did not want to release the names of his dining companions without their consent, so the Port Side has been unable to reach them for comment.
Prof. Segal told the Port Side that as he was leaving the hotel, he approached one of the security people who had threatened to arrest him. “I sought to shake their hands and thank them for not having me arrested (with some irony),” he told the Port Side. The man, who was still wearing an ear piece, then told Prof. Segal, “[Dr. Rice] wants to answer your question.” According to Prof. Segal, the man explained “that Rice had seen that I had not been able to ask my question and had asked someone about it, and had responded – I was told – that she would have liked the chance to respond to what I would have asked.”
“I of course said I would be happy to pose my question to her and he responded that if I were outside the gym in the evening, he would come out and get me and I’d have the chance to ask my question. That, not at all surprisingly, never happened,” Prof. Segal explained.
While it is unclear who called the police and if Rice had intended to answer Prof. Segal’s question, Claremont McKenna officials did request that Prof. Segal stop handing out the information cards.
Mr. Siegel refused to explain why he wanted Prof. Segal to stop handing out the information cards. “I’ll talk to him about that,” he told the Port Side.
After he returned to Claremont, Prof. Segal emailed Mr. Siegel and “invited him to have coffee with me, at my expense, and he has not responded to me at all.” Prof. Segal also requested a meeting with President Gann to discuss the event, but she declined.
The Res Publica luncheon was a private event held on private property, and CMC may have been legally entitled to have Prof. Segal arrested. But we must remember that colleges believe themselves to hold a special place in our society, and CMC is no exception. CMC’s Guide to Student Life states that the college has “a profound commitment to the free expression and testing of ideas – whether or not those ideas are controversial or unpopular – for such freedoms are essential to the search for truth, the central purpose of any institution of higher learning.” While Prof. Segal claims that CMC employees threatened to arrest him, CMC did the right thing in preventing an arrest. Yet, CMC officials should never have objected to Prof. Segal non-disruptively distributing information about Rice in the first place.
The article quotes CMC Associate Vice President Max Benavidez as saying that once I was asked (via the threat to arrest me) to stop circulating cards documenting Rice’s crimes against democracy and crimes against humanity that I did so.
This is not true. I visibly and flagrantly persisted in circulating the information cards, until I left the event at its very end.
To suggest that I would have been complicit in the event’s repression of dissenting speech (by my ceasing to hand out the information cards) is to suggest that I am someone who would be complicit in thwarting and perverting democracy.
This is a terrible attack on my integrity and my love of democracy.
– Daniel Segal
“This is a terrible attack on my integrity and my love of democracy.”
I think you meant: “It’s a terrible attack on my liberal street cred and my sense of self-importance.”
I think the issue that everyone is forgetting here is that while Segal certainly has a right to free speech, he has also violated the #1 rule of common courtesy and respecting the colleges.
CMC as well as the other colleges in the consortium take significant pains to secure the attendance of famous and influential speakers. If I remember correctly, a similar (though much more significant) event occur when Karl Rove came to speak at CMC. While the students (and Segal) are entitled to voicing their opinions, it is remarkably discourteous to show disrespect to anyone who comes and if such actions continue, the colleges will have difficulty securing further speakers.
One of the reasons that the colleges are so good at turning out happy, knowledgeable, and successful students is that they have the opportunity to meet and interact with people who have risen very high in the world. Being able to meet with and listen to these people is a selling point of the colleges, and if people like Segal continue to disrespect our speakers, they will no longer wish to grace us with their attendance.
I fully acknowledge Segal’s right to free speech, but what he did was a major disrespect to the institution and the speaker they worked so hard to procure, so they had full right to ask him to keep his thoughts (however right or wrong they may be) to himself. What Segal did was among the greatest of disrespectful acts not only to the consortium, but to the rules of common courtesy.
TLDR: Show due respect to speakers (whether you are a student or a professor. Hell, this rule applies in life. Be respectful, be courteous) so that the colleges can continue exposing the students to these golden opportunities.
PS: Kudos to the Charles Johnson comparison
And to answer the question posed in the title: No. Prof. Segal, by his own admission, was being a pain in the ass at a private event on private property. Just cause he paid his $50 bucks doesn’t mean he’s guaranteed a question, nor does it mean he has carte blanche in his actions. I pay my $50 to see a baseball game, doesn’t mean security cant toss me out if I’m bothering people.
Prof. Segal – you’re basically a liberal version of Charles Johnson, and I mean that in the worst way possible.
Oh damn, he played the Charles Johnson card! That’s like the royal flush of forum arguments these days
.