What follows are examples of efforts to quell commentary at both public and private university campuses throughout North Carolina.

2009: The speaker

Shattered glass and pepper spray polluted the scene of a UNC-Chapel Hill protest that shut down a 2009 speech from former U.S. Rep Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., who opposes illegal immigration.

In a wild altercation with police, protesters yelled profanities, chanted over Tancredo, and even blocked him from view with a large banner held across the stage.

Demonstrators outside the lecture hall pushed to breach the overflowing room. Police cleared the crowd using pepper spray and taser threats. One protester shattered a window, forcing Tancredo from the room.

The speaker was invited back in 2010, and he made a 90-minute speech without violent disruption. But nearly 100 students staged a silent walkout a few minutes into the talk.

2015: The professor

In 2015, Altha Cravey, a geography professor at N.C. State University with a history of liberal activism, was told by campus police to remove a controversial protest sign from her office window.

Law enforcers defended the action based on a university policy that mandates what can and can’t be posted around campus. However, officials later conceded that the policy was taken too far and shouldn’t have been applied to Cravey’s case.

2016: The Ben Shapiro incident

Another UNC-Chapel Hill incident in 2016 saw conservative author and editor Ben Shapiro face protest from Black Lives Matter and LGBT student groups during his speech. Protesters stood up and silently walked out of the meeting just five minutes into Shapiro’s talk on “the Left’s obsession with race.” Conservative audience members jeered as the other students left the room.

Chapel Hill’s Young Republicans group, who sponsored the event, later argued that heckling the other side was justifiable due to the Left’s lack of tolerance.

“If [protesters] want to talk with us in a respectful tone, we’re open to that. If they don’t want to do that, we’re just going to yell right back,” Frank Pray, a Republican group leader, told Carolina Journal.

2016: The Board of Governors and President Spellings

Disruptive protests spiraled out of control in 2016 after the UNC Board of Governors elected former U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings president of the UNC system.

After firing UNC President Tom Ross, a Democrat, the board hired Spellings, a Republican, to replace him. Critics said the Board of Governors trampled normal procedures when it removed Ross. Then-board Chairman John Fennebresque, who orchestrated Ross’ firing without the input of the full board, resigned his post immediately after Spellings’ election.

The months following were filled with strife, which emanated from students and faculty members.

During one meeting in early 2016, a protest turned violent when students erupted during board proceedings. Protesters swarmed the board’s conference room table, chanting, shouting, and banging the gavel until they were removed forcibly by police. Four students were arrested. One was charged with assault against a law enforcer.

The altercation followed a Dec. 2015 faculty protest during which a group of professors began shouting demands during a board meeting. Those protesters were escorted from the room peacefully by law enforcers.

Students and faculty members claimed the board violated their right to protest, but the state’s Open Meetings Laws stipulate that — while individuals have the right to demonstrate in silence during public meetings — disrupting proceedings is prohibited.

2017: Private universities and the Shannon Gilreath incident

The First Amendment doesn’t govern private colleges and universities, making it tough for professors and students to tout unpopular views.

Shannon Gilreath, a professor of law and of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Wake Forest University, came under fire in January 2017 for penning a highly controversial op-ed published by the Washington Blade, a national LGBT news source.

“Europe’s Islam problem and U.S. immigration policy” called Islam a threat to LGBT rights and stated that the gay community “must not risk an open door to an ideology that imperils our most cherished values — and our lives.”

Outrage followed.

Gilreath, who is a self-professed radical liberal, received hundreds of letters from members of the public, some of which contained death threats.

On campus, the pushback was less extreme.

On-campus protesters called Gilreath racist. Two faculty members from the women’s studies department wrote an op-ed dubbing him an Islamophobe.

University administrators made no attempt to shut him up or stifle his views.

Anti-intellectualism reigned, Gilreath told CJ, stating that protests were a bandwagon faculty effort to enrage students without giving them context for his philosophies.

“I am well known as a leftist. … In my case in particular, I thought it was extraordinarily unintelligent that faculty members would take a few hundred words of a newspaper op-ed as the universe of my work.”

Gilreath has written many controversial articles, including one that called the Roman Catholic church a terrorist organization. No one has ever ripped into him about that, he said.

“There is such a demand for orthodoxy, it seems, on the Left,” he said. “Even though I’m predictably progressive on most issues, when I dared to step out of bounds, from their perspective I was immediately a pariah.”

Tenure provides security for professors at private colleges, but students have far fewer speech protections. Additionally, most students who are educated from a polarized viewpoint don’t understand the importance of respectful debate, he said.

“When you put that sort of lid on discourse, you create a dangerous environment where [the] most extreme elements of both Left and Right are the only elements in the discussion. And that’s not good for anybody. It’s certainly not good for democracy.”