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At Chapel Hill, the glow of winning the 2009 NCAA basketball championship still radiates, and the university can understandably puff with pride. Until Tuesday, that is, when UNC’s reputation was badly tarnished.

That’s when a bunch of student rabble-rousers muzzled a controversial speaker and thus trampled the principle of free speech.

Here’s what happened: Tom Tancredo, a former Republican presidential candidate and former congressman from Colorado, was scheduled to speak at UNC’s Bingham Hall.

Tancredo is a fierce opponent of illegal immigration. So fierce, in fact, that when he was in Congress, he asked federal immigration officials to raid a Capitol Hill news conference being held by Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill.

Durbin was sponsoring a bill helpful to immigrants. Tancredo told immigration officials that illegal immigrants would be present at Durbin’s news conference and should be arrested on the spot.

The immigration service did not comply. Three immigrants did attend the news conference. All were legal. 

Durbin was furious. He accused Tancredo of using tactics employed by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy during the “Red Scare” of the 1950s.  Borrowing a phrase used against the demagogic McCarthy, Durbin said: “Have you no shame, congressman?”

The above episode happened in 2007, and Tancredo is still on his anti-immigrant crusade. His failed presidential campaign last year — his approval rating never rose above single digits — centered on anti-

immigration.

That fit the agenda of a right-wing UNC group called Youth for Western Civilization, which invited Tancredo to speak on campus. The group opposes immigration, affirmative action and multiculturalism.

Tancredo’s appearance was acceptable, because universities are supposed to be forums for the free exchange of ideas — including repugnant and unpopular ideas.

But on Tuesday afternoon, several hundred protesters marched into Bingham Hall. Screaming profanities, the protesters were determined to prevent the speech.

Tancredo’s speech, which barely got started, focused on his opposition to in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.

Then things got violent. One protester shattered a window, two others marched across the stage with a huge banner thrust in front of Tancredo. The banner said: “No dialogue with hate.” (One wonders who the real haters were.) 

Police stopped the speech and escorted Tancredo away. Police then used pepper spray to quell the protests and empty a hallway. Police also threatened to use a Taser against the demonstrators. (Police are now investigating these methods.)

Protesters reassembled outside, shouting: “We shut him down; no racists in our town.” And also: “Yes, racists, we will fight, we know where you sleep at night.”

The event was not entirely one-sided. Many in the audience had come to hear Tancredo speak, even though they disagreed with him. Lizette Lopez, a UNC junior and vice president of the Carolina Hispanic Association, told The News & Observer of Raleigh: “We are the children of immigrants, and this concerns us. So we would at least like to hear what he has to say if you want to hear what we have to say.”

Tancredo later told the Raleigh newspaper that this was the first time he’d ever been silenced by protesters on a college campus, including American University where there were 400 protesters. Chancellor Holden Thorp called Tancredo to apologize for the students’ behavior.

This was not the first time the Chapel Hill campus has been embroiled in a free-speech rumpus.

In 1963, the N.C. General Assembly passed the controversial Speaker Ban Law forbidding communists from speaking on state-funded campuses. The law clearly violated the U.S. Constitution’s free-speech guarantee, but benighted legislators didn’t seem to care. 

In 1968, a UNC student group invited Herbert Aptheker and Frank Wilkinson to speak on campus. To dramatize the idiocy of the law, Aptheker, an avowed communist, was forced to speak to the crowd over a wall separating the campus from the street. The Speaker Ban Law was declared illegal in 1968.

Attempts to muzzle free speech are provoked by left-wingers (the Tancredo episode) and right-wingers (enactment of the Speaker Ban Law). Both sides are woefully narrow-minded. The point is not whether one agrees with a speaker’s views but instead believes in his right to express them.

 Rosemary Roberts writes a column on alternate Fridays. E-mail: rmroberts@triad.rr.com.