Earlier this year, black conservative writer Jason Riley received an invitation from Virginia Tech to speak to the business school. Then, weirdly, about a week later, he received another email, this time saying the school was uninviting him. The reason was its fear that a talk by Riley, who has controversial views on race, would spark protests.
That reversal sparked such a backlash that the school ultimately re-invited Riley.
At the time, in trying to explain its flip flop (and what many saw as caving to political correctness), Virginia Tech’s business school issued a statement saying Riley had never been invited to speak. Then, after Riley published the invitation letter as proof, the school declared that one of its professors had issued an unauthorized invitation without university officials’ knowledge. That explanation was widely mocked and not given much credence. How is it possible that an email would go out inviting someone to speak and the top administrators wouldn’t be aware of it?
We reviewed hundreds of pages of email correspondence among seniors leaders at the school from the period in question—mid April through early May— to get some insight into the conversation behind the scenes . And after sifting through those exchanges, it’s possible that administrators were telling the truth. The emails show the confusion and debate playing out among the key players.
The emails show that one professor may have sent out the invite to Riley without getting the sign-off from the other members of the committee that oversees the outside-speaker program. The back and forth also suggests that the professor, Doug Patterson, may have tried to cover his tracks when the school started to get nervous about hosting Riley. Patterson did not return Heat Street’s repeated requests for an interview.
On April 19, Patterson, who is the director of the program that hosts speakers on freedom and capitalism, tells his colleagues in an email that “unless there is an objection,” he will invite Riley to speak in the fall.
Later that day, before he hears back, he sends Riley an email that includes this sentence: “My purpose in writing is to invite you to give the fall 2016 lecture here in Blacksburg.”
The next day, Vijay Singal, head of the finance department and also a member of the outside-speaker committee, finally responds to Patterson’s email. He explicitly tells him: “Please don’t invite anyone until you hear from the committee.”
“Agreed,” Patterson writes back to Singal later that day. “At this point all I have done is ask him if he had an interest in giving the lecture. He replied that he did. That is where things stand.”
Patterson, meanwhile, continues to correspond with Riley, emails show, offering two potential dates and discussing Riley’s requested payment, adding that until the department head approves the honorarium, “I cannot formally confirm the invitation to speak.”
The committee, apparently still thinking that Riley hasn’t been invited, continues to sour on him as a potential speaker. “After googling Jason Riley and race and read[ing] a couple of his articles, I think this would be a bad choice for the next speaker,” finance professor Art Keown, another committee member, wrote on April 21.
It’s unclear how the rest of the discussion goes down off-email, but on April 29, Patterson writes to Riley, retracting the invitation to have him speak at the BB&T Distinguished Lecture. “When I told the department head that I wanted to invite you he didn’t say much one way or another,” Patterson wrote to Riley, who is also a fellow at the Manhattan Institute an author of a book on how liberal policies have hurt black communities. “Later, he learned that you have written about race issues in the WSJ. He and others in my department are worried about more protests from the looney left if you were to give the lecture.”
Heat Street’s requests for interviews to all of the key players at Virginia Tech were denied or went unanswered. In response to our request to speak to them directly, a university spokesperson said, “We have no further information to share at this time.”
After National Review broke news of Riley’s disinvitation on May 2, the head of the business school, relying on Singal’s earlier email, writes in an open letter to the campus that “no invitation was extended to Jason Riley.” In response, Riley tweets a copy of the letter inviting him.
Here's the invitation to speak @virginia_tech says was never extended to me. @WSJopinion @ManhattanInst @FoxNews pic.twitter.com/mTjJUvkDAG
— Jason Riley (@jasonrileywsj) May 4, 2016
In a recent interview, Riley told Heat Street that he hasn’t corresponded with Patterson since the disinvitation and has no knowledge of what was happening behind the scenes, but the initial note included stated an explicit invitation.
“I don’t know if Professor Patterson had the right to invite me to speak,” Riley says. “All I know is that he did, and then after inviting me, disinvited me. I also know that the school led people to believe that I had never been invited in the first place. They made me out to look like a liar, and that is why I produced the email originally sent to me, so that everyone else could read it and determine whether a reasonable person could determine whether it was an invitation or not.”
In the days after news broke of the disinvitation, Singal and Robert Sumichrast, head of the business school, write in emails of their frustration with Patterson, especially regarding the disinvitation letter. Singal writes to Sumichrast: “I am quite shocked by it and several parts are not true.”
In a May 4 email exchange, Sumichrast writes that “what Doug told me… is directly contradicted by the copy of his letter” and that “Doug was not being truthful in what he told you and me.” After he realized he’d “been misled,” Sumichrast said he “would now apologize and invite Riley.”
“What a mess!” Singal responded.
— Jillian Kay Melchior writes for Heat Street and is a fellow for the Independent Women’s Forum and the Steamboat Institute.
