COLONIE — The organizers of a free speech conference at Siena College insist they want Sunday's event to be civil and thoughtful. It's unclear if they'll get their wish.

The conference features several prominent and controversial figures from conservative and libertarian politics, including self-described political "dirty trickster" Roger Stone.

The weeks leading up to the Siena event have been marked by the kinds of controversies that have attended similar campus gatherings around the nation. Among the questions raised: Should there be limits on who can be invited to speak on campus?

In a recent interview, the presidents of the three conservative campus organizations behind the event made it clear that they do not want it to devolve into a chaotic free-for-all, much less the sort of rioting prompted by recent visits from alt-right figures to the University of California's Berkeley campus.

“The goal of the conference is to educate students on free speech, and how it affects them and how important it is to their country,” said Siena junior Antonio Bianchi, president of Turning Point Siena.

Bianchi organized the event along with Alec Barkett, president of Young Americans for Liberty's Siena College chapter, and Michael Bove, president of Siena’s College Republicans.

All said they focused on inviting speakers who could talk about free speech from several angles and help balance what they saw a liberal tilt amongst past speakers on campus.

Stone is slated to discuss free speech on social media. The longtime political adviser, lobbyist and author was recently banned from Twitter. Special Counsel Robert Mueller has been investigating Stone's contacts with Wikileaks as party of the ongoing probe into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential race, according to numerous recent reports.

James O’Keefe, who will talk about free speech in the media, leads a Mamaroneck-based nonprofit called Project Veritas. The conservative provocateur has made his career attempting to expose what he describes as liberal media bias and left-wing hypocrisy, frequently through undercover videos.

The group has been denounced for its deceptions. Last fall, a Project Veritas operative named Jamie Phillips approached the Washington Post with her account of an affair with Republican U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore of Alabama, whose campaign was reeling from multiple allegations of his relations with underaged girls. Phillips told the Post — which had broken the initial story about Moore's relations with underage girls — that he had impregnated her when she was a teenager.

The Post exposed her ruse in a story that included a video of its reporter confronting Phillips about her deception.

Sunday's other speakers include Christian Ragosta, a field coordinator for the National Rifle Association; Austin Petersen, a libertarian political candidate; Nico Perrino, communications director for the Foundation for Individuals Rights in Education; and Kassy Dillon, founder of the Lone Conservative website.

Payments to the speakers are being paid for with the student activity fees. It is open only to people with a valid Siena ID.

There will be a protest outside the conference, and students and professors are planning on attending to ask the speakers hard questions, said Jim LaValle, president of the Siena Democrats club. He said he had encouraged those both inside and outside the conference not to be disruptive.

“Use your First Amendment rights just as they’re using it — but don’t put anything across the line, don’t incite anything,” he said.

Bianchi said they had reached out to other student organizations to invite them to take part in the event, but none agreed.

LaValle, however, said no one had reached out to his group.

“Why is this now just a platform for conservative speakers and pundits who have a checkered and marked history of racist and inflammatory comments?” he said. “Why were we never provided the opportunity to provide a different point of view?”

And there has been pushback from faculty, as well. Jenn McErlean, a philosophy professor, resigned from a committee that had been formed to develop methods of civil discourse on campus because she did not want to work with students like Bianchi, according to an email forwarded to the Times Union.

Roy Gutterman, director at the Tully Center for Free Speech at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, said that in the current politically charged national climate, college campuses are a precarious place for free speech.

“There’s not a lot of tolerance,” he said.

There is also a belief in some conservative circles that right-leaning students’ right to speak is more likely to be curtailed in the name of "political correctness."

“There’s some validity behind that,” Gutterman said. “When you see people who believe they are being censored or punished it tends to be people on the political right, and that seems to be just how college campuses have evolved.”

These issues were the subject of two days of discussion in "Shall Make No Law: An Exploration of Current First Amendment Issues on College Campuses," a two-day session hosted Wednesday and Thursday by the state University at Albany, and organized by the office of the SUNY system's General Counsel. One panel discussion was titled "Campus Unrest — The New Normal?"

At Siena, Bianchi, Barkett and Bove stressed that the school’s administration has been supportive since they began planning the event early last semester. The pushback, they said, has come from faculty.

“And we had to clarify to them: Even if you don’t like some of the people who are coming to this conference, neither do we,” Bianchi said. “We don’t agree with everything that people at this conference have done or said.”

Siena College President Brother F. Ed Coughlin said conferences and other events like this are a balancing act.

“You’re always trying to navigate that tension," he said. " ... How do you respect academic freedom and the individual’s right to have a conference, to talk to individuals they want to talk to — individuals who in different ways, because of their reputation, have values that are very much opposed to or stand in contrast to the values of the college?”

Gutterman, who also teaches journalism and media ethics at Syracuse, said that private colleges such as Siena have much more latitude in deciding how to govern free speech issues on campus than public universities do.

“I think you can’t have a college education without free speech,” he said. “Just because someone brings a speaker to campus doesn’t mean you believe in what they say.”