Advice to University Presidents: Admit you have a problem.
Commit to protecting free speech and sanctioning conduct that crosses the line. And do not submit to DEI.
Tuesday’s Congressional hearing was a disaster. During a time of skyrocketing campus antisemitism, three university presidents, one of whom has already resigned, struggled to defend freedom of speech on their campuses—probably because they had no practice.
My latest piece for Psychology Today is about how antisemitism is defeating safetyism on college campuses:
“For years, free speech advocates have complained about “safetyism” on campus—shielding students from discomfort at the expense of freedom of expression. Now that the speech is painful to Jews, history’s most convenient scapegoats, university administrators are declaring their commitment to freedom of speech.”
My advice to university presidents:
1. Admit that you have a problem.
The campus speech climate across the country is anything but free. And Harvard’s is worst of all. Harvard has the distinction of coming in dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s college free speech rankings—with a rating of “abysmal” and a score that had to be rounded up to zero.
A year ago, all Harvard undergraduates were required to participate in an online Title IX training during which they were taught that using non-preferred pronouns constitutes “abuse,” and that “cisheterosexism,” “sizeism,” and “fatphobia” perpetuate “violence.” (NB: Calling for the genocide of Jews was not on that list.)
In 2021, I wrote an essay for Sapir in which I created a composite account of the real campus experiences of some real Jewish students. I detailed how the themes embedded in Critical Race Theory (CRT) pave a path for students to become antisemitic. “Despite its laudable goal of opposing racism and white supremacy,” I wrote, “CRT relies on narratives of greed, appropriation, unmerited privilege, and hidden power — themes strikingly reminiscent of familiar anti-Jewish conspiracy theories.” (See this chart below from a Network Contagion Research Institute report I co-authored.)
From the article in Sapir:
The subtlety is that, instead of targeting Jews directly, the target of critical social justice is “whiteness.” But this does nothing to protect Jews. In 2018, when Hasidic Jews were victims of a wave of violent attacks — a precursor to another cluster of bloody attacks to come a year later — Mark Winston Griffith, the executive director of the Black Movement Center in Crown Heights, told The Forward that some black Americans see Judaism as “a form of almost hyper-whiteness.”
In the Critical Social Justice paradigm, race is the locus of power and success is a function of whiteness. Using that lens, the fact that American Jews have on average been successful can only be interpreted as the story of a once powerless minority group accepting an invitation into “conditional whiteness” rather than joining the “resistance” to dismantle it. And in the critical social justice paradigm, “Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.”
Overall, the Ivy League didn’t fare well in the FIRE rankings. Out of 248 colleges and universities, Penn was ranked second to last. Dartmouth came in at 240; Yale, 234; Columbia, 214; Cornell, 212; Princeton, 187. At number 69, Brown University was the only Ivy in the top half. Ivy League-adjacent MIT ranked in the bottom half. So it’s unsurprising that the university presidents had trouble clearly communicating about campus antisemitism and free speech during the hearing.
In October, Nadine Strossen and I published an article for the Free Press in which we argued that even antisemites have free speech rights worth defending, and that “only an emergency can justify repression” (to quote Jewish Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis). We also discussed the “context” that the university presidents so ineptly tried to invoke. “The Court has recognized several context-based categories of speech,” we wrote, “that do satisfy the emergency principle, including intentional incitement to imminent violence. In addition, speakers may not issue “true threats”—speech that directly targets specific individuals with hateful, violent rhetoric, intending to instill a reasonable fear that the targeted individuals will be subject to violence.”
Do pro-Hamas protests meet this standard? “Much of what we’ve witnessed on campuses over the past few weeks is not, in fact, speech, but conduct designed specifically to harass, intimidate, and terrorize Jews,” argues legal scholar Ilya Shapiro. Nadine and I concur.
Some campus events have even involved physical assault, including an episode caught on video at Harvard, where a targeted Israeli graduate student was menacingly encircled by protesters shouting “shame,” blocking his path with their bodies and keffiyehs, while repeatedly telling him to “exit.” The targeted student can be heard on video saying, ‘Don’t grab me,’ ‘don’t touch my neck,’ ‘you’re grabbing me,’ ‘stop touching me,’ and ‘I live here!’ An FBI report even indicates that he was physically assaulted.
But no assault is necessary to convey an unlawful threat, and “the speaker needn’t even intend to commit violence,” as we wrote in an article for Time. “If the speaker either intends to instill a reasonable fear of violence, or disregards a substantial risk that his expression would instill a reasonable fear, the harm is done. When threatened individuals experience such fear, they are deterred from exercising their free speech rights and even their right to freedom of movement.” This line between Constitutionally protected and unprotected speech already exists, and for many years, university presidents should have been asking whether this standard was being met on campus—not just for Jewish students and faculty.
When Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik, a representative from New York, asked each of the presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ codes of conduct. MIT President Sally Kornbluth explained that it could constitute harassment “if targeted at individuals, not making public statements.” Penn President Elizabeth Magill said “if the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment,” Harvard President Claudine Gay concurred. “It can be, depending on the context,” she said. “When it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation; that is actionable conduct and we do take action.”
These responses were infuriating to many observers—including Stefanik, who appeared to think the “conduct” to which these women referred was committing the act of genocide. She declared all three presidents’ answers “unacceptable… across the board.” But free speech advocates understood what the university presidents meant. As legal scholar Ilya Shapiro recently wrote, “sometimes ‘speech’ isn’t speech. Sometimes it rises to the level of conduct that prevents others from being able to live their lives. Right now we need people to discern the difference.”
The inability to communicate that difference was remarkable. “I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” McGill later claimed in an apology video that was followed by her resignation. “I want to be clear,” she said, “a call for genocide of Jewish people is threatening. Deeply so. It is intentionally meant to terrify a people who have been subjected to pogroms and hatred for centuries, and were the victims of mass genocide in the holocaust. In my view it would be harassment or intimidation. For decades, under multiple Penn presidents, and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the constitution and the law. … These policies need to be clarified and evaluated.”
Greg Lukianoff, President of FIRE, read this as “suggesting that Penn will rethink its commitment to free expression.” I’m not sure that’s what she meant. It seemed to me that rather than undermining a commitment to free speech, she was trying to clarify that calls for genocide might violate existing rules about harassment and intimidation, thereby crossing over from mere speech into the realm of conduct. (Now it’s not her problem.)
Harvard’s president Gay also issued an apology, along with what appeared to be a weak attempt to define calls for the genocide of Jews as “true threats.” “What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment,” she said, “was to return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community—threats to our Jewish students—have no place at Harvard and will never go unchallenged.”
But neither president’s post-hearing explanation helped much, especially since calls for “intifada” and eliminating Jews “from the river to the sea” have always gone “unchallenged.” As Lukianoff pointed out, the presidents were “shockingly incapable of explaining the deeper ideas behind a principled defense of free speech, and articulating why censorship makes so many things so much worse for minority viewpoints.” Plus, we all know how ridiculous it is for any one of these university presidents—let alone all three—to claim that their deeply illiberal and censorious campuses have in fact been bastions of liberal values and freedom of speech. Before they uttered word one about their deep commitment to freedom of speech, they should have admitted that such a commitment is entirely new. Everything they said about free speech was sheer hypocrisy.
The institutional blindness to antisemitism that pervades higher education is both a result of the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) paradigm—one that relies on a CRT lens—and a function of how antisemitism works. Antisemitism is a blinding bigotry. It blinds those who participate in it to their bigotry by using terms and concepts from the predominant moral concern of that era, and no matter what the issue, Jews are always painted as being evil and impure.
In the past, people who thought themselves on the “right side of history” persecuted Jews in the name of religion; then in the name of racial purity; now in the language of human rights and social justice. Now that racism is rightly considered morally repugnant, Jews and Israelis are falsely smeared as “Jewish supremacists,” “racists,” and bizarrely, after being the victims of a genocide perpetrated by Nazis, are called “white supremacists” and even “Nazis” by those who have succumbed to antisemitic propaganda.
“Jews, who have never been seen as white by those for whom being white is a moral good, are now seen as white by those for whom whiteness is an unmitigated evil.”
“Zionism is racism” was the work of the Soviets, who managed to get that nakedly antisemitic phrase into a United Nations Resolution in 1975. It was eventually rescinded in 1991, but the damage was done. Today, calling Israel an “apartheid state” and calling Jews “white, settler, colonizers” who are attempting a “genocide” is the antisemitic narrative of the day.
Another hallmark of antisemitism is that antisemites accuse Jews of whatever they, themselves, are doing. Nazis accused Jews of attempting global domination. Soviets accused Jews of killing their political rivals, and now Islamist terrorists accuse Jews of imperialism and genocide. Never mind that Hamas and other Islamist groups have openly admitted that their end-goal is a global caliphate. Never mind that they’ve been explicit about their intention to ethnically cleanse Israel of Jews “from the river to the sea” and then “globalize the intifada” and murder every remaining Jew. (“The Jew will hide behind a stone or tree, and the tree will say, `O Muslim! O servant of Allah! This is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.' Except Al-Gharqad, for it is a tree of the Jews.”)
Oh—and never mind that the Palestinian population has doubled twice since 1948.
As far as Jews and others who find the chants of “from the river to the sea” and calls to “globalize the intifada” legitimately threatening, the double standard is itself a form of antisemitism. As Bret Stephens recently wrote in the New York Times, “colleges and universities that for years have been notably censorious when it comes to free speech seem to have suddenly discovered its virtues only now, when the speech in question tends to be especially hurtful to Jews.”
2. Commit to protecting free speech and sanctioning conduct that crosses the line.
Nonetheless, as Stephens frequently warns, including Jews in the protections afforded by illiberal censorship is not the answer. For too long, under the DEI banner, administrators have fostered campus monocultures in which only certain views are tolerated. In these ideological “safe spaces,” in some cases it has become unsafe (and not merely metaphorically) to express the conviction that Israel has the right to exist as a sovereign Jewish state—in other words, to openly be a Zionist.
In 2016, students at the University of California at Irvine screened a film about Israeli soldiers. More than 50 members of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), the Muslim Student Union (MSU), the Black Student Union (BSU) and other groups chanted “Intifada, Intifada, long live the Intifada” and “all white people need to die,” while blocking students from entering the screening room, trying to push their way into the room to disrupt the screening, and then blocking the exits. Police were called to escort Jewish students from the room.
“The protesters were screaming hate in an angry way that made people fear their safety,” said a student who participated in a small counter-protest. “These same students are the ones saying that they’re triggered and feel unsafe on campus by words and ideas, but they are the ones actually contributing to a physically unsafe environment by hatefully protesting, physically intimidating, harassing and calling for the death of white people and Jews.”
Protests that substantially disrupt presentations are violations of free speech rights—both those of the speaker and the audience. At public colleges and universities and at the private ones that claim to offer free speech on campus, administrators should remove and punish protesters who materially interfere with events. When protesters who violate others’ campus free speech rights are not sanctioned, campuses become hostile to free speech.
This is how we arrived at a time where large segments believe that free speech is violence and violence is self-defense—as was the case at Berkeley in 2017 when Milo Yiannopoulos was scheduled to speak. Violent, destructive protests prevented his appearance, injured several people, and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars of property damage. Now Hamas supporters on campus claim that harassment and intimidation constitute free speech.
But they don’t.
In 2017, the UC Irvine chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine was finally sanctioned with disciplinary probation for two academic years for substantially disrupting another event at which five Israel Defense Force reservists came to speak. This year, several campuses, including Brandeis, Columbia, and schools in Florida, began to deactivate, ban, or suspend SJP and other campus groups associated with antisemitism for violating school policies. (Banning student groups must be for violating school policies, not the groups’ viewpoints.)
For behavior that does not violate rules for student groups and speech that does not constitute conduct in the strictest sense, but is associated with a reasonable assessment that Jews are being made to feel unsafe on campus, there is another existing legal route that does not require weakening free speech protections: Title VI of the Civil Rights Act provides that no person in the United States shall, on the ground of actual or perceived ancestry, ethnicity, religion, or national origin be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.
These institutions have well-known histories of denying freedom of speech to those whose expressions are disfavored. While defending freedom of speech is laudable, this sudden turnaround—the double standard—could be an example of antisemitic discrimination. For example, a Jewish professor at the University of Southern California is being investigated after making anti-Hamas comments to anti-Israel demonstrators at a protest on the USC campus as part of a global “Shut it Down for Palestine” event. Facing potential discipline for his speech “is both a violation of USC’s own promises of free speech and an outrageous, viewpoint-discriminatory double standard,” according to his lawyer, Samantha Harris. (No one who made anti-Israel comments is being investigated.)
Universities are required to prevent campus speech from becoming conduct that creates a hostile educational environment. Jewish students on campuses across the country are hiding in their rooms in order to avoid celebrations of rape, kidnapping, and attempted genocide of Jews, hearing antisemitic chants, and seeing signs glorifying Hamas terrorists. They now fear wearing Jewish symbols and religious paraphernalia. It is not unreasonable to ask whether these chants, rallies, and displays have created a hostile educational environment for Jews, and if not, what criteria must be met for that threshold to be crossed.
If the university presidents had grappled with that question in advance of the hearing, they might not have found themselves merely parroting First Amendment legalese.
3. Do not submit to pressure to deprioritize your educational mission.
Harvard’s mission is “to advance new ideas and promote enduring knowledge.” But the critical social justice ideology that underlies its campus “Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging” paradigm relies on logical tautologies, eschewing objectivity and reason, denigrating critical thinking, and promoting groupthink. It requires an illegitimate claim of “feeling unsafe” to silence certain views and people while allowing conduct that creates a hostile environment and makes people legitimately unsafe.
The tribal thinking that has replaced critical thinking on campus has resulted in a seemingly endless inventory of perceived indignities, offenses, and harms. Teaching students to be vigilant to “microaggressions” and other potential affronts makes them see hostility and malice even where none exists, while increasing the likelihood of using violence to shut down disfavored speech.
At a time when self-censorship is the norm rather than the exception, academic institutions must create conditions such that expressing disfavored views takes less courage. And at the same time, they must cultivate courage as an essential moral virtue required for truth-seeking and knowledge production.
My advice to university presidents: Acknowledge reality and admit that your campus has not done its job. Clarify your commitment to freedom of speech, including sanctioning those who violate others’ rights. Refuse to submit to the DEI paradigm that sees everyone as oppressed or oppressor while preventing cross-cultural connection, and sowing distrust.
And while you’re at it, teach your students about antisemitism—and about the contributions Jews and Judaism have made to the world. ◆
Instead of donating to your university, help the Sayeret Golani Brigade “Flying Tigers” IDF special forces reconnaissance unit. They are only $2500 away from reaching their fundraising goal.*
*Not a tax-deductible donation. This is not an official IDF fundraising effort. A former member of the brigade is in the U.S. and is purchasing additional gear for his brothers-in-arms.
In other news: I’ll be in Israel for three months and will be writing here more frequently beginning in mid-January—telling the stories of the people I meet. Click here for photos of Kibbutz Be’eri. I plan to meet with some residents and hear their stories.
More to come…
I appreciate the way you explained the situation, providing many examples and giving concrete suggestions. I hope that many colleges presidents read this essay!
Great piece! I look forward to your upcoming coverage.