« Presidential Quo Warranto | Main | Public Statement of Israel Research Universities Presidents Regarding American Universities Presidents’ Statements in Congressional Hearings »
Friday, December 08, 2023
A mess of stuff on campus speech
A mess of items today that reflect different pieces of what I have been trying to put together this week.
1) Popehat began his Camp One defense by attacking the premise of the committee hearing:
A more realistic interpretation is that the hearing was a crass show trial primarily intended to convey that a wide variety of dissenting speech about Israel is inherently antisemitic, that American colleges are shitholes of evil liberalism, and that Democrats suck. Since Democrats do suck, they mostly cooperated. [citing statements by Pennsylvania Governor and potential 2028 presidential candidate Josh Shapiro].
As if to prove White's point, Doug Emhoff at the National Menorah Lighting took aim: "Seeing the presidents of some of our most elite universities literally unable to denounce calling for the genocide of Jews as antisemitic — that lack of moral clarity is simply unacceptable." Except Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth did not fail to denounce calls for genocide as antisemitic. No one asked whether calls for genocide or "river to sea" are antisemitic; Stefanik asked whether those statements constitute protected speech and they gave the correct answer of "it depends on context," because it does. In fact, they did at points condemn the message, just without expressing intent to sanction the speech where it remained protected.
2) David Bernstein said on Twitter (I cannot find the link) that the problem is not universities' failure to stop hate speech but their failure to enforce existing content-neutral campus regulations. The comments of the MIT student in the video Steve links to (and of other students who spoke outside the hearing) confirms that; universities can and should proscribe and sanction much of what she describes, although not because the speech is antisemitic. Had the hearing focused on those university failures, it would have played very differently. Of course that was never the point. Popehat again: "many people bought it, and now it’s being used as part of the culture war against higher education, and too many of you fucking fell for it."
3)Eugene Volokh emphasizes an often-overlooked value of speech: Know what people are thinking:
No-one likes rude awakenings, bitter lessons, and situations with which one is not quite sure how to cope. But they are tremendously useful. Many of us have indeed been rudely awakened to the magnitude of hostility in many American universities to Israel, Israelis, and Jews. But that's not because there has been a surge of such hostility: It's because the existing hostility has revealed itself.
Thanks to the freedom of speech, we have a better sense now than before of who our enemies are, and who our friends are. We have a better sense of how our institutions operate. We have a better sense of how the ideologies that many teach there can play out.
4) Glenn Reynolds attempts to, in my terms, move folks from Camp Three to Camp One:
But as much as I enjoy seeing these people stew in the juices of their hypocrisy – and believe me, enjoy it I do -- it is nonetheless true, as Eugene Volokh cogently points out, that free speech principles, and the First Amendment where it applies, prevent things like a selective ban on anti-semitism, or on “advocacy of genocide” or whatever.
He opposes proposals for new restrictions on campus and a new commitment to the old protections for campus speech. He argues campuses adopted those to protect lefties from the conservative establish; the reverse may have a salutary effect.
5) Rep. Stefanik published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (looking for an unpaywalled copy--will update if I find one) placing herself in Camp Three. Of course, that is not the position she pursued through her questions on Tuesday. Maybe she recognized the potential problem with Magill's suggested solution of expanding codes of conduct to reach more speech.
6) I will leave on this question: What will it take to move campers from Three to One? As I have said, I believe many of these campers agree that a lot of this speech (including a lot of the speech at the center of this week's controversy) is protected because it does not rise to incitement, threats, or harassment. But they: 1) Recognize that universities have not acted as if it were protected until Jews were the targets and 2) Expect universities to return to past practices when future speech targets different groups. Given that we cannot predict the future, what should universities do? Is an acknowledgement of the change--which no one has done--sufficient? Must it include a mea culpa (or kaper lanu--a detailed list of past improper firings, expulsions, and sanctions against faculty and students? Must that include some compensation or restitution to them? Does it require more formal prospective commitments? Must universities dismantle the DEI apparatus and presence of CRT programs (that is Reynolds' answer) and maybe all Sociology programs (another WSJ suggestion)? Something more? It would great to see this become the question, rather than unhelpful insistence--perpetuating universities past sins--that everything is incitement to violence.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on December 8, 2023 at 10:48 AM in First Amendment, Howard Wasserman | Permalink
Comments
The comments to this entry are closed.