More campus-speech narratives and problems

Inside Higher Ed (may be paywalled) reports on the latest Republican Converse Auto-Da-Fe.

• The hearing involved the Presidents of DePaul, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, and Haverford. Haverford President Wendy Raymond--the only female witness (sensing a pattern on this)--bore the brunt of GOP attacks about donuts (read the story--this keeps getting more stupid) and her refusal to disclose any disciplinary action the college took against protesters (prompting one committee member to threaten the school's federal funding, which also requires schools not to disclose student disciplinary records).

• The Democrats invited Georgetown Prof and former ACLU Legal director David Cole to finally explain, for the record, the underlying First Amendment issues:

“The line between protected speech that is antisemitic and discrimination that is antisemitic is a hard line to draw, but it’s a line that our Constitution compels us to draw,” Cole said.

He added, “It’s not a line that I’ve heard a single Republican care about on this committee.”

To draw that line, Congress needed to engage in a fact-finding mission and “determine what actually happened based on often-competing accounts, and then you make a determination based upon those facts,” he said. Instead, the committee has seized upon various complaints, which they have not investigated, and then brought in college presidents to “berate them based on the committee’s version of the facts, which may or may not be true,” Cole said.

This did not stop Elise Stefanik from asking each president whether calls for genocide are protected speech and the presidents from saying that it is (it is not, at least in some contexts).

Cole likened these hearings to HUAC, which pissed off one Republican member who probably cannot see the connection.

• I wonder if these are running out of steam.

• Separate from that, Temple University has been dealing with some stuff, according to a kind-of-vague statement from President John Fry on Wednesday. As far as I can tell, we have: 1) Two students got a bar to put "Fuck the Jews" on a message board at an off-campus bar; 2) a student did an interview with a racist/antisemitic media personality, prompting the university to condemn his statements; and 3) another student, identified with Temple's SJP, in an online video makes "alarming statements related to the United States." The two students at the bar have been suspended; the other two are under investigation and threatened with expulsion; the letter reminds that the university Code of Conduct applies to off-campus conduct.

It is impossible to know what was said in the latter two situations. "Fuck the Jews" is so clearly constitutionally protected (it is not incitement or a true threat and unless the bar had been rented out for a Jewish celebration of some kind, not targeted harassment) that those suspensions cannot stand. Fry's letter reminded of this incident at University of Oklahoma from 2015, in which two frat members were expelled for singing a racist song during a fraternity event--I think the students walked away quietly rather than challenging their expulsions. I wonder if these students might do the same.

A recurring complaint since October 7 and the campus protests has been the failure of universities to punish antisemitic speech as they did racist or sexist or anti-immigrant campus speech. I had hoped that universities learned that they had taken the wrong approach previously and they would respect the First Amendment limits on codes of conduct (however ugly that might be). The Temple case shows at least one school going in the opposite direction.

To be clear--these people are assholes and should be shunned and derided and spoken back to and perhaps even rejected in private social and professional circles--what Republicans and FIRE would call cancel culture. But they should not suffer formal sanction by the state. We have gotten this entirely backwards.