Free speech on college campuses: Is it time for a reset?

Emmanuel Ching felt a bit uneasy last week after he and other student leaders tried to hash out a statement about the Hamas assault on Israel on Oct. 7 and its massacre of nearly 1,400 Israeli civilians.

Student groups across the country continue to spark widespread outrage after expressing support, and even celebration, of the Hamas attacks. But Mr. Ching, a member of the executive board of GWDems at the George Washington University – the largest chapter of College Democrats in the country, with over 1,000 members – hoped his group would condemn the deliberate slaughter of civilians and kidnapping of nearly 200 others, among them children and the elderly, who were taken into Gaza as hostages.

As he texted with others in the board’s group chat, it soon became clear the student leaders could not reach a consensus. Some saw the words “unequivocally condemn” in the first draft as problematic. Others felt they weren’t qualified to speak out on the issue, while some worried that condemning Hamas would carry over to the larger cause of the Palestinian people. 

“Any organization that claims to support peace, that claims to pursue justice – especially an organization affiliated with the Democratic Party – should want to unequivocally condemn terrorism by a terrorist organization, and the fact that that had to be clarified was a little concerning,” Mr. Ching says.

But there’s a “broader trend” on college campuses, he says, that has made students trying to sort through and understand the longstanding conflict between Palestinians and Israelis more and more difficult.

“People see the other side as the epitome of evil,” he says. Instead of upholding the values of inquiry, dialogue, and good-faith discussions rooted in empirical fact-finding, college campuses have become places of fear. “I think there is a hesitation and an aversion to approaching this topic and to approaching discussing these issues and this conflict, because people are scared about how their opinions are going to be misconstrued,” Mr. Ching says.

Farewell to the marketplace of ideas?

Today, the college experience can seem like it has simply become an endless competition of moral opprobrium. Opposing sides castigate the other as holding, in effect, monstrous points of view – unfit to function within society.

As the Monitor reported earlier this year, thinkers on both the right and left have begun to doubt the very concept of a free “marketplace of ideas.” Conservatives, especially, say that American institutions of higher education have become hostile to their ideas to the point of out-and-out censure. 

Last year, for example, a host of student groups at the University of California Berkeley Law School each adopted a bylaw, first proposed by Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine, that banned the invitation of any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”

Many left-wing students, too, have for years employed the tactic of shouting down conservative or pro-Israel speakers when they appear on campus. Earlier this year, after Mr. Ching and others traveled to Israel to participate in a university-sponsored academic program, a pro-Palestinian student group posted his and others photos online, accusing them of endorsing genocide, ethnic cleansing, and colonialism. 

After widespread coverage of student support for the Hamas attacks and kidnappings, even if some included qualifications, there has been an equally furious response to, in effect, “cancel” those students. 

This week at Harvard University, a large truck with digital billboards labeled “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites,” sponsored by Accuracy in Media, a conservative media advocacy group, drove through campus, digitally flashing the names and faces of students it said were members of 34 student groups that signed a statement saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

A number of online sites, too, published the personal information of students linked to these groups, the Harvard Crimson reported. The information included names with photos, class years, employment history, social media profiles, and hometowns.

Some hedge fund managers and law firm partners in New York said they would use this information to blacklist students who were members of these groups, and some began to rescind offers of employment.

“It’s time for the adults to take over, and that includes law firms looking for graduates to hire,” wrote Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon in a much discussed opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal this week titled, “Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students.” “If a student endorses hate, dehumanization or anti-Semitism, don’t hire him. When students face consequences for their actions, they straighten up.”

Tom Ginsburg, director of the University of Chicago Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression, agrees that “those students, like anyone who engages in speech, are not immune from consequences for those things they say.”

But at the same time, the very idea of a higher education is at risk when threats of canceling or blacklisting become a part of educational relationships. It’s an implicit attempt to chill or silence opinions that violate one side’s sense of moral certainty and belief that certain ideas have no place on college campuses.

“There’s always been student agitation,” says Professor Ginsburg. “The world’s very unjust, and students are trying to figure it out. ... They should be able to try things out and not carry the weight of their future selves with their speech experiments.”

College presidents and administrators have sometimes been caught in the middle of the Manichean certainties expressed by both side in the larger debates surrounding the enduring conflicts between Palestinians and Israelis.

Some alumni and wealthy donors, especially in the Ivy Leagues, have withdrawn their money and support after saying administrators had failed to unequivocally condemn the Hamas attacks. Long-time donor and former Republican governor of Utah, Jon Huntsman, also a former board member at the University of Pennsylvania, told his alma mater his foundation would close its checkbook because of the university’s tepid response to the Hamas attacks.   

“The University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low,” wrote Mr. Huntsman, a former U.S. ambassador, in a letter to UPenn President Liz Magill.

“Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate,” he wrote. 

Such reactions, however, only tend to damage the idea of higher education as an essential arena for free inquiry and debate, and a place where students can rigorously explore ideas – an idea becoming more and more passe.

“Obviously, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic,” says Professor Ginsburg. “That’s another trope that’s out there. But on the other side, there’s just very simplistic takes on Hamas. They’re not a pro-woman organization or a pro-gay organization, to say the least. Yet somehow, you get these people who think all good values always go together – if you’re pro-LGBT rights, you should be pro-Hamas. That’s a nutty position, obviously.” 

Still, it’s certainly true that college campuses have become generally overrepresented with aggressive pro-Palestinian sentiments, says Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. 

“In this case,” he says, “the pro-Palestinian, anti-Zionist point of view has become very popular on campus. ... And a lot of university presidents who will privately say that they’re very pro-Israel and they’re utterly horrified by the behavior of Hamas, they’re kind of too scared of their own faculty, their own students, and their own administrators to say what they really think.”

Could fewer statements allow for more free speech?

Mr. Lukianoff believes academic environments would be much healthier if university presidents didn’t feel they have to make political statements on every issue, but to remain as politically neutral as possible. “The free speech actors on a campus are supposed to be the professors and the students,” he says.

“The value of freedom of speech is not that people always say good things, smart things, wise things, kind things,” he continues. “The value in freedom of speech is knowing what people really think and why.”

“My hope is, out of this very dark and worrisome time, at least people can open their eyes to how dysfunctional particularly elite campuses have become, that they’re afraid to have certain arguments, that they’re becoming doctrinaire and groupthink-y in their approach,” says Mr. Lukianoff, coauthor of the new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.”

An educational climate rooted in so-called “cancel culture” has caused an uptick in campaigns to punish people for what would be First Amendment protected opinion in other settings. This, he adds, only creates a climate of fear. 

“This is potentially an opportunity for large scale reform that actually embraces debate, questions orthodoxies, and allows for freedom of speech,” he says.