Academia’s selective defense of free speech
Washington Examiner
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Ordinarily, it would be a blessed relief to see college administrators take a stand for free speech. They should be consistent, though, rather than arriving at the opinion that expressive liberty on campuses is important only when students demonstrate to support terrorists killing Jews.
In recent years, administrators have canceled or allowed the eviction of numerous speakers, investigated and sometimes evicted faculty members and students for violating left-wing speech codes, or let students and staff hound heterodox professors so maliciously that they feel they must resign. Rather than defend principles of intellectual inquiry, administrators have been more concerned about providing emotionally “safe spaces” for “triggered” students than providing physically safe places for people expressing unapproved opinions.
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Suddenly, this week, administrators’ concerns changed. Rather than worry about the content of demonstrations that support rape and murder, college presidents and deans have suddenly become champions of free speech.
At universities nationwide, left-wing and ethnic groups have shown up in force to shout that the real victims in the Middle East are Palestinians, not the Israelis killed, women raped, and babies beheaded by Hamas terrorists. More than a few demonstrators chanted slogans to the depraved effect that the Israeli civilians deserved their fates.
In turn, school administrators have been shamed into expressing sympathy for the Israelis — of a sort. Some suggest a moral equivalence between the two sides, condemning hatred “from all sides.” But all of them proclaim a commitment to protecting demonstrators shouting murderous slogans.
First-year Harvard President Claudine Gay said emphatically, “Our university rejects terrorism. That includes the barbaric atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.” That statement came only after days of being hounded into it by former Harvard leaders, and even then, Gay did not actually condemn the 31 student groups that wrote that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
Then, in a rapid segue to speech liberty, she said: “Our university embraces a commitment to free expression. That commitment extends even to views that many of us find objectionable, even outrageous. We do not punish or sanction people for expressing such views.”
That is not true. For years, Harvard has failed spectacularly to abide by the free-speech principles Gay claims it upholds. A month ago, for example, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression released its annual College Free Speech Rankings and rated Harvard the worst of 254 colleges in the country, earning the first “zero” grade FIRE has ever given. Of all nine “deplatforming” attempts in five years, Harvard sanctioned speakers seven times, including three terminations of faculty members and revoking a conservative student’s admission to the college. When evolutionary biologist Carole Hooven stated the obvious truth that only two biological sexes exist, the campus blowback was so strong against her, without adequate administrative support for her right to state facts as facts, that she felt impelled to take a leave of absence.
At Middlebury College in Vermont, administrators did not condemn Hamas but wrote, in terms of moral equivalence, about “the untold pain, suffering, and loss of life unfolding from the violence happening now in Israel and Palestine.” Brown University’s president, Christina Paxson, vaguely condemned Hamas’s attacks but insisted “this is not a time for blame.” Paxson then said, “It is a time for empathy” for Israelis and Palestinians. Compare this, however, with her extravagant blame-casting against police and others after the guilty verdict against the killers of George Floyd. Then, she blamed “systemic and structural racism” supposedly infecting every area of life.
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At Stanford, administrators wrote that the “university as an institution does not take positions on geopolitical issues and news events.” Not so. President Marc Tessier-Lavigne wrote a letter to the whole university community after Floyd’s death denouncing “broad and persistent racial injustice in the United States” and (separately) blasted the Supreme Court’s June decision against racial preferences in college admissions.
Universities don’t take positions except when they do, and they uphold free speech except when they trample on it. Their hypocrisy and lack of self-knowledge are endless.