Defending Freedom of Speech & Thought at Universities
“Freedom of thought and expression is indispensable to the mission of a modern research university.”
That’s from an open letter, begun at UC Berkeley but now available for academics anywhere to sign, in defense of freedom of expression and academic freedom at universities, in light of the Trump administrations attacks on higher education. These attacks include the political weaponization of funding for universities, interference in the research and teaching operations of universities, the deportation of individuals involved in campus protests, and more.
The text of the letter is below. You can can see a Google Docs version of it here and sign it here.
This is a perilous moment for American universities. Federal funding commitments are being weaponized to pressure universities to comply with demands of the current administration. At the same time, individuals at institutions of higher education are being threatened with deportation for political speech. We, the undersigned, call on faculty and academic leaders at Berkeley and other American institutions to stand firm and protect our core values in response to these assaults.
Freedom of thought and expression is indispensable to the mission of a modern research university. Our entire intellectual community is impoverished unless all of its members, regardless of their political viewpoint or immigration status, may freely express themselves without fear of retaliation. Academic freedom is an essential safeguard for free expression. It protects the right of faculty to pursue their scientific and scholarly investigations in accordance with their own best judgments about the inquiries in which they are engaged. It protects the rights of instructors to design and deliver their courses, and the rights of both faculty and students to discuss issues in the classroom that are germane to the subject, including issues of contemporary controversy. It confers authority on the university and its faculty to administer its academic programs and enforce its own internal norms and expectations. Finally, all members of an academic community must have the right to engage in protected political speech.
These commitments are non-negotiable. They are absolutely central to our academic and social mission, and have made Berkeley and other American institutions prolific engines of scientific and scholarly discovery for the benefit of humanity. But these same commitments to free expression are also under direct threat, as recent events involving Columbia University have shown. There is no room for compromise on these issues as universities deal with the political pressures to which they may be subject in the weeks and months to come. On the contrary, we call on faculty and academic leaders to defend our commitment to free expression vigorously and without apology in the public sphere, and to do everything in their power to protect the rights of members of our community from outside interference.
(via Shamik Dasgupta)
UPDATE: Readers are encouraged to share links to articles and essays they come across elsewhere defending US universities in the current context.
“The United States is home to the best collection of research universities in the world. Those universities have contributed tremendously to America’s prosperity, health, and security. They are magnets for outstanding talent from throughout the country and around the world. The Trump administration’s recent attack on Columbia University puts all of that at risk, presenting the greatest threat to American universities since the Red Scare of the 1950s. Every American should be concerned.” — Christopher L. Eisgruber (Princeton) in “The Cost of the Government’s Attack on Columbia” in The Atlantic.
It’s about time that university presidents (ONE, so far!) started yelling and screaming about the Nazification of our country by the Orange Scumbag and his goons. Thank you too, the many faculty members of our great universities, who had took the time and HAD THE COURAGE to sign this important public letter. Here in the U.S. many of us our now afraid of our own government! Let’s be more like Europe and elsewhere where governments fear their citizens, as it should be, of course. Best Wishes
“Freedom of thought and expression is indispensable to the mission of a modern research university”
The fascists agree with this, it’s why they’re attacking it.
These are nice words, but we’re past the point where words will decide these battles. Whatever leverage academia has is held in the immense wealth and influence of some of our universities. I think any adequate response to this admin should explicitly appeal to that power, anything else seems inadequate to the moment.
To this end, universities could – but would never – cancel all televised sports until (for a start) research funding is reinstated. Many Americans hate universities and fear education but couldn’t live without college football. More to the point, television networks promoting the destruction of academia sure couldn’t.
I believe there is only about one more week of televised college sports that most Americans care about right now (the end of March Madness) and then it’s about five months before football season starts. I don’t know how many Americans watch any college sports in the spring or summer.
“Letter signed by members of the Columbia History Department urging resistance to the Trump Administration’s efforts to dictate university policy.”
https://bsky.app/profile/joelhs.bsky.social/post/3lksrgckxc22e
I agree that academic freedom is essential to the mission of American universities and should be vigorously defended.
But I doubt it’s essential to the mission of American universities to allow antisemitic activities on campus. The explicit aim of the administration’s revocation of federal funding from Columbia is to combat such activities. There is credible evidence that Jewish students have been harassed at Columbia and that the student organizations protesting on Columbia’s campus have expressed support for terrorism against Jews. If that does not amount to antisemitism, it’s hard to know what would.
I’m quite certain that, if a private American university allowed a white supremacist student organization to engage in racist activities on campus (in violation of the university’s own policies), progressives would expect – indeed, demand – that its federal funding be revoked. (They would also expect white supremacist students who were non-citizens to be deported if they were mobilizing others to engage in such activities.) In my view, they would be right to do so. Private universities do not have a constitutional right to federal subsidies, and it’s legitimate for elected representatives to withhold federal funds from institutions that enforce (or refrain from enforcing) their policies in discriminatory ways.
Of course, Trump’s appeal to Title VI could be a pretense. He could, in principle, be trying to dismantle higher education for independent reasons. But I don’t see much evidence of that. And I don’t think ordinary Americans are broadly opposed to higher education tout court, as some comments in this thread seem to suggest. They just don’t like it when university officials refuse to condemn behavior that seems (to them, anyway) transparently morally bad.
I’m interested to hear whether and how people think Columbia’s case differs (in morally or legally relevant ways) from the fictional case involving white supremacy I outlined. I’m also interested in whether and how people think the administration’s revocation of federal funding from Columbia is an attack on academic freedom specifically. (It’s taken for granted in the above letter that it’s an attack on academic freedom. That may be true, but it’s not obvious.)
Update: After reading through the demands made of Columbia by the Trump administration, I’m now persuaded that there’s significant overreach happening. I wasn’t previously aware that Columbia had been asked to, e.g., put specific departments into receivership and restructure their disciplinary process. That’s quite concerning, and it helps explain why the above letter assumes that the administration’s actions are contrary to academic freedom. I’m still interested in hearing reactions to my original comment, though.
Sounds like you had been had by propaganda and have (laudably) realized that by yourself. What other reactions could you be looking for?
I was hoping people would have more to say about the hypothetical case and its dissimilarities to the actual case. There could be some other than the ones I mentioned.
The two cases differ because the campus protests were maligned unjustly by the entire media apparatus. Hundreds of Jewish students participated in, and organized, the campus protests and encampments. Incidents of antisemitism deserve to be called out but the issue is that protesting a genocide has been conflated with antisemitism. It is not antisemitic to say Israel is the world’s most efficient babykiller or that Palestinians are the victims in the conflict.
Unless you can show widespread hate and antisemitism from the multiple encampments I and many Jewish students visited, it’s an unfair picture.
Fwiw, part of the problem is that academics including many articles and comments on here are all to happy to stymie free speech when it doesn’t align with their views. This includes basic “right wing” positions that one can disagree with but still defend the right of people to express. Along the same lines, someone who expressed support for Hamas might not be someone you like, but a commitment to free speech means we should defend their right to do so. We see how quickly the same tools get utilized against views we approve of. The individuals being held by ICE or deported for being married to Palestinian activists, or expressing support for Palestinian statehood, or even working on international law in the occupied territories, are just the beginning. Your support for deporting “antisémites” easily will get turned on its head and be used to malign a host of views including ones you might hold.
Thanks for this!
It is not “the same tools” that are utilized here.
The alleged lack of commitment to free speech on the left manifests itself in other exercises of individual liberty: refusals to associate, public condemnations, counterprotests.
This very, very different from violent state interventions like deportation, indefinite imprisonment, or police violence.
This is not just a difference in degree, it is a difference in kind. Equivocation here just furthers the rights lie that they are only responding to injustices inflicted on them.
this is such a crucial distinction that the apologist commentariat here doesn’t want to acknowledge
Can you link to the comments you have in mind? In general I think most comments on free speech on DN have been good at respecting the distinction between exercise of speech rights on the one hand and coercive activity (e.g., occupying spaces, harassment in the legal arms of the term, people being fired or disciplined) on the other, but I may well have missed some things.
You are right to point out that there is a difference in kind here. However, I am not sure it is just exercises of individual liberty – there have been cases of academics losing their jobs or finding it hard to get hired because of conservative views in some disciplines.
I think in general, a more robust commitment to free speech (especially speech we find disagreeable) would be better. But your point is well taken, and to be honest, I don’t think the Trump administration is merely responding in kind. They would probably do this even if academia was fervently in support of all speech.
It’s definitely antisemitic, and cartoonishly insensible, to say “Israel is the world’s most efficient babykiller.” I’m happy for you that you’ve kept yourself anonymous in doing so. Such statements are openly drawing on a history of antisemitic blood-libel, the lie that Jews abuse, kill, and consume the blood of children. Also supporting openly racist political movements whose stated aims are mass murder and the destruction of States is far from obviously protected expression. In fact, to me it looks like political action that is quite plausibly incitement to violence and (depending on which rights and which States are at issue) sedition. To be clear, I think the same is true when it comes to expressions in support of Nazism and the KKK, and find it to be incredibly dishonest how many liberals treat these as cases of mere expression of opinion or attitude, as if one isn’t clearly participating in openly and proudly racist, violent political movements in expressing such support.
Hi exhausted,
I’m trying to figure out what, on your view, makes
(A) “Israel is the world’s most efficient babykiller”
antisemitic.
Let me ask you, on your view, is the statement
(B) “Israel has killed roughly 15,000 Gazan children since the October 7th attacks”
antisemitic?
Is the statement
(C) “Israel has killed roughly 15,000 Gazan children since the October 7th attacks and that’s abhorrent”
antisemitic?
And what about
(D) “Israel has murdered thousands of Gazan children since the October 7th attacks?”
Is that antisemitic?
And lastly, is
(E) “Israel is a murderer of children”
antisemitic on your view?
Thanks.
I can’t speak for exhausted, but (A) seems to me to imply something about Israel’s motives that (B)-(E) don’t imply. Normally, when we say that x does y efficiently, y is something that x consciously aims at. So, (A) strongly implies that Israel consciously aims to kill as many Palestinian babies as possible. And that does seem like an antisemitic thing to imply. (A) demonizes a group of people (by demonizing a proxy), but (B)-(E) don’t. (There’s an important difference, I think, between demonization and moral condemnation.)
I’m not quite sure if this argument works, but basically: The notion that the Jews are murdering babies is a core trope of anti-Semitism throughout history. It has been used to justify atrocious violence against Jewish people. Of course, this doesn’t mean that it’s anti-Semitic to morally condemn Jewish actors who do kill children. However, plausibly, it means that special caution is required. (A) is imprecise, essentialising and polemical. It’s imprecise because it suggest that Israel is aiming to kill as many infants as possible without fully asserting it. It is essentialising because it uses a nomimal construction, so it suggests that is in the essence of Israel to kill children, rather than it does kill children because of the choices of particular politicians and leaders (cf. “John is a drug user” v. “John uses drugs”) It is polemical because it uses a term, “babykiller” that is not part of ordinary parlance but designed to evoke a strong emotional response. Imprecision, essentialisation and polemicism are normal parts of political discourse. However, combined with the subject matter of Jewish actors killing children, they suggest either that the author deliberately means to evoke anti-Semitic tropes or that they are insouciant about evoking anti-Semitic tropes. Such an inscouciance is itself anti-Semitic.
I think replies like these really cheapen the serious harm that antisemitism causes (which is rampant in the US, just take a look at Trump’s closest aide throwing Nazi salutes twice and thinking it is funny).
Your comment highlights the unfortunate fact that Israel’s supporters have sought to identify the state with Judaism and Jewish people, and there hasn’t been enough of a backlash against this. You may find this article by Matthew Noah Smith written just a few days ago helpful: https://substack.com/home/post/p-158966694
You don’t seem to engage at all with the particular argument that I am presenting. I am not saying that criticism of Israel per se is anti-Semitic. I said that criticism of Israel that evokes anti-Semitic tropes is anti-Semitic. Not because it is criticism of Israel, but because it evokes anti-Semitic tropes.
If a cartoon were to show David Berkowitz (also known as Son of Sam, and happening to be born Jewish) wearing a kippa and drinking blood, then many Jewish people would have been rightly offended. Not because of any sympathy with that serial killer, but because the cartoon evokes anti-Semitic tropes.
I also don’t see how pointing this out cheapens “the serious harm that antisemitism causes”. Bigotry of all kinds is often sustained by habits and ideological assumptions that are shared across sharply opposed political camps. And the way to criticise such bigotry is not to turn a blind eye to the occassions when it happens in your own camp, not even if the incidence on your side are less severe in the grand scheme of things. In order to be a credible critic of anti-Semitism on the right, we need to take the persistence of anti-Semitic ideas on the left seriously.
So what kind of criticism of Israel would not be anti-Semitic?
“In its war against HAMAS since October 7th, the State of Israel under Netanyahu has killed roughly 15,000 Gazan children and minors, and that’s abhorrent.” I would say that you can probably cut away some of the elements in this claim without carelessly evoking anti-Semitic tropes, e.g. the explicit reference to HAMAS and the particular Israeli leadership. But as a proof of concept, this serious criticism of Israel that does not carelessly or intentionally evoke anti-Semitic tropes.
Do you also insist that Hamas atrocities should be prefixed with “In its war against Israel….”? Do you also worry about anti-Arab and other tropes being used, and correct people appropriately?
You said yourself that the killing of children is a sadly common occurence in war. So you need to make a stronger case for why we should interpret “baby-killer” as an intentional evocation of anti-Semitic tropes and not just a commonly used anti-military epithet (much hay was made of anti-Vietnam-War protesters applying this term to returning American soldiers, for instance). If you want to back off from the argument that the evocation of anti-Semitic tropes is intentional, that puts you in the position of arguing that speakers need to be held responsibe for whatever their speech evokes in other people’s minds, even if such evocations are not apt to the content and form of the evoking speech, or wildly implausible. “Insouciance” about being accountable to every possible misinterpretation while telling the truth is not anti-Semitic.
I have not said anything about how likely killing children is in war. I am “M N”, not the same commenter as “N M”, though I admit the confusion is understandable.
I think speakers are responsible to avoid evoking anti-Semitic tropes to any reasonable hearer, at least insofar as this is compatible with making the legitimate point they are making. Saying that associating “Israel is the world’s most efficient babykiller” with the blood libel is “wildly implausible” is itself wildly implausible. Israel’s Jewish identity is, for better or worse, extremely salient (i.e. as one Jewish actor, not necessarily as “identified with Judaism”). The idea that Jews kill children is a central trope of Western Christian hatred of Jews. Anybody who is aware of that history will be reminded of the blood libel by this statement. For obvious reasons that includes many American Jews. So, special care is required in discussing such issues. Failing to show such care shows that you are unconcerned about the history
Thanks for the engagement, and apologies for the late response. (I tend to keep engagement with these sorts of discussions limited, for reasons that my alias should gesture toward.) (B) and (C) I find largely unproblematic as expressions, although the connotation of “children” misrepresents the fact that many armed militants in Gaza are minors, making it appear, falsely, as if all of the Gazans under 18 dying in the war are simply bystanders. (D) and (E) I find a bit more problematic, because I do not think it is credible to claim that the IDF is targeting Gazan bystanders under the age of 18, i.e., is “murdering Gazan children.” Are they intentionally killing Gazan militants under 18? Yes. Are they unintentionally killing Gazan bystanders under 18? Yes. The antisemitic features of these sorts of statements are those suggesting that the military of the Jewish State is intentionally planning and going out of its way to kill innocent Gazan minors: This is blood-libel plain and simple. If some rogue member(s) of the IDF kill an innocent Gazan minor, they have murdered a child and it isn’t antisemitic to say that.
This is a good point, we should refrain from proclaiming Israel the world’s most efficient babykiller until we have sufficient data to show that that is the case.
That said, given the high number of children in Gaza and the high number of civilian casualties from Israel’s attacks, it’s clear they’re in the running for the title (and might even be the frontrunner!)
So, for the sake of accuracy, we should call Israel a candidate for the world’s most efficient babykiller.
Do you have any idea of the kind of numbers of civilian casualties, including children, in wars? Any innocent killed is tragic, of course, but it’s not even close to the highest numbers.
In order to make this claim even remotely plausible, you have at least to disregard history. According to estimates, the State of Israel has killed around 15,000 children and minors in Gaza in the one and a half years since October 7th. During the Shoah, 1.5 million children were killed in 1941-45, 375,000 per year. During the Armenian genocide, 500,000 children were killed in 1915-23, or 62,500 per year. During the Rwandan genocide, by conservative estimates, 500,000 people were killed. I can’t find sources of how many of them were children. However, 49% of the Rwandan population at the time was under 14. Even if we assume that the perpetrators spared some children for being children, 100,000 murdered children would be a very conservative estimate, in just 100 days.
This kind of imprecision precisely is part of what makes a phrase like “world’s most efficient babykiller” so careless.
Very much agreed, except that I take there to be much more that makes the “most efficient babykiller” “careless.” (Is a sixteen year old, armed and radicalized militant whom the IDF kills a “baby”?) And to my understanding, the age breakdown of the Gazan population is quite similar to the Rwandan case as you present it (half minors, half non-minors). This fact, together with Hamas’s tactics (employing minors in its operations for various purposes), should lead us to be a bit more careful in interpreting the meaning of the age breakdown of Gazan casualties.
An ‘efficient’ killer implies more than just the total number killed. How many did they kill per unit time? What was the single greatest kill? and so on. Given that Israel is quite happy in using modern highly destructive weaponry in dense civilian areas, calling their killing efficient doesn’t strike me as at all careless.
The Battle of Mosul – the 2016-2017 urban battle between ISIS and US-supported Iraqi forces that ended the open conflict with ISIS -largely destroyed the city and killed somewhere between 10,000 and 40,000 civilians. (Another million were displaced.) There is no reliable count of children killed (ISIS seemed to lack the Gaza authorities’ remarkable speed and accuracy at providing authoritative numbers), but around a third of the population of Iraq are under 14, so at least many thousands of children, perhaps 10,000 or more, were killed in the battle.
I am tentatively inclined (as a lay observer) to think that the Battle of Mosul was for the most part conducted as humanely and proportionately as is feasible in the hellscape of urban warfare; I am much less confident of this claim for the Gaza war. Still, when I compare the level of protests within universities over Gaza with the virtual silence in the same spaces over Mosul – even though US and allied pilots were actually dropping the bombs there, and even though deaths in the West from ISIS terrorism were substantially lower in absolute terms, and ridiculously lower in relative terms, than Israeli deaths on 10/7/23 – I do think I see why some people are concerned about antisemitism.
This is an odd reply and aims to paint the campus protests as rooted in antisemitism which is an absurd claim. Thousands of students and professors appalled at the war in Gaza are not just using the death of Palestinians to unleash their antisemitism. That pretty much every encampment had Shabbats and other Jewish rituals led by Jewish students also makes the suggestion puzzling. Did you visit any of these encampments?
There are many reasons you didn’t see the same outrage level of protests but here is one: many thought the war against ISIS was justified and average Iraqis supported it. The people of Mosul celebrated being freed from ISIS rule. There is no similar comparison to Palestinians or people in Gaza thanking Israel for ridding them of Hamas because Hamas enjoys local support.
I am also taken back by your comment that “ISIS seemed to lack the Gaza authorities’ remarkable speed and accuracy at providing authoritative numbers.”
The Gaza Ministry of Health actually stopped posting detailed death counts with names and ages a few months into the war because they were no longer able to do so (you can imagine many workers had died and the morgues were overflowing, with many stuck under the rubble). A few months ago the Lancelet published a study estimating it to be 2x the Gaza ministry’s numbers, Ralph Nader has estimated to be magnitudes higher, and Trump himself seemed to admit it was in the 100s of thousands when he said 1.5M Palestinians would need to be moved (there was 2M+ people in the Gaza Strip before the war).
The fact, supposing it is a fact, that a substantial proportion of student anti-Israel protesters are motivated by anti-Jewish bigotry, is obviously just not very important compared to the fact that the US is currently participating with Israel in a war of ethnic cleansing at best, extermination at worst. So it’s reasonable to suspect the motives of those who divert discussion of the latter to the former.
OK, but this is a site for (mostly) academics in (mostly) American universities; isn’t it reasonable that here we discuss the Gaza war mostly in connection with the situation in American universities?
Fine; but even within this restricted domain, the (supposed) fact that a substantial proportion of student protesters are anti-Jewish bigots, is less important for the present and future of American academic life, than the fact that a substantial proportion of wealthy Columbia alumni and donors are bigoted Jewish ethnonationalists.
This is some pretty wild-eyed whataboutery. The Iraq wars had no shortage of anti-war demonstrations, on and off campus, running for years. But we need to ignore that and always find random comparisons between different cohort of students to make some confuse point about anti-Semitism?
Could I get you a napkin?
The comment of ‘exhausted’ seems to raise at least a couple of questions (well, more than that, but I’ll only address two of them here). I’m not a constitutional scholar, but I believe the following is a pretty fair representation of the current state of U.S. law. One question is whether speech that supports or could be taken to support “openly racist political movements” (to quote ‘exhausted’) is protected by the First Amendment. The answer to that is yes, unless the speech crosses the line into direct and quite imminent or specific incitement of violence. So, for example, the chant “death to [insert group of people]” will usually be protected by the First Amendment, because it’s not a direct incitement of violence (unlike, e.g., “let’s go beat up those guys who are holding signs in the parking lot,” which is).
Another question is whether private universities, which are not bound by the First Amendment, have to allow that kind of speech on their campuses. The answer is that they do not, although their professed commitment to free expression should make them, IMO, lean strongly in the direction of allowing the maximum possible amount of free speech that is consistent with their educational mission.
Thanks for the reply. I’m also not a constitutional scholar, though we can talk about what “incitement to violence” and “sedition” mean in more general terms than American law. I also tend to agree that in most cases, “death to [insert group of people]” neither constitutes incitement to violence nor, similarly, fails the “clear and present danger” test. But the context of the expression could change that. Groups wearing Hamas/Hezbollah/etc. garb and chanting “globalize the Intifada” in some place with a reasonably sizable Jewish population, and Nazis wearing Nazi garb marching in Jewish neighborhoods in Skokie, however, do seem to fail this test, and I worry that the notion that they don’t harbors the sense that Jews should or do simply sit on their hands in the face of being attacked or threatened. If a group was dressed in KKK cloaks or Nazi garb while chanting “globalize the lynching” or “globalize the firebombing” in some place with a reasonably sizable Black population, they would be threatening members of that population, and violence of some kind would probably ensue. (Some kind of chant like “enslave the Blacks” would seem closer to the “death to [X group]” case for reasons nearby the lack of imminence or directness of threat you raise.)
My view is that people wearing keffiyehs and chanting “globalize the intifada” (in a place with a reasonably sizable Jewish population) are engaging in speech that is protected by the First Amendment. I think a majority of federal judges, putting aside the current membership of SCOTUS for the moment, would agree with that (though who knows for sure). If I were a student and wanted to protest Israel’s policies and the IDF’s actions, I would have tried to protest in a different way than chanting “globalize the intifada” (a slogan I dislike) but that’s beside the point.
The better alternative to sitting on one’s hands if one feels threatened — as perhaps one reasonably might in some cases — is to stage a counter-demonstration, rather than going to court to try to restrict the speech. Admittedly counter-demonstrations can carry the risk of escalation to violence, as has sometimes happened. So there’s no perfect answer.
Again, public universities are bound by the First Amendment but private universities are not, so they have somewhat more leeway in this respect to try to balance the various considerations. Unfortunately their decisions have sometimes been influenced by outside forces and are now going to be influenced by heavy-handed threats of federal government intervention and withholding of funds.
Ok. Do you think the first amendment protects people to dress in KKK cloaks and chant “globalize the lynching” in a place with a reasonably sizable Black population? And what if these people do so directly in the face of Black individuals while using their own bodies to prevent those individuals from moving freely?
Were I an observer, that would strike me as an attempted murder in progress. People who dress in KKK cloaks murder Black persons, and so they’re among the people who would be called upon to commit some such act of violence. (In any case, I would certainly take those actions to constitute threats of violence against some relevant subset of the Black population, whether or not any member of that population feels threatened by those actions, and whether or not American law protects it.)
If you know about the Second Intifada, I think you might take calling for such a set of events to be ‘globalized’ to be calling for violence against Jews around the world. Including those who are in the given vicinity. And I take it that the logic is more or less the same regarding people who dress like Hamas militants: They make themselves to appear as among those who would be called upon to commit such acts of violence, and so when they call upon it, they threaten violence against Jews in the given vicinity.
I think the KKK marching down a street in a predominantly Black community while chanting “globalize lynching” (or something similar) is protected — albeit, of course, completely repulsive — speech. However, using one’s body to prevent someone from moving freely is conduct not speech, so the First Amendment does not protect that. It also does not protect burning a cross right in front of someone’s house, for example. (Not every lawyer or judge or scholar or proverbial man or woman in the street for that matter will have the same view of the First Amendment. I’m just giving you my view.)
Do you think the first amendment protects people to dress in KKK cloaks and chant “globalize the lynching” in a place with a reasonably sizable Black population?
In cases like this, I often find it difficult to know if the person asking the question means to ask if the speech in question would likely be found (or has been found) to be protected speech under the relevant law, or it should be found to be protected, under a better understanding of the US 1st Am., or if some better but different principle of free speech protection would protect the speech in question. But, sticking just to the first question, given the holding in RVA v. City of Saint Paul, which found that burning a cross _inside the fenced-in property of an African-American family_ could be protected speech, it seems really unlikely to me that, unless there was an unexpected change in the law, the above would be found to be a violation of the US first Am.
(I might note that I don’t agree with the holding in RVA. Given the actual facts of the case, I’d say there were good reasons to not find the actions to be protected speech. But, given the decision that was in fact made, the scenario presented here doesn’t seem like a close case to me – it’s hard to see how it wouldn’t be protected speech, under US 1st Am law, given the state of the law as it is now. That leaves open the question of what better law might say.)
Thanks for the response. Important disambiguation and helpful case citation. I’m more interested in the ethical question of where the law, in a more or less basically liberal context, should stop protecting expression/expression-involving conduct. But regarding how the American legal system would treat these cases, I can’t quite say, and agree that the sort of case you raise to indicate that it would protect what I would judge to be threats of violence against given populations. Perhaps with the exception of the obstructing free movement cases, for which, to be sure, there is video of evidence of multiple regarding Jewish students post-October 7th.
Unlike most people on my “side” of the political spectrum, I agree that the anti-Israel campus protests movements were generally anti-Semitic. However, they weren’t anti-Semitic in the classic sense of participants’ having negative attitudes towards Jews per se; at least, from what I’ve seen, there was too little of that to justify suppressing the protests. Rather, the protests were anti-Semitic in an indirect sense. Theoretical ideas about colonialism, the use of force by anti-colonial movements, and criticism of anti-colonial movements led the protesters to support Hamas and the Oct. 7 attacks, generally by description, rather than by name. (“Resistance by any means,” paraglider posters, “working with” the “unified command” in Gaza, etc.) All this applies to the major organizing groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, prominent intellectuals and influencers, and the rank-and-file participants I spoke with.
The point is that “indirect” bigotry, including anti-Semitism and white supremacy, is and should be tolerated more than direct bigotry. That Ben Shapiro, Milo Yiannopoulous, Candace Owens, and Matt Walsh are bigots to varying degrees of directness who have spoken at many colleges shows that indirect bigotry is generally tolerated. If MAGA students could organize an anti-replacement encampment that didn’t totally devolve into explicit white supremacy and neo-Nazism (which I don’t think they could ever do), my guess is college administrators would tolerate it as much as they tolerated the anti-Israel protests.
Mmmm funny how these people never complained when the wokists prevented any even quite moderate conservative option from being expressed on campus.
I must have missed it when the “wokists” imprisoned and deported people, sent police to beat up conservative students, or demanded that the James Madison Program be put into receivership.
Honestly, I was hoping that now people would see what attacks on academic freedom and free speech *actually look like*.
Alas.
I’m sure they would have if they could have …
And your surety is based on the exactly zero people attempting or even calling for it?
These are truly extreme attacks on academic freedom and free speech. But their existence doesn’t turn less extreme attacks on these things into non-attacks.
To Brian’s point, though: my recollection is that a good number (though not all) of the people who signed the letter did complain, and in some cases got flack for it.
No, these aren’t differences in degree, they are differences in kind. State-sanctioned violence in defiance of the rule of law is emphatically not just a more extreme version of counterprotesting.
Is every attack on academic freedom and free speech similar in kind to state-sanctioned violence in defiance of the rule of law?
I don’t understand what you are asking me.
Fair enough—but in that case, I hope you’ll forgive my tediously spelling it out!
Ah, I see. I suppose there could be such other kinds of attacks on civil liberties (ones not relying on state intervention), but you haven’t said what they would be.
My main notion was many of us might not know what it feels like to have one’s freedoms substantively challenged. They are sure to find out now what that’s like.
Hopefully, they might thereby realize that the previous talk of “campus free speech crisis” was a whole lot of nothing.
I think it is really quite important that, throughout this process of finding out, one keeps in mind that this is *not* an in-kind response from the right. It is a new thing, an unjustified thing, and a very, very dangerous thing.
Also fair enough! I hadn’t picked up on your main notion, which strikes me as important and insightful. While of course I still disagree with you about the “campus free speech crisis,” that disagreement indeed seems much less important than the fact that, as you say, this isn’t an in-kind response from the right.
In any case, thanks for the good-faith and productive reply, in an exchange that could easily have turned into a frustrating episode of online foot-stomping.
Ok I’m sure some did.
just checking in: are we still “having conversations” with the people who voted this administration into office despite voluminous evidence of what its goal was because those voters “contain multitudes” and were “fed up?” just wondering
Yes?
i’m geninuely sorry to hear that
Ok
I don’t know who “we” are (I assume at least some DN readers voted for Trump) but anyone who wants to win the next election certainly should be having those conversations.
Conservatives didn’t have conversations with their political opponents and they won.
If you conflate ‘my political opponents’ with ‘anyone who voted for my political opponents’, good luck winning elections.
I honestly don’t have very strong views about this. But I find it puzzling that you (and others) take it for granted that in order to win elections, one must not vilify one’s opponents. That’s an empirical claim. What’s the support for it? After all, conservatives have been winning elections running on nothing but vilification.
It might or might not be advisable to vilify your opponents. But we’re talking about vilifying people who voted for your opponents. That’s political suicide.
Yes, I understand that this is what you believe, I’m asking for your evidence.
Presumably, the targets of conservative vilification (queer people, racial minorities, etc) are also voters.
Trump did better with racial minorities than any previous republican for decades. I don’t recall him or his major surrogates vilifying racial minorities at all. More generally, it’s hard to prove a negative, but I don’t recall anything from the Trump campaign along the lines of “if you voted for Biden last time we don’t want to talk to you.”
Obviously the Trump campaign vilified lots of groups people, and obviously some of them were voters, but that’s not the issue: the post I was replying to was advocating not engaging with people simply because they were Trump voters last time around.
*You made the claim* that such-and-such is a requirement for winning elections. You can’t now just Russel’s teapot yourself out of justifying that claim.
I’m not even convinced you’re wrong, I just don’t think it’s obvious. Rapprochement, reaching across the isle, including moderate conservatives, etc, is 1 for 2 in recent elections.
I assume you mean that the Trump campaign didn’t *explicitly* villify and otherwise attack racial minorities. This was the most racist Presidential campaign in a long time. Race (or something close enough to it) was obviously part of at least some of the following, wouldn’t you agree?
I’m sure I’m forgetting many examples.
If these some or all of these don’t attack racial groups specifically, but rather immigrants or poor immigrants or third world immigrants or what have you, is the difference important?
(I agree that villifying Trump voters is extremely imprudent.)
Depends what you mean. Politics ruins everything so I avoid political conversations when I can. Treating people with respect? Yes?
Since the obvious irony of academic philosophers being selective in their defense of freedom of speech and thought has already been noted, I will add that it’s this attitude that has led conservatives (and I count myself among them) to launch this sort of counter-offensive against higher education. If we are not even thought worthy of “having conversations” with, then why should we stand by while ideological leftism is laundered through universities with public funding?
Yes, yes, nothing is ever the conservatives fault.
Defunding higher education? You made us do it.
Deporting and disappearing people? You made us do it.
Threatening judges and suspending the rule of law? You made us do it.
Try removing the plank from your own eye before you worry about the specks in the eyes of others. Maybe then people will want to have conversations with you again.
Oh I agree entirely, Julian. Let us all take inspiration from the Gospels and be more self-reflective before accusing the sins of others. That will really renew the public’s trust in higher education.
I’m glad we agree. Now, pray-tell, which part of the gospels recommends petty vindictiveness?
Whichever ones you’re reading, I guess.
The counter-offensive you’re advocating here is an authoritarian power grab by a (to put it as neutrally as possible) mentally unwell strongman President, yes? Could you explain why this is a proportional, appropriate, and effective response to universities’ leftism laundering? Is it right-wing speakers like Charles Murray getting shut down by protesters? Departmental anti-racist statements in 2020? The Tuvel/Hypatia thing?
Revolutionizing the relationship between universities and the President obviously isn’t a conservative policy. But let’s look at the rest of this “counteroffensive” that “conservatives” support.
Is it conservative to literally upend the world order? Based on the idea that a trade deficit is a subsidy to the trade partner, or that an ally’s territory would be nice to have?
Or to steamroll through long-established democratic norms, like not using the Vice President to throw out state-certified electoral college votes?
Or violating established norms of minimal political forbearance like not removing political opponents’ security details, including other “conservatives” who step slightly out of line, and broadcasting as much to an audience rife with extremists (including seditious militia leaders who were pardoned)?
Or writing EOs targeting specific private firms?
Or defying judges and openly arguing in favor of doing so (including in a case to deliver innocent civilians into slavery)?
Or stretching the meaning of “invasion” to make it apply to illegal immigration, for the purposes of massively reducing civil liberties and increasing executive power?
Or….
If conservatives support Trump’s “counteroffensive,” then conservatism isn’t what they say it is. That real-world self-described conservatives don’t believe in what their academic apologists ascribe to them has been clear for a long time, but at this point, there aren’t even any sane pretenses about norms and traditions.
Turns out that famous academic philosophers know how to sign a petition!!!
Given their silence over the last two/three years of a genocide that their country sponsored, I thought they just didn’t read the news. My bad.
A number of comments here from both sides of arguments seem to be equating Trumpism (whatever that means) with conservatism. That identification strikes me as unfair coming from the left and horrifying coming from the right. There is as much room to be a conservative and not a Trumpist as there is to be a Marxist and not a Stalinist (or a theist and not a cultist). I don’t think this is just a matter of word-choice.
I agree that it is foolish to simply equate “Trumpism” (whatever that is) with conservatism. But equally foolish would be to ignore the relationship between the two entirely. Even if Trump is not himself an ideological conservative, he very obviously is the leader of the conservative movement (in America, at least). You can be a purist and say that movement is not “real conservatism.” But I find that as empty as Marxists claiming that Marxist political movements are not “real Marxism.” At some point, we have to leave the ivory towers and face political reality.
I see your point, but there seems to be a significant difference here.
Many politicians, for good or bad, have been conservatives. They have implemented conservative policies. Nobody denies this.
By contrast, the party line from (at least many) Marxists today is that true Marxism/communism has never been tried. This move is meant to remove all blame or cause for doubt from every single Marxist/communist regime that has ever been attempted, anywhere in the world, despite the dismal track record of all sorts of places that have apparently given it a very good shot.
Conservatives who deny that Trump represents their view are not trying to deny that *every* ostensibly conservative politician has nothing to do with conservatism: they only deny that Trump does.
To insist that Trump represents conservatives on the grounds that doing so is necessary in order to ‘face political reality’ would be like insisting that all socialists are represented by Pol Pot. Surely, there’s something like a straw man fallacy here.
Trumpism isn’t the only form conservatism can or has taken, not is it a special outlier that could be easily removed from conservatism writ large. The truth is in the middle. The political reality is that Trump’s movement’s politics (some mixture of authoritarianism, nationalism, conspiracism, populist rhetoric, xenophobia, and/or racism) are a major part of real-world conservative movements around the world. In addition to the US, similar styles of politics dominate conservative movements in Brazil, Hungary, Poland, Italy, and elsewhere, and are significant parts of the conservative coalition in Canada, France, the UK, and elsewhere.
Trumpists so dominated American conservatism that the equation of the two (considered as real-world movements, not abstract theses) is legitimate.
The history of US “conservatism” is obviously full of authoritarian racism and other key elements of Trumpism. The backlash to Reconstruction, ensuing democratic backsliding, Jim Crow, and movements to preserve Confederate pride have been massively influential in US politics. William F. Buckley, a supposed conservative luminary, opposed the Civil Rights Movement and preferred further restrictions on the franchise to enfranchising black people.
I could go on, of course. The point is that, if a conservative is to reject Trumpism in a principled way, they would have to reject a lot of contemporary and historically influential conservatism. Not just Trump.
Finally, there’s a difference between saying “I don’t support X” and actually engaging in behavior that’s not supportive of X; or even not engaging in behavior that’s supportive of X. Trump’s supposed critics in conservative intellectual circles often engage in behavior that functionally seems like support for him. See much National Review commentary or Ross Douthat columns and interviews. Or conservative academics who leap at every opportunity to make hay out of a woke excess on a college campus, but criticize Trump only under dialectical duress.