Demanding “Yes” or “No” On Free Speech in Higher Education
Photo by KKPCW, CC BY-SA 4.0
We’ve all seen the footage from last Tuesday’s congressional hearing, haven’t we? Rep. Elise Stefanik had the presidents of three major universities; Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania, and asked them about rules involving antisemitism on campus. It was a disaster for higher education and over the weekend one of those three presidents, Liz Magill of UPenn resigned in shame.
At the hearing, Rep. Stefanik pushed them to answer “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your] rules or code of conduct” with a simple “Yes” or “No” and they all said it depends on the context.
You know that old gag about driving on the highway, where everyone driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower is a grandmother? It reminds me of that.
When I exit an online conversation it’s because the other person is unhinged, doesn’t respond to my points, or is a waste of my time. When other people exit conversations with me, it’s because they are cowards who have seen that they’ve lost and are running away instead of admitting it.
By the same token, when I won’t give a simple “Yes” or “No” it’s because the question is too nuanced, and those simple answers are insufficient. When I demand a “Yes” or “No” from someone else, it’s because they are weasels who will hide behind a wall of empty words to avoid the question.
That’s a legit issue. Look at the Nov. 28th interview on CNN where reporter Bianna Golodryga tried to get Sarah Hendriks, deputy executive director for UN Women to address why they haven’t issued any comments about the Oct. 7th Hamas attack which included rape and other forms of sexual violence. Hendriks then spends 90 seconds running out the clock, speaking about the “context” of their process without ever answering the question.
Like everything else in these televised congressional events, the questions did not exist to learn answers but to generate video clips; and boy did we get some video clips.
I’d love to sit here and tell you that in the three and a half minute clip that went viral, the three college presidents did indeed try to run out the clock and Rep. Stefanik correctly called them out on it. But watching the clip again today I instead see three untalented public speakers trying to invoke a philosophy that until five minutes ago they rejected: Freedom of Speech on campus.
Things are about to get worse for free speech
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression ranked Harvard and UPenn in their bottom five universities nationwide for this year, while MIT is ranked “average” – but average in a pool where most institutions fail. It’s fair to conclude that this sudden embrace of “free speech” has a motivation beyond doing what’s right
For what it’s worth, my former hero Ken White at Popehat thought the university presidents had the correct philosophy, but he spent half the time pushing bogus Great Replacement Theory charges against Rep. Stefanik, who correctly criticized the mainstream “Demographics is Destiny” argument made by people like James Carville and tied it to immigration policy. This clumsy attempt to label someone an anti-semite reminds me why I don’t admire him anymore, even though his legal analysis is exceptional.
White went on to list some examples that are clearly Anti-Jewish bigotry wrapped in a veneer of anti-Israeli politics but showed some examples the college presidents could have listed to defend the “context” where someone can advocate for genocide without breaking a rule, such as during a philosophical discussion about violent revolution.
He’s right – an open discussion in academia should allow people to discuss difficult ideas such as when organized violence should be permitted, and we can have that while not allowing people to target specific people on campus and demand that they be killed.
If you think that sounds like unproductive speech not worth protecting, there are more dire examples. Free speech rights should have prevented the University of Oklahoma students caught on video singing a racist chant about lynching black people.
Tyler Cowen wrote that what the college presidents said was strangled by lawyers and HR reps, and “…by their fear that their universities might be sued, and their need to placate internal interest groups. That is a major problem, in addition to their unwillingness to condemn various forms of rhetoric for violating their codes of conduct.”
He’s right too; it’s easy to get caught up in the philosophical question of what someone can say in defense of violence and forget to acknowledge that some people are openly supporting Hamas, even if it doesn’t break the rules.
My goal is not to beat up on people when they do the right thing but to say I don’t believe they are sincere. On paper, it’s nice that these institutions are speaking up for free speech, but it’s a feigned position and they will abandon it when they encounter any resistance.
In fact, some already have.
Between the hearing and her resignation, UPenn President McGill released a short video saying their speech rules are built on constitutional law, but said “these policies need to be clarified and evaluated.”
That’s chilling.
Before they demanded Magill resign, UPenn’s business school leadership, the Wharton Board of Advisors proposed new “standards of behavior” for students at the public university, including a ban on “hate speech” that “incites violence” and that students and staff “…will not use language that threatens the physical safety of community members.”
This is the same school that gagged female student-athletes who were uncomfortable with biologically male trans students in their locker room, threatening their scholarships if they spoke out. If you thought free speech was bad at UPenn back then, it can only get worse when saying “Lia Thomas is a man” is punished as physical endangerment.
Magill is staying on as the interim president, and the person they replace her with will likely be an identical robot. UPenn is hoping that putting her head on a pike will prevent more donors from rebelling. I know it’s enjoyable to see bad actors suffer public humiliation like she just did, but if you want to improve free speech in higher education you have to change the structure and the culture, not the figureheads.
If I had been asking questions at the congressional hearing, I wouldn’t have demanded “Yes” or “No” answers from the college presidents on speech policies. I would have asked them why they are invoking free speech values now when they’ve never respected them before.
I have not heard of any colleges kicking students out for calling for genocide or other speech that is supporting Hamas.
The problem isn’t that the answer is, “it depends”.
The problem is the answer is “no”.Report
I think the OP is asking for the answer to be “No,” FWIW.Report
That would be fine… if colleges weren’t in the business of suppressing speech… and if some of the things which we’re hearing about didn’t cross the lines drawn for the rest of society.Report
The first part I generally agree with, and think the attempt to treat private postsecondary educational institutions as if they are (or should be) bound by Constitutional concerns is pretty foolish.
The second part, I really don’t know, and am also not 100% sure of the relevance. The rest of society isn’t generally subject to threats of expulsion or other academic disciplinary procedures.
Anyway, I think I’m on team, “Depends,” given the existing way that universities generally decide these things.Report
If the U is going to crack down on things that aren’t illegal then they’re on some level of defensible ground.
That does mean that they’re tollerating speech against Jews that they’d never tolerate against other minorities.
Crossing lines the rest of society has drawn takes us into “outright illegal” territory and the U deciding that nothing should be done is a problem. It’s like how they used to treat rape, i.e. by not calling the police because the U is in charge.Report
That does mean that they’re tollerating speech against Jews that they’d never tolerate against other minorities.
I don’t think this is really true, not because I don’t believe that they aren’t tolerating a lot of very ugly anti-semitic rhetoric (they are!) but because a lot of it doesn’t map cleanly to stuff that would be applicable to other minority groups.
Which, again, pushes me to, “It depends.”
Crossing lines the rest of society has drawn takes us into “outright illegal” territory and the U deciding that nothing should be done is a problem.
It is, but generally speaking, actually advocating for genocide isn’t even illegal.Report
Even though ostensibly private most, if not all, of the types of schools in question have agreed to be bound by a number of federal rules and requirements in order for students to be eligible for federally backed loans and other forms of aid (plus all kinds of other goodies and benefits in terms of how they are treated). Part of the tension is that they want to be private for these purposes while still benefiting from the spigot of public money going into higher ed. That’s the reason they won’t just tear up those contracts and walk away, but if they want the money there is going to be some public say and expectations around how the institutions are run.Report
Yeah, but I don’t think any of those amount to, “Be bound by First Amendment when it comes to regulating student speech.”Report
Absent agreeing to something with the government or with their students and faculty expressly saying that I think you’re probably right (one of our con law scholars would have to weigh in, it is not my area of expertise).
My point is more that I don’t think this is quite the simple public/private 1A distinction. I think what’s really going on is that prestigious private universities maintain their special place by portraying themselves to the larger public as dedicated to the kind of classical liberal values from which the 1A was derived, while operating much differently internally. The open question is how much all of the largesse they get is contingent on that former understanding, which people increasingly know is inaccurate.Report
This criticism of universities is common, and always has some sort of “fallen from grace” theme.
That universities USED to be bastions of something called “classical liberalism” but have fallen from grace and become corrupted.
But the existence of some Edenic period is faulty.
Its not to say that universities were always corrupt, but matching my comment below, there have always been boundaries and taboos of what things Must Not be Said, and groups which Must Not Be Offended.
I think people only notice the boundaries when they get moved.Report
“I Am Altering the Deal, Pray I Don’t Alter It Any Further.”Report
Anyone with an Edenic view of anything is at minimum missing a lot by omission.
However I would suggest considering the role that higher ed has played in the social contract in the post war era, not just in actuality (which is always murkier), but in terms of how people understand the ‘deal’ that comes with being an American. It goes without saying that 100 years ago these places didn’t admit blacks, or Jews, or often even Catholics. They were still finishing schools for the WASP elite. However, we had integration in the military, and the GI Bill, and the civil rights revolutions in law and culture in the 1960s. All of those things reset the expectations on what higher ed does, what its purpose is, and how admission should work. The places themselves have echoed those exact sentiments, and held themselves out as having a higher mission.
Which is why ‘well the boundaries moved’ as, they certainly have before, as if it’s some value neutral, agnostic thing doesn’t make sense to me as a response. The people running these places moved the boundaries by choice, and with a specific purpose and worldview in mind. It is more than fair to analyze that on the merits, and to ask whether they still deserve the special place in light of that. At minimum their defensiveness suggests to me that they aren’t as confident in the boundary moving project as one would think. If they were why would they be so upset whenever they get caught in the shift?Report
The people running these places moved the boundaries by choice, and with a specific purpose and worldview in mind.
Yes, when GIs and women and black people were allowed to attend the finishing schools, that too was a moving of boundaries, with a specific purpose and worldview in mind.
And even at the time, people were saying:
It is more than fair to analyze that on the merits, and to ask whether they still deserve the special place in light of that.
Specifically it was William F. Buckley who said this, that universities in 1951 were forcing secularism and New Deal Liberalism on young minds and suppressing dissenting views.
What is most often missing, is the “examining on the merits.”
A lot of people want to shout about suppressing of speech, without stopping to examine the merits of the speech in question.
For example:
What are the merits of drawing a line between “Supporting a Palestinian state” and “Supporting the elimination of Israel?”Report
I’m not the one that’s arguing for suppression, or against the old, post war (stated) worldview.Report
RE: What are the merits of drawing a line between “Supporting a Palestinian state” and “Supporting the elimination of Israel?”
It’s what we should do… however we’re going to find an uncomfortably high number of people are doing the second.
We’re in this pickle (for speech) because we’ve been pretending that the second group doesn’t exist and everyone is in the first group.
Not only does that group exist but it’s a popular view with some groups.
Of course we also have “useful idiots” who doesn’t understand where the Jordan river is.Report
It’s what we should do… however we’re going to find an uncomfortably high number of people are doing the second.
In the broad sense, sure, but it’s entirely unclear what light it will shed on the way university administrators should be conducting themselves in the face of protests against Israel.Report
RE: what light it will shed on the way university administrators should be conducting themselves in the face of protests against Israel.
The typical protester on public ground is ignored, like normal. The protester who is at the front door of a Jewish student threatening them does not.
The activist who posts herself calling for more dead bodies gets treated as though she’s calling for more dead bodies.
The administrators should follow their rules, even if that results in supporting Jews against Palestinians.Report
The protester who is at the front door of a Jewish student threatening them does not.
Yeah, definitely… but I don’t think that changes depending on the specific contours of their anti-Israel position.
The activist who posts herself calling for more dead bodies gets treated as though she’s calling for more dead bodies.
On the other hand, this seems really over-inclusive, unless you mean they’re literally saying, “More dead bodies!”
Maybe I missed a viral outrage…?Report
RE: unless you mean they’re literally saying, “More dead bodies!”
If she’s looking at 10/7 and saying how this needs to be done again and again then she’s calling for more dead bodies.
Ending her student status probably also deports her back to Gaza but whatever.Report
I think what’s really going on is that prestigious private universities maintain their special place by portraying themselves to the larger public as dedicated to the kind of classical liberal values from which the 1A was derived, while operating much differently internally.
This is plausible. My objection to the original argument is the one I usually make in this context: the commitments you want a university to make to support the classically liberal values that universities are supposed to support line up badly with the requirements of the First Amendment.Report
Also true.
From a pure outcome perspective I’d have no problem if these places shuddered, or devolved in the popular imagination to nothing more than luxury resorts for lesser scions of the wealthy, with the real prestige coming from state flagships. But being a state school guy myself I would think that.Report
“the commitments you want a university to make to support the classically liberal values that universities are supposed to support line up badly with the requirements of the First Amendment.”
Isn’t “do not censor speech” a classically-liberal value?Report
No, it isn’t.
At least, not without a crapton of caveats and exceptions and provisos.
Seriously, SCOTUS has spent about 200 years trying to figure out what speech is protected and what can be censored, and under what conditions.
“We should totally censor this particular type of speech under these conditions” is indeed part of the “classical liberal” tradition.Report
““We should totally censor this particular type of speech under these conditions” is indeed part of the “classical liberal” tradition.”
*rolleyes* so when you keep posting those links about how Texas Conservatives did this-or-that rotten thing to suppress speech about trans people, that’s actually them being Classically Liberal?Report
No, because liberalism, classical or otherwise, allows censorship but demands a reasonable justification.
If conservatives want to be seen as “classically liberal” they need to put forward a reasonable justifications for suppressing speech.
And so far, their justifications have been preposterous.
Once again (because it appears to be necessary) everyone agrees on this point even if it takes a hundred exchanges to get them to admit it.Report
Chip, that trick doesn’t work when you show people that your thumb is on the scale. You have to hide that.Report
That’s missing pillsy’s point, which is that a private university under principles of freedom of speech is allowed to police speech within itself however it wants. It doesn’t have to tolerate any speech it doesn’t want to. It can be completely arbitrary in what it does and doesn’t allow and no one, including the government, has any say over that.
What’s created the tension is that all of these places tend to advertise themselves as being committed to principles that are very different from what they do in practice.Report
RE: being committed to principles that are very different from what they do in practice.
The disconnect in principles isn’t with “free speech”; They’re clearly not really in favor and haven’t been for decades.
The disconnect in principles is with “we want a safe place where minority students are not threated” in combo with “threatening genocide against Jews is fine because they’re Jews”.Report
I don’t think that’s right, though I’m sure that’s how the Mossad is hoping the American public interprets things.
What they’ve been doing is equating words and expressions of ideas that are inconsistent with a very specific political world view based in all these silly critical theories not as debate, but as code of conduct and similar bureaucratic violations, while expressions of the approved world view are permitted to be as extreme and nonsensical as the speaker likes, for no reason other than its affirming the world view.
Under the approved world view, the Palestinian cause is the only legitimate one so they can say whatever crazy sh*t they want (this is ironic, as for those who have been paying attention, it was criticizing the Israeli perspective that used to get you in trouble). It has very little to do with the hypothetical targets of the speech, and everything to do with the worldview being expressed (i.e. the approved one).
It isn’t that if these places had any principles they would be coming down on the pro-Palestinian students. It’s that they wouldn’t have been doing all of the other stuff against speakers that dissent from the approved world view that they have been for years and years.Report
TL:DR – because these universities won’t platform Naz.i’s they are bad.Report
Save it for twitter.Report
I don’t have time for that cesspool.Report
Then say something intelligent. Because what you just said makes me think you wouldn’t know an actual nat’l socialist if one swatted you with a wet towel.Report
I responded directly to that, which is a tired trope about how all the ultra right, Christian Nationalist, Naz.i aligned people trying to speak on campuses should be platformed.
Which I am sure you are smart enough to know as you typed it.Report
*shrug* this is the game they built, the rules they wrote, the story they wanted told. They wanted a world where as soon as someone did something questionable on camera that person got wished away to the cornfield, and now they’ve got it. They built a Death Laser and their intentions were good and pure, and they thought that was enough, and they honestly did believe that anyone who said otherwise was really just a Bad Guy in disguise.Report
everyone driving faster than you is a maniac and everyone driving slower is a grandmother
Officer, I was moving with the flow of traffic. The fact that you keep pulling over people like me indicates deep institutional rot.Report
“For what it’s worth, my former hero Ken White at Popehat thought the university presidents had the correct philosophy, but he spent half the time pushing bogus Great Replacement Theory charges against Rep. Stefanik, who correctly criticized the mainstream ‘Demographics is Destiny’ argument made by people like James Carville and tied it to immigration policy.”
I was never a regular Popehat reader, but I have a vaguely good impression of Ken White from ten years ago that’s sticky enough that I’m still kind of surprised every time I’m reminded what a sleazebag he’s become.Report
Unmedicated Bipolar Disorder Type 1 is a hell of a drug and not for amateurs.Report
Where is this quote from?Report
From the “Demanding ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ On Free Speech in Higher Education,” by Michael Hirschbrunnen. I think I saw a copy up at the top of this page.Report
Once more, everyone, everywhere, with no exceptions, believes that speech must have boundaries, but most people are uncomfortable saying so.
So we get all sorts of artful dances about how a particular suppression of speech isn’t really suppression of speech, but is in fact something else entirely.Report
For me the boundaries are here.
For you the boundaries are there.
What don’t you understand?Report
Yes, that is the dilemma.Report
It’s only a dilemma if you start whining about it.Report
A lot of people seem to have issues where two things can be true. In this case, the issue is, a question can be:
1. Asked in a bad-faith and trollish manner and meant to score political points with the base;
2. Also be a straight-forward question.
Congressional hearings like this are not really anything but shows for politicians to preen to the camera and the red-meat base and I am surprised about how many people go into them without this realization seemingly.Report
You’d think that the college leadership would be sophisticated enough to run rings around these Republican neanderthals.Report
The problem is the Neanderthals are correct here.
The student speech code doesn’t allow them to point out that the former-male swimmer doesn’t swim like a born-female because it would hurt her feelings. However the code does allow them to call for genocide with hundreds of dead bodies on the ground to showcase that they’re serious.Report
You don’t hang around with academics much do you?Report
Academics? I was talking about college leadership.Report
um they are all academics bro. Some still teach and publish while running schools.Report
I know that the preznit of Harvard doesn’t do that. Does the preznit of Penn?
You know, the ones who are currently bracing against the crapstorm that we’re talking about.Report
um yeah, the President of Harvard does (from Wikipedia):
And according to Google Scholar she was publishing regularly through at least 2020.
Liz Magill (Same source):
I could go on man. These are academics who came to their leadership positions the normal way – by doing their scholarship, accepting promotions and moving around.
What did you think they were?Report
There’s currently a major plagiarism scandal going on with Claudine Gay. Like, she lifted a whole bunch of other people for her “scholarship”.
This is happening, like, *RIGHT NOW*.Report
And? You somehow think that means she’s no an academic? Somehow refutes my statements?Report
If she plagiarized the work of others, I’d say that, to the extent that that is representative of academics, it reflects really poorly on the academics.
As such, I’d say that she’s not representative of them.Report
well considering that the accusation of plagiarism comes from Chris Rufo who is – checks notes – definitely not an academic and has – checks notes again – an openly anti-university bias, I’m not sure they need much credance.
Especially since her dissertation advisor is openly refuting that she plagiarized his works, which is one of Rufo’s contentions. (https://www.thedailybeast.com/harvard-president-claudine-gays-thesis-adviser-gary-king-shoots-down-plagiarism-accusation)
There’s also the minorly inconvenient (for both Rufo and you) issue that her scholarly publications have all been peer reviewed which mostly (though not every single time in thousands of applications) roots that out before it gets published.Report
I’m not sure that pointing to “peer review” at this point demonstrates what we wish it had demonstrated in, say, the previous era. As for the guy responsible for advising her defending her… well, he kinda has to, doesn’t he?
It’s not like he can say “whoops, I totally missed this! In my defense, I was drinking a lot of brandy at that point in my life.”Report
Speaking of plagiarism…
Report
Once again, Philip H, you are one of the few people actually paying attention to things.
For everyone else, as far as I can tell, a lot of the claim she plagiarized is basically a _grammatical_ argument.
I.e, she basically did this: George Washington said that it is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company. [inline cite to him saying that]
Instead of: George Washington said “It is far better to be alone, than to be in bad company.” [inline cite to him saying that]
There a lot of people pretending this means she plagiarized text, text that she was very clearly quoting as someone’s else words and cited very plainly.
Because it’s not in quotes, you see. That means she’s trying to pretend she wrote it herself.
And they may, in a technical sense, be correct that is ‘plagiarism’, but that’s mostly because the definition of plagiarism is often rather stupid and nonsensical broad, and fails to understand that directly repeating things others have said is often better if those things not actually the point of the paper!
In any paper, there are things that are clearly supposed to be your ideas, and should be your ideas even if you got them from elsewhere. And also there are things that are _not_, are just you explaining something like a new methodology for doing something. Forcing people to rewrite a technical explanation of things like that instead of just repeating it and citing where it came from is absurd and creates a place for errors to be introduced for no reason. It’s actually _not_ good to make people do that in papers.
Likewise, if you’re literally trying to explain someone else’s thoughts and positions, it’s actually _bad_ to rephrase them. You’re supposed to quote them in quote marks, but that can get incredibly awkward in phrasing. But if you don’t put those quote marks, even if you have made it _extremely_ clear you are saying what they said, it’s ‘plagiarism’, because most plagiarism codes are extremely broad in stupid ways.Report
“Congressional hearings like this are not really anything but shows for politicians to preen to the camera and the red-meat base and I am surprised about how many people go into them without this realization seemingly.”
What were your thoughts on the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings?Report
It was a huge missed opportunity.Report
UPDATE: Yale to add ‘Israeli’ back to dining hall label after realizing that ‘Israeli couscous’ is an ‘actual ingredient’
https://www.campusreform.org/article/update-yale-to-add-israeli-back-to-dining-hall-label-after-realizing-that-israeli-couscous-is-an-actual-ingredient/24479
“A Yale University spokesperson told Newsweek that the word “Israeli” had originally been removed because of student concerns regarding country or ethnicity labels on dishes in general, but that in this case the word “Israeli” will be added back to the label, considering that ‘Israeli couscous’ is an “actual ingredient.””
Right…..student concerns regarding country or ethnic labels……right. Now I’d like to know the quantity consumed over the last few year’s and whether or not its dropped recently.Report