Last fall, having drunk deeply of the Left’s cocktail of antisemitism, post-colonialism, and general nuisance-making, a small but virulent minority of American college students began “protesting” for “Palestine.” Inaugurated mere days after Hamas’s Oct. 7 sneak-attack against Israel, these agitations crescendoed with the establishment, in the spring of this year, of “Occupy Wall Street”-style encampments on university quads.
Four months later, a new school year is upon us, and Israel’s war marches on. It is worth reflecting on what we learned from the ordeal, as well as what administrators and reformers ought to do if and when student activists resume their “struggle.”
A number of today’s undergrads were actually listening when adults taught them Oppression Theory for 13 years. 1) A loud minority of students is more radical than we thought.
The first lesson is that a number of today’s undergrads were actually listening when adults taught them Oppression Theory for 13 straight years. As a result, the spring’s protesters used language that shocks the conscience. “From the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea” is a call for the total annihilation of the Jewish state, just as “Globalize the Intifada” urges the elimination of all Jews everywhere. This is the rhetoric of madmen. That not every protester believes what he preaches is small comfort. Many do. To unteach such hatreds will be the work of decades, just as teaching them was in the first place.
2) Professors can’t be trusted to be the adults in the room.
As Campus Watch’s A.J. Caschetta wrote for the Martin Center in November, many of today’s tenured faculty members are yesterday’s campus radicals. Consequently, few object when their colleagues vote to boycott Israel or host brazenly antisemitic events. In an ideal world, professors would help students explore the moral and geopolitical questions raised by the ongoing war—or at least get kids back in the classroom by threatening unexcused absences and “F’s.” That such a move feels laughably unrealistic tells us much about the current state of the professoriate. Today’s instructors seem as likely to be arrested alongside their charges as they are to correct students’ ignorance and misapprehensions.
3) Progressive insistence that speech is “violence” has been insincere from the start.
We heard it for years from activists, tech workers, Democratic apparatchiks, and social-media mavens: Any words that cause discomfort in another human being are a form of “violence.” The comedy of Ricky Gervais is “violently transphobic.” Opposing student-debt elimination is “policy violence.” Pro-life sentiments are both “violent” and “triggering.” And on the list went for most of the last decade.
Nobody meant a word of it. Instead, progressives in the “language is violence” school were merely reaching for whatever rhetorical tools lay at hand at the moment. Now that leftists are the ones shouting, e.g., “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” speech is once again sacred and protected by law. On the one hand, higher-ed reformers should cheer the fact that progressives are once again championing constitutional virtues. (Of course, the manner of their doing so is despicable and ought to lead to mass expulsions.) On the other hand, we must never again be cowed for one second by what is plainly a dishonest argument. Speech is not violence. Violence is. What is good for the pro-Hamas goose must be good for the pro-life gander.
What is the better play? Abiding by one’s own values or forcing one’s enemies to live by their terrible rules? 4) Conservatives, too, are hopelessly confused about free speech.
What is the better play? Abiding by one’s own values or forcing one’s enemies to live by their terrible rules? To no small extent, this question is a stumbling block placed smack in the middle of the right-of-center coalition. I understand, of course, the desire for vengeance: Conservatives have been silenced on campus for decades, and we finally have public opinion on our side. Why not use the power of law to silence those who cheer the decapitation of infants?
The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson makes this point as eloquently as I’ve seen it. The ideology prevalent in university encampments is “incompatible with Western civilization and an open society. If it’s allowed to grow and fester as it has been for the past three decades (at least), it will destroy the societies that once tolerated it.”
I am extremely sympathetic to this view. Nevertheless, while I will not break out the Man for All Seasons quote, I will grit my teeth and insist that antisemitic speech must be given the full protection of law, in alignment with First Amendment jurisprudence. No, we can’t shut protesters down because we hate what they’re saying. No, we can’t jail them for their words. (Davidson doesn’t go nearly that far, but others have.) Yes, we must tolerate, within bounds to be discussed momentarily, even noxious ideas.
What that doesn’t mean, let us be clear, is that campus protesters must be allowed to spew their poison in whatever manner they see fit. Indeed, the familiar leftist slogan that freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences is worth appropriating. Let the kids shout their hatred of Jews and the West to their hearts’ content. But the moment they trespass, barricade, assault a cop, or lay a hand on a student wearing a yarmulke, haul their butts to jail. Moreover, hold them accountable for their racism. Just as I would be unlikely to get many job offers while waving a Confederate flag, campus Jew-baiters ought to lose the occasional internship. As those of us on the right are told constantly, nobody has to hire you if they find your views obnoxious.
The moment protesters trespass, barricade, assault a cop, or lay a hand on a student wearing a yarmulke, haul their butts to jail. 5) Frat bros are the future.
The social penalty for opposing leftism as an undergraduate is not what it once was. Just ask the UNC frat bros who defended the American flag against Students for Justice in Palestine activists outside Gardner Hall. Not every campus conservative will be given an RNC speaking slot and half a million bucks to throw a keg party. Still, it is reassuring to note that the mainstream media barely bothered to drag the fraternity counter-protesters through the mud. So obviously patriotic and admirable were the young men’s actions that one is tempted to revise one’s opinion of the whole silly Greek-life system. Will our boys struggle to find friends, dates, and employment? I strongly doubt it. The Left’s naked Hamas-love has weakened its grip on the public imagination. Conservatives who once slinked across campus should hold their heads high.
6) College officials can afford to act boldly.
By the same token, the time for administrative bravery is at hand. If the last few months have demonstrated anything, it is that college presidents who enforce campus rules receive little pushback, while those who capitulate to rioters—e.g., Sonoma State’s luckless and now-former president—risk their careers.
Already, as I write these words, universities are signaling that they will not tolerate a reprise of last spring’s lawlessness. As the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month, “The University of Denver is banning protest tents [and] Indiana University wants people to stop writing on the walls or holding late-night rallies.” Elsewhere, Harvard is requiring students to seek advance approval to use bullhorns, and the University of California System has forbidden student encampments and masks that veil protesters’ identities.
Will these reforms hold? If university officials are smart, they will. Higher education as an institution is in no position to further alienate the American public, and the American public dislikes college kids who wave genocidal banners instead of going to class. Neither are boards of trustees likely to stand by administrators who announce their moral unfitness at every turn. If a college president doesn’t want to go the way of Minouche Shafik (Columbia), Liz Magill (Penn), Claudine Gay (Harvard), and Martha Pollack (Cornell), he will keep his pro-Hamas contingent in line.
If, having purchased the right to sit in class, students choose not to use it, well, their money still spends. 7) Campus radicals can’t be coddled.
The bottom line is this: We have taught students badly and are suffering the consequences. While the Constitution guarantees undergraduate racists the right to speak their minds, we needn’t pull them into an institutional embrace.
Late last month, the influential Young Democratic Socialists of America passed a resolution calling for a “national student strike,” an action designed to shut down American campuses in the name of Palestinian “liberation.” As one student told the Chronicle of Higher Education, “A university’s primary function is education … and if students do not attend class, a university can’t function.”
This is exactly wrong. While it will please no one to hear it, a university’s “primary function” is selling credentials to students who wish to buy them. If, having purchased the right to sit in class, students choose not to use it, well, their money still spends. To put it another way, universities should set attendance policies and assignment deadlines and enforce them. If a sophomore is too busy protesting to work, give her a zero. There is certainly no ethical reason to do otherwise. If university policy forbids as much, the policy should be changed immediately.
We have arrived at an inflection point in the history of campus radicalism. Public opinion, common sense, American ideals, and basic decency stand against the mob. If we let them, our most petulant students will take over our quads again, chanting their foolish doctrines until their every demand is met. Let’s not allow it this year. Free speech doesn’t mean free rein.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.