Campus protests that begin as anti-Israel but often turn into blatant anti-Semitic and pro-terrorist propaganda have rocked much of the country in recent months. It’s enough to make anyone wonder what kind of education is being received at higher education institutions, and what’s happening to the many students who attend these schools – especially those at elite schools. But unless protests go beyond protected speech, the real institution that should be resisted is the government. The state’s approach to policing speech has a bad history and has the potential to turn even the most hateful protesters into martyrs when the consequences have already been felt throughout society.
rattlesnake is JD Tuccille’s weekly newsletter. If you care about government overreach and real threats to everyday freedoms, this is for you.
Bureaucratic scrutiny
“The Department of Education is required by law to prevent discrimination based on race, color, or national origin in higher education,” the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) noted last week. “Now, the agency is telling college and university administrators they can only do so by violating the first The amendment can achieve this important goal.”
FIRE points to agreements between the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the University of Michigan, City University of New York, and Lafayette College, which are under investigation for their handling of campus protests following the October 7 Hamas incident against Israel attack. The agreements signal official dissatisfaction with how the school has responded to protests and demand stronger action in the future.
“OCR found no evidence that the university complied with Title VI requirements to assess whether incidents, individually or cumulatively, created a hostile environment for students, faculty, and staff and, if so, to take reasonably calculated steps to end the hostile environment and correct it. its behavior.
FIRE counters that federal bureaucrats appear to want universities to view student expressions as promoting a certain amount of bad sentiment, whether coordinated or not. Once the invisible line of accumulated objectionable rhetoric is crossed and a hostile environment is deemed to exist, the paper suggests, official intervention becomes necessary.
How to determine this point?
The agreement commits the University of Michigan to conduct a “climate assessment” to assess the extent to which “students and/or employees experience or witness discrimination and harassment based on race, color, and national origin.” These assessments will then be used to “determine response steps for OCR review and approval” to address hostile speech on campus.
“This unconstitutional order rewrites the rules of campus speech,” said Alex Morey, vice president of campus advocacy at FIRE. “OCR has invented an entirely new standard that unnecessarily pits First Amendment rights against federal anti-discrimination laws and The threat of punishment dangled from every discussion.”
Speech is protected even if it is offensive
This is not to deny that much of what is said at anti-Israel protests is despicable. While many attendees called for an end to the war out of concern for the people of Gaza, some Jews were told to “go back to Poland.” Hamas’ military wing was urged to “kill another soldier immediately”. The invasion and massacre of October 7 also received public and repeated praise.
But it’s hateful speech It bears repeating that it is protected by the First Amendment.
Blatant harassment and violence no protected. Molotov cocktails and attacks can easily attract police attention. This is true regardless of the political affiliation of those guilty.
But it goes too far to require a “climate assessment” of schools to determine whether campus speech has crossed some invisible threshold of hostility that warrants official intervention. Any such assessment is inevitably subjective and tends to be on the restrictive side, as administrators worry about invoking the wrath of federal bureaucrats and the financial stick they wield as potential punishment.
Government falls short on policing speech
The fact is that government officials have a terrible record of monitoring speech and protest. This was true in the 1970s, when a church commission found that the FBI “placed more emphasis on domestic dissent than organized crime,” and more recently, when the FBI noted that Revolutionary War imagery suggested violent extremism.
Government intervention improves few areas of life, and political debate is no exception. The government’s actions could turn protesters into martyrs, joining the ranks of dissidents subject to state surveillance.
Free speech has social consequences
In fact, apart from acts of violence, government action in response to these protests has been largely unnecessary. Overall, the protests have alienated Americans. In May, YouGov found that “Americans are more likely to strongly or somewhat oppose (47%) than support (28%) pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses.”
This is also reflected in the way society as a whole treats graduation protesters. Last month, college information company Intelligent polled college students and graduates looking for jobs. “Three in 10 pro-Palestinian student activists have had their job offers rescinded in the past six months,” the survey found. More than two-thirds said job losses were definitely (31%) or probably (37%) due to caused by their radicalism. Prospective employers appear to be concerned about this issue when considering new employees; more than 70% of respondents said they were asked about participation in pro-Palestinian protests during interviews.
Sometimes, when you use your right to free expression to say terrible things, others don’t want to be associated with you. For a free society, this is a more appropriate punishment than a government-mandated assessment of the climate of speech on campus.
Of course, many universities have created their own problems in the past by failing to consistently protect speech and clarify the line between intolerance of legally actionable harassment and actual violence. That leaves them scrambling when a new wave of protests breaks out on (some) campuses to define boundaries and apply established rules.
For those interested, the Chicago Principles developed by the University of Chicago in 2014 are a good place to start. They are certainly better than having federal officials impose scrutiny through the bureaucracy.
