The Review: The hate-speech problem in campus protest

Are some kinds of vitriol too much? ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. At Texas Tech University, an assistant professor named Jairo Fúnez-Flores was recently [suspended]( over a series of strongly worded tweets protesting Israel. The most vitriolic: “Fuck Israel and everyone who rationalizes the genocide of Palestinians.” That’s protected extramural speech, but Texas Tech claims the temporary suspension is justified while it investigates whether Fúnez-Flores made similar comments in the classroom. Meanwhile, at the University of California at Berkeley, an Israeli lawyer named Ran Bar-Yoshafat was [prevented]( from giving an invited talk after protesters, [chanting]( “Intifada! Intifada!,” rioted, smashing windows and a door. None of this is new. Well before the war in Gaza, no topic more reliably triggered campus conflicts than Israel and Palestine, and no topic more routinely resulted in the abrogation of speech rights central to academic freedom. Two especially salient controversies: In 2014, Steven Salaita, a scholar of Native American studies, had a job offer rescinded by the University of Illinois over aggressive tweets protesting Israeli treatment of Palestinians (for instance, “At this point, if Netanyahu appeared on TV with a necklace made from the teeth of Palestinian children, would anybody be surprised?”). In 2010, a group of student protesters [attempted to prevent]( Michael Oren, then the Israeli ambassador to the United States, from giving a talk at the University of California at Irvine. Then as now, the pattern of speech suppression is asymmetrical — firings and suspensions on the one side, disruptions and heckler’s vetoes on the other. While it is worse, professionally, to be fired than to be shouted down, today’s fragile environment for academic freedom is as much the result of the normalization of the heckler’s veto as of the fear of administrative reprisal. According to the administrators who punished them, both Salaita and Fúnez-Flores are guilty of speech that is “hateful, antisemitic, and unacceptable,” in Texas Tech’s official characterization of Fúnez-Flores’s tweets. Whether the statement “Fuck Israel” is antisemitic is a matter of judgment; what is not a matter of judgment, though, is whether it is protected by academic freedom as normally conceived. It is. As Keith Whittington of the Academic Freedom Alliance [wrote]( to Texas Tech’s president, Lawrence Schovanec, “The university’s actions represent an egregious violation of the principles of freedom of expression and due process to which Texas Tech University has contractually committed itself and to which it is constitutionally required to adhere.” Tweets like Salaita’s and Fúnez-Flores’s are undeniably intemperate. It is probable that identical political sentiments less vitriolically expressed would not have gotten them in trouble. But when it comes to extramural faculty speech, an uncouth manner shouldn’t matter — and when it comes to speech protected by the First Amendment, it can’t matter. To this point, the law professors Erwin Chemerinsky and Howard Gillman in their book Free Speech on Campus quote Justice John Marshall Harlan’s majority decision in Cohen v. California (1971), which ruled that one Paul Robert Cohen was within his rights to wear a jacket emblazoned with “Fuck the Draft” in a courthouse: “Verbal tumult, discord, and even offensive utterance” are “necessary side effects of the broader enduring values which the process of open debate permits us to achieve.” It was not always obvious that this was so, either with respect to academic freedom or the First Amendment. The American Association of University Professors’ 1915 founding document on academic freedom enjoined “dignity, courtesy, and temperateness of language"; its 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom likewise encouraged faculty members, when speaking as citizens, to “exercise appropriate restraint” and to “show respect for the opinions of others.” But in 1970, the AAUP added a footnote to the “appropriate restraint” section meant to loosen any shackles it might appear to impose: “Administration should remember that teachers are citizens and should be accorded the freedom of citizens.” After 1971, professors have in theory as much a right to offend when speaking extramurally as Paul Robert Cohen. SPONSOR CONTENT | Queen's University Belfast [Pioneering a Pathways to Peace]( NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. To read this newsletter as soon as it sends, [sign up]( to receive it in your email inbox. If faculty members are not obliged to moderation when speaking as citizens, students certainly aren’t. Heatedness and hyperbole in student-protest rhetoric have been almost conventional since the 1960s, and doubtless contribute to the perception of some that, when it comes to protests over Israel and Palestine, naked bigotry has reared its head. That some of the verbal tumult on campus recently has involved more or less [blatant]( antisemitic speech is certain. But is it really the case that, as Dara Horn [wrote]( recently in The Atlantic, “the big lie” of antisemitism “is winning”? Among the most shocking incidents recounted by Horn: “The phrase ‘Gas the Jews’” was “chanted at a rally organized by NYU students and faculty.” That accusation appears to have originated in a [complaint]( brought by three NYU students against the college last November. Bella Ingber, one of the complainants, included it in the litany of antisemitic incidents she [recounted]( before Congress last December. I can discover no video or audio evidence of the chant, and it is unclear who actually heard it; another complainant, Sabrina Maslavi, [told]( CBS only that “my friend heard ‘Gas the Jews’” but did not claim to have heard it herself. The complaint itself asserts the following: “Regularly confronted with such genocidal chants as, ‘Hitler was right,’ ‘gas the Jews,’ ‘death to kikes,’ and ‘from the river to the sea,’ and other abuse, plaintiffs not only have been deprived of the ability and opportunity to fully and meaningfully participate in NYU’s educational and other programs, but they have suffered and have been put at severe risk of extreme emotional and physical injury.” Elsewhere, the complaint states that “NYU students and faculty members hurled ... threats of murder and rape” at Jewish students. Again, I can find no video or audio evidence of any of these chants on campus except for “from the river to the sea,” nor does there appear to be any reporting corroborating the claims in the suit. The complaint as written seems designed to draw an equivalence between unambiguously genocidal language and “from the river to the sea.” (Readers, if you are aware of evidence corroborating the claims in the complaint against NYU, please contact me.) Still, even if those claims fail to hold up, it’s clear that campus protests of Israel frequently employ an extremist rhetoric that, from its early [celebration]( of Hamas’s hang-gliding murderers to its more [recent]( rhyming ditties in support of Houthi militants, might plausibly be condemned as antisemitic. Is that a reason to suppress it? Chemerinsky and Gillman would say not — both because the category of “hate speech” is fundamentally unstable and because all attempts to formally prohibit it end up being either overbroad or too narrow. “There is,” they write, “simply no way to regulate hate speech without censoring ideas. That is never permissible on college campuses.” ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. The Latest THE REVIEW | OPINION [The Dark World of ‘Citation Cartels’]( By Domingo Docampo [STORY IMAGE]( Predatory journals and bad-faith scholars are gaming the system — at scale. ADVERTISEMENT THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Trump and His Allies Are Preparing to Overhaul Higher Education]( By Steven Brint [STORY IMAGE]( The sector isn’t prepared to defend itself. 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Wilford and Ethan Cutler [write about]( Raymond Aron’s final lecture, recently published by Princeton. Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com. Yours, Len Gutkin FROM THE CHRONICLE STORE [Fostering Students' Free Expression - Buy Now]( [Higher Education in 2035]( Higher education is facing an array of challenges: economic headwinds, political pressures, and shifting demographics. [Order your copy]( to help your institution prepare for what’s ahead, and discover how the sector will evolve in the coming decade. JOB OPPORTUNITIES [Search jobs on The Chronicle job board]( [Find Your Next Role Today]( Whether you are actively or passively searching for your next career opportunity, The Chronicle is here to support you throughout your job search. Get started now by [exploring 30,000+ openings]( or [signing up for job alerts](. NEWSLETTER FEEDBACK [Please let us know what you thought of today's newsletter in this three-question survey](. This newsletter was sent to {EMAIL}. 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