Free Speech, Violence, and Closing Colleges
In 2017, according to the Harvard Crimson, “Harvard rescinded admissions offers to at least ten prospective members of the Class of 2021 after the students traded sexually explicit memes and messages that sometimes targeted minority groups in a private Facebook group chat.” The emphasis is mine.
Yet today, as students at Columbia, Yale, NYU, and elsewhere publicly chant anti-Semitic slogans that transcend any pretenses of a line between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism, threaten and in some cases physically attack their fellow students who are Jewish, and interrupt the operations of their campuses, the response has been… different.
Over the last decade, those on college campuses have increasingly said that speech can be violence. They have accordingly and increasingly canceled speakers with whom they disagreed—often through the heckler’s veto—in flagrant violation of free speech. The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has been tracking these incidents since 1998 and has seen them skyrocket over the past decade. Attempts to cancel speakers were over four times higher in 2023 than they were in 2012. Only a few months into 2024, colleges are on pace for having the most “deplatforming” attempts in one year. And roughly 39% of the attempts to cancel speakers have been successful since 1998.
Yet now college faculty members and students are actively arguing that actual violence, attempts to shut down debate and civil dialogue, the defiance of college rules, and the interruption of campus operations—Columbia has canceled in-person classes for the rest of the term, for example—are all protected speech.
That backdrop makes the release of our latest Future U. episode timely. Titled “Fighting for Free Speech on Campus,” Jeff Selingo and I interviewed Greg Lukianoff (he writes the terrific Substack
), the president and CEO of FIRE and co-author of the bestselling book The Coddling of the American Mind with , as well as the new book, The Canceling of the American Mind with .Greg is known as among the staunchest defenders of the First Amendment and free speech. He has defended—correctly in my view—the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, which occurred at the University of Pennsylvania before October 7th and sparked an outcry among some donors. But as he said on our show, the First Amendment does have limits. And they are smart and sensible. Here’s Greg:
I think the First Amendment has a lot of sensible limitations in it. And I think one of the smartest things we do that other countries don't is we use categorical exceptions, not balancing tests, because balancing tests, you can see them in action as soon as the political attitudes shift. Suddenly, if you have something a little teeter-totter, all the weight can be on one side of it overnight, depending on the political passions of the moment. The categorical approach is a little bit more like choice architecture for judges basically saying, "Listen, if it doesn't fit inside this little box and there are strict rules for what fits inside this little box, you can't censor it."
So I think there is no such thing as a free speech absolutist, at least not one that I've actually met. I am a viewpoint absolutist though, and I do think that people are entitled to their viewpoint and people should be allowed to play with ideas and engage in devil's advocacy even if they believe horrible things, partially because it's valuable to know if people think horrible things. And for that matter, if you're trying to actually produce ideas, you have to always be going, "Well, what if we're completely wrong? What if the exact opposite of what we believe is wrong? How would we even know that and how rich that area is?" So in terms of a lot of things we saw on campus, and we were just to be clear, very clear on this, after October 7th, yeah, we've defended a lot of pro-Palestinian students in the past couple of months, but we've also seen a lot of unprotected speech on campus in the last couple of months.
We've seen a lot of outright assault, which should be punished. It's not extreme speech. It's the opposite of speech violence. I always say that you need to be highly tolerant of opinion. You should have no tolerance for violence. And I mean, no. When it comes to the thing that happened at Berkeley just a week ago where they chased off an IDF speaker and smashed, overran where he was speaking. No, the students who engaged in violence, in my opinion at this point, should probably be expelled. And the ones who organized it who does the favor of having in all caps shut it down when they were organizing it should probably be punished as well. But so things that aren't protected, true threats aren't and shouldn't be protected, intimidation, which basically means something similar to truth that's making someone feel like they're being targeted and are in danger, discriminatory harassment on campus, if severe persistent and pervasive singling out of someone on the basis of a protected characteristic, that can also be punished as well.
Now, that's a high bar, and it should be because otherwise you end up in a situation in which you can just go after opinions you don't like. So I think that the exceptions to free speech, as understood on campus, actually make a great deal of sense.
I think the conclusions from the conversation, which we recorded well before the recent events at Columbia and elsewhere, speak for themselves. But I was also curious about civility on college campuses and cultivating an environment conducive to conversation. Greg said:
But as to things like civility, I wish we taught that stuff. I mean, that's one of the things that I think is such a problem. And one thing that we did the research department FIRE couldn't be prouder of, and one of the things that we did was we compared some of the schools that had the worst rankings when it came to free speech on their campus, and we compared them whether or not they'd had more anti-Semitic incidents on campus. And we found that, yeah, actually a lot of these campuses that are bad for free speech are also bad for, they're high on anti-Semitism for at least according to the data that we could put together.
And that doesn't really surprise us. I think that one of the reasons why Dartmouth has actually weathered the storm pretty well, and even though Dartmouth did not do very well in the campus free speech ranking, Sian Beilock, the new president of Dartmouth, I have some real hope for. And one of the reasons why they didn't have a major blow up after October 7th is they started the hard work of having dialogue between pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel students almost like a year before the blow-ups. And so by the time the actual blow up came, they weren't having the situation where administrators were giving this oversimplified idea of it's all just about activism, it's all just about oppressed versus oppressor. They already had done the hard work of being like, "Oh, actually, yeah, no, people who are not stupid or evil disagree on this one." And I think that some of the stuff that they're trying to do at Dartmouth gives me some hope.
Please listen to the full episode here.
Closing Time for Colleges
Apart from the abhorrent and disgusting scenes from certain colleges that, in the case of Columbia, have shuttered their operations, there is a different troubling trend for many: college closures. This is a topic I have of course opined about at length. On the latest episode of the podcast College Uncovered, a collaboration of GBH News and the Hechinger Report, I offer extensive comments on the state of college closures, what’s to come, and what prospective students should be asking before they enroll.
Check out the episode here.
Thanks for reading, writing, and listening.