1. It is insufficient to rediscover the virtue of free speech now. The very fact that these schools curtailed it severely when it went against favored groups and wants to change the rules now that it goes against Jews is itself discriminatory. That in itself warrants an admission of guilt, at the very least.
2. Protests add nothing to the pursuit of truth, and thus nothing to the academic enterprise. Thus, it would be perfectly in keeping with a liberal speech policy to ban *all* protests while giving the broadest scope to research, teaching and classroom discussion.
3. I'm not going to pretend there's some equivalence between cheering the torture of children and cheering the war against the torturers and neither should the schools. That doesn't mean allowing pro-Israel groups but not SJP; as I said just above, I don't think the school needs to allow protests at all. It does mean that the administrations should be asking themselves what weird philosophies they've been teaching that have encouraged so many of their students to get this so wrong. Again, that doesn't mean shutting down the teaching of those philosophies, but they should at least be counterbalanced by academics who teach that there are no exceptions for the it's-wrong-to-torture-children rule.
Speech is conduct. To pretend otherwise is to demote speech to a status of insignificance. However, shouting “Free Palestine” is in itself not an expression of hatred because of something a listener might imply. What that listener implies has to be considered as critically as what the speaker says. If they are revolutionaries they should not be given credence.
So what do we do? Let’s put the horse before the cart. Groups which explicitly reject established aspects of constitutional law should be prohibited from organizing and be subject to investigation. That includes calls for other systems of law and morals on American soil which entail the exclusion of other law-abiding groups in a pluralist community.
The language of the Constitution is our guide. It is the raw material of free speech. Don’t make things more complicated than they should be.
We seem to be making a complicated issue intractable. If the First Amendment of the Constitution is a starting point for a university's free speech policy, then it was the university's decision to make calls for extralegal violence against individuals and groups protected speech. The university, of course, has to defend that decision however difficult that may be.
Very well stated. And why I am a member of FIRE.
Absolutely correct, but let me add a few notes:
1. It is insufficient to rediscover the virtue of free speech now. The very fact that these schools curtailed it severely when it went against favored groups and wants to change the rules now that it goes against Jews is itself discriminatory. That in itself warrants an admission of guilt, at the very least.
2. Protests add nothing to the pursuit of truth, and thus nothing to the academic enterprise. Thus, it would be perfectly in keeping with a liberal speech policy to ban *all* protests while giving the broadest scope to research, teaching and classroom discussion.
3. I'm not going to pretend there's some equivalence between cheering the torture of children and cheering the war against the torturers and neither should the schools. That doesn't mean allowing pro-Israel groups but not SJP; as I said just above, I don't think the school needs to allow protests at all. It does mean that the administrations should be asking themselves what weird philosophies they've been teaching that have encouraged so many of their students to get this so wrong. Again, that doesn't mean shutting down the teaching of those philosophies, but they should at least be counterbalanced by academics who teach that there are no exceptions for the it's-wrong-to-torture-children rule.
Speech is conduct. To pretend otherwise is to demote speech to a status of insignificance. However, shouting “Free Palestine” is in itself not an expression of hatred because of something a listener might imply. What that listener implies has to be considered as critically as what the speaker says. If they are revolutionaries they should not be given credence.
So what do we do? Let’s put the horse before the cart. Groups which explicitly reject established aspects of constitutional law should be prohibited from organizing and be subject to investigation. That includes calls for other systems of law and morals on American soil which entail the exclusion of other law-abiding groups in a pluralist community.
The language of the Constitution is our guide. It is the raw material of free speech. Don’t make things more complicated than they should be.
We seem to be making a complicated issue intractable. If the First Amendment of the Constitution is a starting point for a university's free speech policy, then it was the university's decision to make calls for extralegal violence against individuals and groups protected speech. The university, of course, has to defend that decision however difficult that may be.