If you have been following the horror shows at Ivy League schools, you know how agonizing this situation has become for old-school First Amendment liberals.
Are the tropes of anti-Semitism still protected forms of speech? Back in the 1970s, ACLU lawyers knew the painful answer to that question when Nazis wanted to legally march through Skokie, Illinois, a Chicago-area community containing many Holocaust survivors.
America has come a long way, since then. Today, the illiberal world considers a stunning amount of free speech to be violence, except in myriad cases in which speech controls are used to prevent “hate speech” and misinformation/disinformation in debates when one side controls the public space in which free debates are supposed to be taking place.
Clearly, death threats, physical intimidation and assaults are out of line. But what about a slogan such as, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”? Is that automatically a call for genocide? The Associated Press has this to say:
Many Palestinian activists say it’s a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel’s destruction.
Ah, but what does Hamas say? The same AP report notes:
“Palestine is ours from the river to the sea and from the south to the north,” Khaled Mashaal, the group’s former leader, said that year [2012] in a speech in Gaza celebrating the 25th anniversary of the founding of Hamas. “There will be no concession on any inch of the land.”
The phrase also has roots in the Hamas charter.
The key is that Hamas opposes a two-state solution allowing Israel to continue as a Jewish homeland. How is Israel eliminated without the eliminating, to one degree or another, millions of Jews?
This brings us back to the Ivy League. At this point, I think that it’s time for someone to ask if other minorities on Ivy League campuses have — in recent decades — experienced severe limitations on their free speech and freedom of association. To what degree are other minorities “ghosts” on these campuses? Do they barely exist? Has the rush to “diversity” eliminated many religious and cultural points of view?
Ah, but the Ivy League giants are private schools. They have rights of their own.
Don’t progressive private schools have a right to establish what amount to doctrinal statements that students, faculty and others must sign, documents resembling the covenants that define religious campuses on the left and right? Could they have documents that limit the speech rights of various religious and cultural perspectives that clash with their core beliefs?
Clearly private schools have a right to be “voluntary associations.” The issue, with the Ivies, is whether they are openly publishing their covenants and warning believers in various minority groups that they are surrendering basic rights when choosing to enroll.
This is an incredibly complex topic. At this point I will leap to a USA Today report about the fall of University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill, a piece that that is completely tone deaf (nod to Bill Moyers) to the presence of First Amendment religion “ghosts” — left or right — in news coverage of this disaster. Here is some key background in that news-you-can-use explainer:
Colleges and universities have reported an increase in antisemitic incidents since the start of the Israel-Hamas war in October.
The furor directed at the three college leaders was triggered in part by their response to questions about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates their schools’ code of conduct against bullying and harassment. ….
“If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment. Yes,” Magill said. …
Magill walked back her comments in a video message on X last week.
“In that moment, I was focused on our university’s longstanding policies, aligned with the U.S. Constitution, which say that speech alone is not punishable,” Magill said. “I was not focused on — but I should have been — the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetuate.”
Now, many First Amendment liberals have asked logical questions that sound something like this: Why is it acceptable to shout “Intifada by any means necessary!” but it is now anathema to say that DNA has something to do with sex and gender (yes, I know the current journalism definitions of those two terms)?
Also, as anyone knows who has followed GetReligion for nearly 20 years, in this age public debates about culture, morality, politics and even science inevitably lead to debates about religion.
Thus, I see “religion ghosts” in the current Ivy wars.
I am not sure that gay-rights legend Andrew Sullivan sees the same ghosts that I do. But it’s impossible to read the following Substack commentary by this old-school liberal — “The Day The Empress' Clothes Fell Off: Did the Congressional hearings finally expose the scandal of the Ivy League?” — without seeing the, well, DNA of some potential Ivy League problems facing traditional Jews, Catholics, evangelicals and others. Yes, traditional Muslim believers, as well.
This is strong stuff. I will let Sullivan preach for a new minutes. Read this carefully and look for ghosts:
Thanks to the recent Supreme Court case, the energetic discrimination against Asian-American candidates for admission at Harvard is no longer in doubt. But countless other candidates for admission have little to no chance, regardless of their grades, or extracurriculars, because they belong to the wrong race, sex, sexual orientation, and “gender identity.” As soon as students are admitted under this identity framework, they are taught its core precepts: that the “truth” — or, in Harvard’s now-ironic motto, “Veritas” — is a function not of logic or reason or of open, free, robust debate and dialogue, let alone of Western civilization, but of inimical and evil “power structures” rooted in identity that need to be dismantled first. Identity first; truth second — because truth is rooted in identity and cannot exist outside of it.
In the hearings, [Harvard] President Gay actually said, with a straight face, that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.” This is the president whose university mandates all students attend a Title IX training session where they are told that “fatphobia” and “cisheterosexism” are forms of “violence,” and that “using the wrong pronouns” constitutes “abuse.” This is the same president who engineered the ouster of a law professor, Ronald Sullivan, simply because he represented a client, of whom Gay and students (rightly but irrelevantly) disapproved, Harvey Weinstein.
This is the same president who watched a brilliant and popular professor, Carole Hooven, be effectively hounded out of her position after a public shaming campaign by one of her department’s DEI enforcers, and a mob of teaching fellows, because Hooven dared to state on television that biological sex is binary. This is the president of a university where a grand total of 1.46 percent of faculty call themselves “conservative” and 82 percent call themselves “liberal” or “very liberal.” This is the president of a university which ranked 248th out of 248 colleges this year on free speech (and Penn was the 247th), according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Harvard is a place where free expression goes to die.
Maybe some of these spoken and symbolic speech issues contain religious and moral content?
It might be a good time — YO! JOURNALISTS! — to check in with some symbolic religious groups on Ivy campuses. I would start with Orthodox Jews, Southern Baptists, Black Pentecostals, Latino Catholics, members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and others.
Does anyone want to ask if members of traditional religious groups are routinely included in lists of “oppressor” groups?
That said, I will add my own “Amen” to this word from Sullivan:
The absolute worst thing you can do right now is what the presidents of these woke institutions now say they intend to do: switch Jews out of the “oppressor class” and into the “oppressed one,” and re-apply all the DEI discrimination on their behalf.
That doesn’t solve the problem; it compounds it. Pro-Palestinian, and anti-Israel speech should no more be censored than any other — and the suppression is real. There should be one standard and it should be free speech. But there can be no free speech and no guarantee of it until the toxins of critical theory, and the architecture of its enforcement, DEI, are excised from the university altogether. Asking the current leadership to correct these lost institutions is an exercise in futility.
I will ask: Are Orthodox Jews going to move into the “acceptable” class? I have my doubts about that.
Oh, and let’s be careful out there.
FIRST IMAGE: The Ivy League, a graphic of school logos at Emigrarusa.com