CAMPUS GROUPTHINK: NOT-SO-SAFE ZONES

Dear Deborah:

While we’re on the subject of on-campus activity, there’s another recent development that I find troubling and would like to discuss with you. It may seem a bit off our topic, but in my gut, I feel that it is in some way related to it.

In a speech Salman Rushdie gave at Emory in 2015, he remarked that “these are not good days for liberty. . . . Freedom seems everywhere in retreat.”1 Given his personal experience, one might have expected that he was referring to Islamist extremists. He was, but he was also referring to the North American university campus, which he described as becoming an “insult-free zone.” He condemned the fact that threats to freedom of expression in America

[are] beginning to be the greatest where they should be the most defended, that is to say within the walls of the academy. . . . And the people most willing to sacrifice, or limit, this fundamental right are young people. . . . To equate social good manners, the way we interact with each other, with the liberty to say what one thinks, even if people don’t like it, is to make a false comparison. . . . Ideas are not people. Being rude about an idea is not the same thing as being rude about your aunt. . . . What you don’t have is the right to use your alleged offended-ness as a reason to stop other people from speaking.

Students on American college campuses seem to have taken notions of political correctness, as well as ideas about “inclusivity,” “exclusivity,” and “safe space,” to a point where they trump freedom of speech. In 2015, a student theater group at Mount Holyoke, after seeking student feedback, canceled their annual production of Eve Ensler’s groundbreaking play, The Vagina Monologues, because transgender women do not have vaginas, and the play therefore “offers an extremely narrow perspective on what it means to be a woman.” Responding in Time magazine, Ensler pointed out that “inclusion doesn’t come from refusing to acknowledge our distinctive experiences, and trying to erase them, in an attempt to pretend they do not exist. Inclusion comes from listening to our differences and honoring the right of everyone to talk about their reality, free from oppression and bigotry and silencing.”2 (She also noted that she has in recent years made available an optional monologue based on interviews she’d conducted with transgender women.)

Am I wrong to see a connection between these trends and the silencing of pro-Israel speakers on campus?

Yours,

Joe

Dear Joe and Abigail:

No, Joe, you’re not wrong. Before the Free Speech Movement of the mid-1960s, it was campus administrators who decided what constituted “acceptable” public speech for students and faculty. How ironic it is that nowadays, it’s left-wing student groups who are attempting to establish rules delineating what types of public speech are permissible.3 As the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley observed, “Free speech has become controversial.”4 In 2017, students there objected to appearances by Milo Yiannopoulos and Ann Coulter, both of whom hold a decidedly right-wing perspective on world events. The students—assisted by Antifa groups from outside the university—rioted until the events were canceled, ostensibly because the university could not guarantee the guests’ safety. That was wrong. However reprehensible their pronouncements are, if Yiannopoulos or Coulter have been invited to speak on campus, their right to do so must be respected (unless, of course, they are inciting violence). As Berkeley professor Robert Reich observed, “How can students understand the vapidity of Coulter’s arguments without being allowed to hear her make them, and question her about them?”5 I am convinced that if the students who object to her so-called “ideology” were to listen to her for two minutes, they would understand she has none, just a series of well-honed insults.

Even more disturbing is how some faculty members have been responding to free-speech controversies. In 2017, Wellesley faculty who are part of the college’s Commission on Race, Ethnicity, and Equity issued a statement, in the aftermath of an appearance by a professor who maintains controversial views on sexual violence on campus. They expressed concern over “the impact of speakers’ presentations on Wellesley students who often feel the injury most acutely and invest time and energy in rebutting the speakers’ arguments.”6 Students, they seemed to be suggesting, should not be exposed to ideas that might challenge their comfort zone. But isn’t the university experience all about challenging one’s comfort zone? And how long would it be before a speech about technology developments in the State of Israel would be placed in this discomfort zone by Israel’s opponents?

For several decades, Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, had been observing a “Day of Absence” each April, during which students and faculty of color did not come to campus, to demonstrate what an all-white society would look like. In 2017, the organizers decided that, instead, “white students, staff, and faculty [were] invited to leave campus for the day’s activities.”7 Biology professor Bret Weinstein expressed his objections in an email to faculty and staff:

There is a huge difference between a group or coalition deciding to voluntarily absent themselves from a shared space in order to highlight their vital and under-appreciated roles, and a group or coalition encouraging another group to go away. . . . On a college campus, one’s right to speak—or to be—must never be based on skin color.8

During a subsequent student protest, Weinstein was surrounded and verbally assaulted by students outside his classroom. When he was threatened with violence, the university administration told him that the campus police could not protect him. He and his wife resigned their faculty positions in September of that year and left the area.9

There are, however, times when university administrations take the necessary and appropriate action in these situations. In 2017, the American Enterprise Club, a conservative student group at Middlebury College, invited Charles Murray to speak on campus. His controversial 1994 book, The Bell Curve, implied that innate intelligence differences between the races, rather than discrimination, explained the disparity in the socioeconomic achievements of blacks and whites in America. When the book was published many people objected, myself included, to its implied racism. In all likelihood, I would not have invited Murray to speak at my campus. But the American Enterprise Club did, and, to its credit, it created a program in which a left-leaning professor would engage Murray in conversation after his lecture, for a potentially hard-hitting exchange. Nonetheless, some students, together with off-campus protesters, prevented the program from proceeding.

Prepared for this contingency, Middlebury had arranged for a backup site from which the conversation between Murray and the professor would be broadcast. The protesters learned of the site’s location and physically attacked Murray and the professor, who ended up in the emergency room. But in this case, Middlebury’s president, Laurie Patton, unequivocally condemned the protesters and subsequently called for an “embrace of freedom of expression and inquiry as an educational value for everyone, regardless of their background or political views.” She acknowledged that “controversial speech is especially difficult” but considered it imperative that we “move beyond the false dichotomy between free speech and inclusiveness.” In her view, “an educational institution does not become more inclusive by limiting freedom of expression. Nor does it achieve greater freedom by reducing its commitment to building an inclusive, robust, brave public square where all students are equally welcomed and valued.”10

The University of Chicago took an equally strong stance. In 2014, president Robert J. Zimmer and provost Eric D. Isaacs tasked a faculty committee on freedom of expression with drafting a statement “articulating the University’s overarching commitment to free, robust, and uninhibited debate and deliberation.” The committee acknowledged that there will be ideas that members of the campus community might find disturbing; nonetheless, the university’s commitment was to open and free inquiry. The committee cited the observation of a past president of the university, Hanna Holborn Gray: “Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.”11 (When I read that statement, I couldn’t help but be reminded that Gray’s family fled Nazi Germany in 1933.) Jay Ellison, dean of students at the College at the University of Chicago, subsequently made this position very real in his letter welcoming the class of 2020. Addressing the infamous “trigger warnings” now prevalent on so many campuses, which require faculty to warn students if anything in their lectures or the readings might make students feel “unsafe” or “excluded,” Ellison wrote, “Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own.”12

So, going back to your question, Joe, how is all this related to what we have been discussing? First of all, throughout history, Jews have thrived in societies with robust freedom of expression and strong democratic institutions. They have faced far less felicitous conditions in societies that curtailed free speech. This has been true of both right-wing and left-wing governments, the best examples being Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Second, authorizing any institution or group of people—be they government officials or fellow academics—to decide what is and is not acceptable speech, whether that refers to speech that is antisemitic, anti-Islamic, racist, homophobic, sexist, etc., is dangerous. What troubles me even more is that there are today some Jewish organizations that believe legislative bodies, including the United States Congress, should pass legislation defining antisemitism and determining when anti-Israel speech crosses the line into antisemitism. If such laws are passed, pro-Israel Jewish students will be further marginalized, as they will now be associated with suppressing, rather than answering, speech they don’t like.

The irony is, of course, that most pro-Israel students on campus probably don’t agree with an approach that would repress freedom of expression. But the pro-Israel students don’t yell as loudly as the off-campus Jewish groups fighting “for” them.13 If those who oppose the right of Israel to exist were to be labeled antisemitic, would that mean that anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox groups such as Satmar Hasidim would be included in such a definition? These proposals open a Pandora’s box of absurdities and orthodoxies. Some of what we are currently seeing on campus—shouting down of speakers, faculty calls for invitations only to speakers who do not make students feel uncomfortable, and physical attacks on speakers—are of a piece with the attacks we have been seeing on Israeli speakers.14 I have no doubt that, should these restrictions on “offensive” speech be formally enacted on college campuses, those who speak on Israel’s behalf would soon find themselves disinvited because they might make some students “uncomfortable.”

Using the law as a means of silencing those with whom we disagree is misguided and dangerous. I say this from not just a professional but also a personal perspective. David Irving tried to use the law to silence me when he sued me for libel in the British courts. Antisemitism must be fought, but that fight must be strategic. Many of the more militant off-campus advocacy groups that have taken up this fight against “offensive” speech call for the defeat of the “other side” and insist that there be no exchange of ideas with them. For them it’s a zero-sum game. There are, of course, groups with whom an exchange of ideas is impossible. (I would include in this category deniers, who, as we demonstrated in court, are liars and falsifiers of history.) But it’s in the free exchange of ideas that extremists are revealed to be what they are. And it’s in the free exchange of ideas that the truth is brought to light and prejudice and intolerance are revealed for what they are. How sad it is that on some college campuses today, there does not appear to be room for that conversation.

Yours,

DEL