A few weeks ago, the presidents of three American universities testified to Congress about the problem of campus antisemitism.
The problem has existed for decades, as any Jewish college student knows. But following Hamas’s attack on Israel and the outbreak of war in Gaza, open support for violence against Jews has exploded like never before.
Angry members of Congress showed videos of college students calling for “intifada” on American streets—seeming to support terrorism against Israeli civilians, including the rapes, murders, and kidnappings that started the war we’re in now. The people’s representatives were outraged, and rightly so.
They were right: It really does depend on context
For hours, congresspeople grilled three women—Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Claudine Gay of Harvard, and Sally Kornbluth of MIT—about their respective university’s antisemitism problems, and what they intended to do about them.
The core issue was not so much the hate, but the hypocrisy: these schools are hypersensitive over everything from personal pronouns to ethnic Halloween costumes, but when the “silence is violence” crowd is faced with actual atrocities, its response is lukewarm at best—so long as the victims are Jews.
The climax of the hearing came when Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York asked the three university presidents whether a call for the genocide of Jews would constitute a violation of their school’s policies against bullying and harassment. One by one, they all told Stefanik that “it depends.” This newspaper’s editorial called the answer a “disgrace.” Immediately, calls poured in for their resignations. Donors threatened to pull their contributions. And Liz Magill of UPenn was forced to resign.
The outrage was furious, and ultimately well-founded. But for all the righteous indignation, there is an inconvenient truth that got lost in the noise: Magill, and her colleagues, were right.
The First Amendment protects even hate speech
IN ISRAEL, people go to prison for incitement to racism. Most Western nations have laws against hate speech, antisemitic or otherwise. But in the United States, public universities are forbidden by law—and most private universities have forbidden themselves by choice—to abridge any student’s right to free speech as protected by the First Amendment. And the First Amendment is powerful indeed.
When neo-Nazis planned a march in Skokie, Illinois, the city sought to bar the would-be demonstrators from such a brazen display of hate. But the Nazis—represented by a Jewish lawyer—claimed free speech, and won.
Though the rally took place elsewhere in the end, the Skokie affair enshrined as sacred the right to even genocidal speech, so long as that speech is not intended to provoke immediate unlawful action and likely to succeed in provoking it. Even Holocaust supporters get to have their say in America.
The Skokie affair did not concern private universities like Penn, Harvard, or MIT. Those schools have more latitude to restrict the speech of students, although just where the limits are is a matter of debate.
What matters for our purposes, though, is that the United States has not been the safest and most supportive Diaspora home for Jews in history by accident. It is precisely the country’s liberal tradition—its commitment to distinguishing between ideas and actions, between what ought to be condemned and what ought to be illegal—that made it so hospitable for Jews to begin with. And it is precisely when that tradition is degraded that antisemitism surges in its place.
College campuses did not turn antisemitic by becoming freer, more contentious public squares. They became more antisemitic over decades of suppressing dissident viewpoints, filling faculty seats with narrow-minded ideologues and giving teenage bullies a hecklers’ veto over anyone they decide is a bad guy. It was precisely when “feeling unsafe” became an acceptable reason to shut down any disagreement that Jews began not only to feel, but to actually be unsafe on campus.
If this is in fact what happened, there are two practical takeaways:
First, that literal, physical safety is a matter of law, not campus policy. While most speech is protected by the First Amendment, true incitement, and actual harassment, are illegal. Campus disciplinary systems are not the tool for addressing Jewish safety; police and prosecutors are.
Why are so many students sympathetic to Hamas in the first place?
Second, that the role of a university president is to address the root of the problem, which is academia’s failure to educate and promote a free exchange of ideas. Why is it that so many students are sympathetic to Hamas in the first place? Why do thousands chant “from the river to the sea” when they don’t even know what river or sea they're chanting about? Not because there’s too much free speech—because there isn’t enough.
Extremist views are protected, as they should be. The trouble is that reasonable ones, which would place the current war in Gaza in a sensible, non-radicalized context, are consistently shut down, and students aren’t even exposed to them.
IN THE WEEKS since the hearing, there has been mounting pressure on Claudine Gay, the president of Harvard, to resign from her post, as Magill of UPenn did. Like Magill, Gay provided the correct, if uncomfortable, answer to Rep. Stefanik’s question. Harvard should not punish even the most vile speech for its content alone.
Gay was, however, on the panel that investigated Roland Fryer, a tenured economics professor, over sexual harassment allegations that have since come under serious scrutiny. Fryer, the youngest black professor ever to receive tenure at Harvard, had published research undermining the narrative that American policing has a lethal race problem—an empirical question that everyone else was afraid to research.
In the weeks since her testimony, Gay has also come under scrutiny for insufficient citations in her scholarly writing. While these allegations don’t immediately concern antisemitism, they do concern standards of rigor whose deterioration inevitably results in a hospitable environment for it.
Elite universities in America need an almost-total reform. Their drift away from liberal principles have watered a tree that is bound to yield bad fruit, and Americans are right to be outraged over the selectiveness of their commitment to free speech. Institutions that think of themselves as being at the forefront of social justice have educated and employed generations of antisemites.
But we must not take the wrong lesson from this all-too-glaring hypocrisy, and demand our own right to censor. The solution, rather, is to recommit to the values of free expression and the ruthless pursuit of truth, while treating bona fide harassment as the crime against the state that it is. In times like these, those practices are lifesavers.