Campus Antisemitism Is Making Free Speech Fashionable Again

For years, free speech advocates have complained about “safetyism” on campus—shielding students from discomfort at the expense of freedom of expression. Now that the speech is painful to Jews—history’s most convenient scapegoats—university administrators are declaring their commitment to freedom of speech.

“Safetyism” is a moral culture in which perceived safety (whether real or not) becomes a sacred value, rendering people unwilling to make necessary trade-offs. For a decade or longer, through "Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” initiatives, campus administrations have prioritized “feeling safe” over intellectual rigor, viewpoint diversity, freedom of expression, and institutional neutrality.

For example, in 2015, 13 college administrators at Yale University sent a message asking students to choose inoffensive costumes that wouldn't make others feel demeaned or alienated. Erika and Nicholas Christakis were hounded out of their residential positions in Yale's Silliman College after hundreds of students said they no longer felt “safe” as a result of an email in which Erika asked whether students, technically adults, could choose their own costumes and talk to one another face to face if they felt offended.

At UCLA earlier this year, graduate students objected to psychology professor Yoel Inbar as a potential hire because of his views about institutional neutrality and the requirement that faculty applicants submit DEI statements. They complained that Inbar’s comments “frame diversity statements as a threat to ideological diversity, and reflect a lack of prioritization of the needs and experiences of historically marginalized individuals across the lines of race, class, gender, sexuality, and ability.” He was not hired.

When the presidents of Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) were called to testify at a Congressional hearing about campus antisemitism, Harvard alumna Elise Stefanik, a representative from New York, asked each of the presidents whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their schools’ codes of conduct. MIT President Sally Kornbluth explained that it could constitute harassment “if targeted at individuals, not making public statements.” Harvard President Claudine Gay said “it can be, depending on the context,” adding, “When it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation; that is actionable conduct and we do take action.” Penn President Elizabeth Magill, who was forced to resign four days after testifying, said, “if the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”

These responses were baffling to most observers—and certainly to an incredulous Stefanik, who questioned whether “conduct” meant committing the act of genocide. She declared all three presidents’ answers “unacceptable… across the board.” Because safetyism has been the standard, it was striking to see how Jewish students are expected to face the discomfort of hateful speech when other groups are not.

But free speech advocates understood what the university presidents were clumsily trying to communicate: As legal scholar Ilya Shapiro recently explained, “Sometimes ‘speech’ isn’t speech. Sometimes it rises to the level of conduct that prevents others from being able to live their lives. Right now we need people to discern the difference.” None of the three university presidents seemed capable of doing that.

To be fair, they can hardly be blamed. The speech climate at each of their universities is anything but free. Harvard has the distinction of coming in dead last in the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression’s college free-speech rankings—with a rating of “abysmal” and a score that had to be rounded up to zero. Only 30% of Harvard students say it is never acceptable to shout down a speaker. More than half say it can be acceptable to block other students from attending a campus speech. And fully 30% say it can be acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech.

Only 11% of Harvard students say it is “extremely clear” that the college administration protects free speech on campus. That number is 6% at both the University of Pennsylvania and MIT. When asked how likely it was that the university would protect a controversial speaker’s right to speak on campus, 6% of students at Harvard said it was extremely likely, 7% at MIT, and 4% at Penn.

The Ivy League fared poorly over all. Out of 248 colleges and universities surveyed, Penn was ranked second to last. Dartmouth came in at 240; Yale, 234; Columbia, 214; Cornell, 212; Princeton, 187. At number 69, Brown University is the only Ivy in the top half. Ivy League-adjacent MIT ranks in the bottom half.

Harvard’s conduct code reads, “Bullying, hostile and abusive behavior, and power-based harassment directly threaten the ability of community members to engage in the free exchange of ideas and pursue their educational and professional goals. Such behaviors, as defined in this Policy, are prohibited.”

This policy sounds reasonable. And yet graduate student Laura Simone Lewis was able to bully Carole Hooven, co-director of the undergraduate program in Harvard’s Department of Human Evolutionary Biology. Lewis's conduct threatened Hooven's ability to engage in the free exchange of ideas and pursue her professional goals. And Lewis did so in her official capacity as director of the Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging task force of Hooven’s department. Why was this permitted?

In 2021, Lewis, who refers to herself as a “Blewish feminist mermaid,” complained on social media—using her official title—that the popular lecturer’s science-based assertion that there are two (and only two) sexes was “dangerous,” “transphobic and harmful,” and “directly opposed” Lewis's ability to “create a safe space.”

“Even though someone publicly maligning my speech in their official capacity as a representative of the institution is a clear violation of Harvard’s Free Speech Guidelines,” Hooven later wrote in a searing indictment of Harvard’s abysmal record on academic freedom, “the person who maligned me was not sanctioned.” Administrators failed to defend Hooven's right to express her views and to communicate biological facts, they made no statement on her behalf, and they never apologized. This created a climate in which even senior faculty members were too afraid to publicly defend Hooven, for fear of reprisals.

As a result, Lewis’s campaign led to such a hostile work environment for Hooven that she eventually felt she had no choice but to resign. Lewis’s “safe space” was freed of the “harmful” and “dangerous” claim that there are two sexes.

How could someone so clearly violate Harvard’s policies and not be sanctioned? A year ago, all Harvard undergraduates were required to participate in an online Title IX training at which they were taught that “cisheterosexism,” “sizeism,” and “fatphobia” perpetuate “violence,” and that using non-preferred pronouns constitutes “abuse.”

Remember, “abusive behavior” is not tolerated at Harvard. The problem is that “bullying,” “hostile behavior,” “abusive behavior,” and “power-based harassment” are not clearly defined in Harvard’s policy. This gives DEI administrators license to define as a violation speech it doesn’t like, while protecting speech it likes. As a result, students learn they should avoid things like fat phobia and non-preferred pronouns, while calling for the genocide of Jews isn't on any list.

In 2019, Harvard law professor and criminal defense attorney Ronald Sullivan, was accused by undergraduates of making them “feel unsafe” because of his willingness to defend the accused rapist Harvey Weinstein. Despite his being among the most accomplished scholars at Harvard, he was terminated as dean of an undergraduate residential college.

So far, no one appears to have been fired or expelled for making Jewish students feel unsafe by defending Hamas terrorists who violently gang-raped Jews. (And no protesting students appear to feel unsafe around others who are willing to defend Hamas rapists.)

in 2020, University of Chicago associate professor of geophysics Dorian Abbot was disinvited from a prestigious lecture he was scheduled to deliver at MIT because students said he made them “feel unsafe.” Why? He had co-written a Newsweek article offering “Merit, Fairness and Equality” as an alternative to DEI.

In November, Jewish and Israeli students were “physically prevented from attending class by a hostile group of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel MIT students.” Kornbluth warned disruptive MIT protesters that if they violated school policies, they would be suspended. On the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, they violated school policies. They were not suspended. Some were international students and suspending them, she said, could impact their visas. One professor reported that “MIT admin’s silence makes Jewish and Israeli students feel unsafe.”

Harvard offers an anonymous reporting hotline through which students can report “behaviors that make you or those around you feel unsafe or unwelcome.” And Harvard’s Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging page exhorts faculty to “recognize and avoid microaggressions.” In 2018, Harvard’s School of Public Health flagged seven classes for review after those classes each drew three or more student reports of in-class microaggressions.

What counts as a microaggression? According to the material linked on Harvard’s website, asking an ethnically Asian person “where are you from” communicates “you are not American.” Saying “I believe the most qualified person should get the job” gives the message that “people of color are given extra unfair benefits because of their race.” And a university’s buildings being named for “white, heterosexual upper-class males” is an “environmental microaggression” that communicates to students of color “you don’t belong.”

Celebrating the rape, torture, kidnapping, murder, and beheadings of Jews is not on the list of offensive microaggressions. There is no training that explains why it gives the message “you don’t matter.” And none of the three university presidents who testified before Congress could cogently articulate the circumstances under which calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their code of conduct.

Despite Jewish students saying they feel unsafe as a result of regularly hearing chants like “glory to the martyrs” (who murdered, raped, kidnapped, and tortured Jews), “globalize the intifada” (a violent uprising that targets Jews), and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” (referring to the destruction of the Jewish state of Israel, which exists between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea), so little has been done about it that Congress held a hearing.

Undergraduates at Penn filed a complaint in Philadelphia federal court claiming that Penn committed “egregious” violations of federal civil rights law by selectively enforcing its rules of conduct to “avoid protecting Jewish students from hatred and harassment.”

At Harvard, anti-Israel protesting students disrupted classes with chanting, sometimes in large groups, sometimes one person with a bullhorn. Harvard Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, publicly asked the university to hold accountable both the people and organizations involved. “Students were terrified,” the organization said. A Title VI investigation has been requested.

Title VI of the Civil Rights Act provides that no person in the United States shall, on the ground of actual or perceived ancestry, ethnicity, religion, or national origin be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving federal financial assistance. While defending campus freedom of speech is laudable and necessary, given these institutions’ histories of denying freedom of speech to those whose expressions are disfavored, it is unsurprising that lawsuits complaining of antisemitic discrimination through selective enforcement of rules are proliferating.

“The ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil,” wrote Rabbi David Wolpe, in his letter of resignation from Harvard’s antisemitism task force days after the Congressional hearing. “Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.”

In order to avoid the selective enforcement of campus policies, administrations have two options: They can censor speech Jewish students find hateful the way they censor all the other forms of speech considered hateful by various identity groups. Or they can stick to policies that protect speech and punish harassment, threats, intimidation, and the creation of a hostile environment.

It would be a mistake for universities to enact speech codes designed to censor antisemitic speech. They can address antisemitic harassment, bullying, and discrimination by following existing rules and clarifying definitions. Doing that, however, requires dismantling the poisonous ideology that silences disfavored speech, keeps antisemitism in place, and blinds people to the antisemitism in which they participate. Only then can free speech campus climates flourish.

When college campuses are places where diverse viewpoints can be shared without fear, they will also be places where students can speak about Israel without fear, and where Jewish students can wear Jewish symbols and religious paraphernalia without fear.

Meanwhile, if antisemitism on campus has a silver lining, it’s that it has made free speech fashionable again. ♦