RUTHFULLY YOURS

The post-October 7 conflict on U.S. campuses has been framed as a battle between free speech and hate speech. Anti-Israel protesters claim that universities are stifling their right to expression, while many Jewish and other pro-Israel students respond that “pro-Palestinian” activism has led to violence, intimidation, and a general disruption of educational programs—and they note as well that before October 7, universities had often censored politically incorrect speech.

This framing is mistaken. “Pro-Palestine” advocates are not consistent proponents of free and open debate. Instead, they want to express crude and often menacing sentiments, as Columbia University’s example shows. Columbia students last April insisted that “Zionists” weren’t welcome on campus, even as they denounced other groups’ attempts to air alternative views.

Consider in this light Columbia Law Students for Palestine. The group, which has complained of being censored, also fires off emails to its members intended to discourage them from attending events hosted by pro-Israel students. These so-called SpeakerWatch messages undermine any notion that CLSP is interested in the open exchange of ideas. Ahead of Israeli historian Benny Morris’s Zoom event with Columbia Law students last January, for instance, CLSP lambasted the talk as “justification for Israel’s ongoing crimes against humanity.” The group labeled Morris a racist and Islamophobe and urged its members not to support the Zoom meeting and to instead attend events hosted by CLSP.

In March, when Columbia Law School’s Center for Israeli Studies invited a panel of Israeli legal scholars to speak, CLSP sent a long SpeakerWatch decrying Israel’s alleged crimes and disparaging each member of the panel, describing one as “enabling violence against Palestinians.” Instead of suggesting that its followers attend and express their views, CLSP denounced the Center for Israeli Studies for merely hosting the event.

The group’s insistence that its members not attend pro-Israeli speeches, along with its baseless accusations of violence, undermines respectful campus dialogue. In its place, CLSP helps create a climate of fear—one reason why students still feel more comfortable shouting down a professor than expressing an unpopular opinion.

One approach to restoring free expression and discouraging menacing forms of protest was outlined in a report from Columbia University’s Task Force on Antisemitism. The delegation called on the university to enforce “time, place, and manner” restrictions on speech. (Under which you can, say, legitimately protest in a public square but not in the middle of the street; you can be louder in a park at noon than in a residential neighborhood at midnight.) Its recommendations, however, have been effectively ignored.

In any case, policy alone cannot change this dynamic. Students need to feel free to speak. That requires a culture shift, which must begin with law school deans and other university officials, as one of us (Shapiro) describes in his new book Lawless. These administrators are capable of inculcating among the student body almost any value—public service, entrepreneurship, social justice, whatever. Why not free and respectful speech?

Students should abandon institutions not committed to civic dialogue. Instead, they should consider options in states like Florida, Arizona, and Ohio, which have opened civic centers and institutes at their flagship public universities that teach a wide range of thought and hire academics who dissent from progressive orthodoxy. Such efforts are likely to produce serious reflection among the student body, not SpeakerWatch-style missives or half-baked accusations of “violence.”

Expression on campus must amount to more than calling your peers Nazis and chanting about “intifada.” Universities should want students to hear a wide range of well-articulated views—and that requires the creation of a culture of free speech.

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