RUTHFULLY YOURS

For the sake of campus protestors and their professors across the country, it’s time to make something clear: there’s no such thing as hate speech.

That should go without saying, since freedom of speech and free inquiry is supposed to be what college is all about. But the recent spate of violent student protests, from the University of California at Berkeley to Middlebury College in Vermont, have been met with a collective shrug from an alarming number of college students, professors, and administrators who seem to be under the impression that violence is okay so long as its purpose is to silence “hate speech.”
By hate speech, they mean ideas and opinions that run afoul of progressive pieties. Do you believe abortion is the taking of human life? That’s hate speech. Think transgenderism is a form of mental illness? Hate speech. Concerned about illegal immigration? Believe in the right to bear arms? Support President Donald Trump? All hate speech.

But in fact, there is no “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. The answer to the question, “Where does free speech stop and hate speech begin?” is this: nowhere. For the purposes of the First Amendment, there is no difference between free speech and hate speech. Ideas and opinions that progressive students and professors find offensive or “hateful” are just as protected by the Bill of Rights as anti-Trump slogans chanted at a campus protest.
‘Fighting Words’ Are Not Hate Speech

There are, of course, certain kinds of speech that are not protected by the First Amendment. But those have nothing to do with hate speech, which has no legal definition. For example, there’s an exception for “fighting words,” which the courts have defined as a face-to-face insult directed at a specific person for the purpose of provoking a fight.

But fighting words can’t be expanded to mean hate speech—or even bigoted speech. In the early 1990s, the city of St. Paul tried to do just that, by punishing what it considered bigoted fighting words under its Bias-Motivated Crime Ordinance. The case, which involved a white teenager burning a cross made from taped-together broken chair legs in the front yard of a black family that lived across the street, went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

The court ruled the city’s ordinance was facially unconstitutional (which means a statute is always unconstitutional and hence void) and that it constituted viewpoint-based discrimination. Writing for the majority in R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul (1992), Justice Antonin Scalia explained that, as written,

the ordinance applies only to ‘fighting words’ that insult, or provoke violence, ‘on the basis of race, color, creed, religion or gender.’ Displays containing abusive invective, no matter how vicious or severe, are permissible unless they are addressed to one of the specified disfavored topics. Those who wish to use ‘fighting words’ in connection with other ideas—to express hostility, for example, on the basis of political affiliation, union membership, or homosexuality—are not covered. The First Amendment does not permit St. Paul to impose special prohibitions on those speakers who express views on disfavored subjects.

As for discriminating against certain viewpoints, Scalia noted that fighting words are excluded from First Amendment protection not because they communicate a particular idea but because “their content embodies a particularly intolerable (and socially unnecessary) mode of expressing whatever idea the speaker wishes to convey.” The city’s ordinance, he wrote, simply didn’t fit the definition of fighting words:

Editor’s note: Tufts University and Brandeis University are the latest two schools named to the Freedom Center’s report on the “Top Ten College Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.” These campuses provide financial and institutional support to terrorist-linked campus organizations such as the Hamas-funded hate-group Students for Justice in Palestine while actively suppressing speech critical of Israel’s terrorist adversaries and their allies in the United States. Over the weekend, the Freedom Center placed posters exposing the links between SJP and Hamas terrorists on both campuses. These posters pose a challenge to the Tufts and Brandeis administrations to defend speech that exposes the truth about SJP and its ties to terrorism, rather than ordering it silenced as they have in the past.

Brandeis University: Campus Administration

Brandeis University, located in a suburb of Boston, Massachusetts, is notable for being one of America’s few elite universities to be founded by Jews and is named for Louis B. Brandeis, the first Jewish justice on the Supreme Court. In recent years, Brandeis has been conspicuous for a more disturbing reason—as an academic center that is uniquely welcoming to pro-terrorist speech and ideology directed against Israel while showing extreme hostility towards those who oppose Israel’s terrorist adversaries.

Members of Brandeis’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine have hosted numerous events featuring speakers that defend anti-Israel terrorism and the genocidal Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. Among these are radical professor Noam Chomsky who gave a speech describing Israel’s actions towards Palestine as “vicious, brutal and criminal” and claimed that Israel “is alone in denying” its “illegal occupation of territories.”

In April 2015, the Brandeis administration selected former U.S. Ambassador Thomas Pickering to be honored as the university’s commencement speaker. Known for his extreme anti-Israel views, Pickering has written that Israel has conducted a “half-century-long occupation” of Palestine that is tantamount to “the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.”

In 2014, a Jewish student at Brandeis, Daniel Mael, exposed a secret faculty listserve where more than 90 left-wing Brandeis faculty exchanged radical views. Some of the listserve’s participants promoted Hamas propaganda while espousing anti-Semitic comments and expressing hatred of Israel. Professor Donald Hindley, for instance, referred to the Jewish state as “The Vile, Terrorist Israeli Government,” in a post about the kidnapping of three Israeli teenagers by Hamas terrorists.

Hindley also sarcastically wrote: “Zionist olive trees grow wondrously on Palestinian corpses…” and compared an event challenging the anti-Semitic BDS movement to “Germany in the later 1930s with everyone at least a Nazi sympathizer.”

Brandeis sociology professor Gordon Fellman, meanwhile, wrote on the listserve seeking signatures for an open letter to “end the illegal occupation in Palestine.” According to the letter, “the government of Israel, having provoked the firing of rockets by its rampage through the West Bank, is now using that response as the pretext for an aerial assault on Gaza which has already cost scores of lives.”

When Brandeis University president Fredrick Lawrence condemned these statements as “abhorrent”( but took no official action against the professors who made them), some faculty who participated in the listserve, along with the Brandeis English Department, condemned his comments and sought a faculty forum on freedom of speech on campus.

While welcoming anti-Israel and pro-Hamas speech on campus, Brandeis has also exhibited hostility towards those who are critical of Islamic terrorism. In April 2014, under pressure from students and faculty, the Brandeis administration acted to withdraw an honorary degree that had been offered to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a Somali-born women’s rights activist and critic of radical Islam who has condemned the mistreatment of women in Muslim countries, and especially the practice of female genital mutilation. Eighty-seven Brandeis faculty members signed a petition citing Ali’s “extreme Islamophobic beliefs” as a reason why the honorary degree should be rescinded. Showcasing the university’s blatant hypocrisy, Brandeis had previously awarded an honorary degree to playwright Tony Kushner, who has a long history of anti-Semitic statements, among them the claim that “The biggest supporters of Israel are the most repulsive members of the Jewish community.”

Brandeis also failed to take action when SJP members disrupted a university panel featuring six members of the Israeli Knesset. The SJP activists repeatedly yelled the epithet “war criminals” at the panel participants and attempted to distribute fake warrants calling for their arrest.

For its history of repeatedly welcoming anti-Israel and pro-terror speakers and protests on campus while allowing those who would present opposing views to be silenced, the Brandeis administration makes our list of Administrations Most Friendly to Terrorists and Hostile to the First Amendment.

Tufts University: James M. Glaser, Dean of the School of Arts & Sciences, and Jianmin Qu, Dean of the School of Engineering

The campus of Tufts University has repeatedly rolled out the red carpet for supporters of the BDS movement against Israel. In 2014, it hosted the Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) National Conference, a secretive event which to which media access was strictly controlled and monitored but according to the conference agenda, instructed attendees on how and when to take “direct action” against supporters of Israel.

Tufts SJP has repeatedly condoned anti-Israel terrorism in its published works and statements and holds an annual “Israeli Apartheid” hate week during which the BDS movement against Israel is promoted. It has also violated campus regulations by distributing mock “eviction notices” to Jewish students in the dorms, which it falsely claims are similar to notices “routinely given to Palestinian families living under oppressive Israeli occupation.” Tufts SJP also attacked and delegitimized the campus pro-Israel group Students Supporting Israel (SSI) by labeling it “literally a hate group.”

No action was taken against SJP, yet when the David Horowitz Freedom Center attempted to hang posters describing SJP’s links to Hamas and its genocidal agenda, three Tufts administrators— Dean of Arts and Sciences James Glaser, Dean of the School of Engineering Jianmin Qu and Dean of Student Affairs Mary Pat McMahon—emailed a statement to the entire Tufts student body, condemning the posters and claiming that they violated the University’s community standards.

Bad ideas make bad schools, bad schools make bad citizens, bad citizens make bad laws, bad laws make bad government. That’s the recipe for tyranny.

The phenomenon of rich, privileged “snowflake” college students demanding “safe spaces” from “microagressions” rightly provokes derision and scorn from normal people. Those who live among the slings and arrows of the real world, where actions have consequences and one’s delicate self-esteem is a matter of indifference, can only shake their heads at such childish tantrums. But the roots of this degradation of the university’s traditional mission to cultivate critical reasoning rather than narcissism run deep in our therapeutic culture, and threaten the virtues and qualities of mind necessary for self-rule and political freedom.

Start with the “self-esteem” fad that colonized the schools more than 25 years ago. In 1991 a widely publicized “study” proclaimed, in the words of a New York Times headline, “Gender Bias in Schools Is Still Short-Changing Girls.” Because of the “unconscious bias” of teachers, the tale went, grade-school girls are wounded in their self-esteem and thus rendered incapable of excelling in traditional male-dominated disciplines like science and math. Though the study’s methodology and conclusions were quickly discredited, it went on to provide intellectual support for the $600 million Gender Equity in Education Act of 1993. It also encouraged the more expansive application of Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendment Act, which threatened the cut-off of federal money to colleges in order to coerce them into policing “discrimination” on the “basis of sex.”

This is just one example of how left-wing identity politics, in this case feminism, generated phony “research” that gave a patina of science to contested and dubious ideology, which then became enshrined in federal law. Today, the abuse of Title IX drives the administrative infrastructure of universities that caters to selected victim-groups, creates unconstitutional inquisitions that investigate and punish allegations of “sexual assault,” and shuts-down free speech by conservatives. After all, we mustn’t let wounded self-esteem damage the prospects of women and minorities already victimized by the “patriarchy” and “racism.”

So it’s not just the left-wing ideology that corrupts universities. Intellectual development and training have been replaced by an obsession with students’ feelings. How students feel is now more important than how well they think.

Indeed, over the years universities have developed numerous services for students that monitor their psychological health and offer therapeutic solace. For example, I just received an email from my campus of the California State University system, the largest in the U.S. with half a million students and 23 campuses. The email came from the Campus Assessment, Response, and Evaluation outfit, its acronym CARE revealing its therapeutic thrust. This “collaborative effort” uses a “community approach” to help professors identify “students who are facing significant personal struggles, in distress, or students of concern” and direct them to the appropriate services. These services include free counseling; “Let’s Talk,” a drop-in venue for therapeutic intervention; and a licensed clinical social worker available by appointment at no cost. We professors are supposed to monitor our students for “signs of stress” and then alert them to these services.

What has any of this to do with higher education? What business is it of the university to monitor the psychological well-being of legal adults? Partly schools are engaging in preemptively protecting themselves from liability or a federal investigation. If a depressed student commits suicide in a dorm, the existence of these services and programs for depressed students can offer protection from being sued. The university administrative apparatus also benefits from the expansion of its offices and services, and the added resources and manpower they require. This need to service students’ psychological health has contributed to the expensive administrative bloat in higher education, which has led to fewer full-time professors, more exploited adjuncts, and higher tuition costs.

Identity politics programs also find such offices to be useful allies for reinforcing their ideological agendas. Identity politics is predicated on victimhood, and victimhood generates demands for compensatory programs and services. Minority students and women presumably are being psychologically wounded by racism and sexism, and thus should have services that apply therapeutic balm to their psychic wounds. Given the rarity these days of legal or violent expressions of sexism or racism, victims must look to psychological effects like “low self-esteem” or subjective perceptions of “microagressions” as evidence of “unconscious racism” and other occult biases. The therapeutic services offered by the university validate this victim narrative, as do sexual harassment policies, “hate speech” codes, and other policies all backed up by badly written federal and state laws. They all assume the therapeutic imperative to protect students from damage to their self-esteem.

More generally, this therapeutic infrastructure infantilizes students, and contributes to the dumbing down of university standards of admissions and evaluation, lest students suffer even more trauma from poor academic performance, flunking courses, or dropping out. Thus apart from the hard sciences, most college curricula today are the equivalent of high school courses fifty years ago, and in some cases are not even up to that standard. The obsession with “hurtful” speech similarly assumes a child-like sensibility that must be cossetted and protected in order to avoid psychological damage. In the case of black students, this attitude is particularly patronizing and insulting. College students whose ancestors survived everyday racist slurs and lethal violence now must be protected from subjective slights often invisible to most other people. And universities tolerate and even enable the violent tantrums thrown by those who have been led to expect the whole world to respect their tender sensibilities and inflated perceptions of themselves and their political beliefs.

Hence the sorry state of higher education in America. Legal adults who can join the military and vote, who drink and fornicate, who drive cars watch porn, are treated like preschoolers who need hand-holding and constant guidance from bureaucratic nannies. Standards of admission are lowered and grade inflation runs rampant so that privileged victim-groups aren’t slighted and their self-esteem damaged by hidden racism and sexism. The administrative bureaucracy waxes ever fatter, even as the number of full-time professors diminishes and tuition costs soar. And the tax-payer is on the hook for much of the bill, as the federal government now backstops the over $1 trillion in student debt, billions of it unlikely ever to be repaid.

— Deion Kathawa is an alumnus of the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor with degrees in both philosophy and political science, the former editor in chief of the Michigan Review, and a contributor to American Greatness.

This weekend, I became one alumnus among thousands of University of Michigan alumni heading out into the world to begin discharging my duties as a citizen: voting, paying taxes, and engaging my co-citizens in the public square. Some have argued that a sizeable number of my fellow graduates will not be able to make it in the real world. Because they have been conditioned to have an “expectation of confirmation” of their ideas, the thinking goes, these “snowflakes” will “melt” upon contact with different opinions. While that is a striking (and horrifying) thing to contemplate, I think we ought to take a step back and try to understand the campus mindset more thoroughly, because if we don’t, we’ll be subject to increasingly extreme displays of illiberalism and anti-intellectualism that will inevitably trickle out of universities and infect the wider society — to our collective detriment.

The first thing to know is that the picture that is painted in the media of campuses as incubators and hotbeds of far-left radicalism is, too often, accurate — and depressing. What’s more, too many of the most politically active liberal students understand neither free speech nor one of its prime functions: to discover what’s true. And why would they? After all, free speech and truth itself are nothing more than oppressive, white-supremacist social constructs! Nearly every liberal college student with whom I have spoken in-person or engaged online believes that the First Amendment proscribes so-called hate speech, by which they seem to mean nothing more than speech that expresses ideas with which they disagree or that offend them. And when they find out that the First Amendment does not actually achieve this, to them, desirable end, they bristle: Well, it should!

“That’s offensive!” is a common retort among my peers, and it shows how far standards of discourse have plummeted. The numbers bear this out. But while clustering, the political polarization of academia and society more generally, and the rise of social media bear their share of the blame, they are not by themselves sufficient explanations for what is happening on our elite campuses. Why are students behaving in ever more fascistic ways?

Altheia Richardson, Clemson’s director of the Gantt Multicultural Center, thought she had a heck of an idea when she recently stepped in front of the Clemson Undergraduate Student Government (CUSG) Senate: require that all future student candidates take an ideological poll test.

Yes, really.

She proposed that the body adopt an “intercultural competency” exam which students must pass prior to announcing their candidacies:

The “intercultural competency” test requirement for Student Government candidates who wish to run for office was just one of the ideas Altheia Richardson, Clemson’s Director of the Gantt Multicultural Center, proposed in a recent presentation to Clemson Undergraduate Student Government (CUSG) Senate. As an alternative, Richardson also suggested group training for CUSG members once elected.

“So when it comes to this whole idea of intercultural competence, what would it look like to have a standard for if you’re going to be elected as an officer, or hold a seat within CUSG, that you have to demonstrate that you have a certain level of intercultural competence, before you’re allowed to take that office, or that seat,” Richardson stated, according to CUSG Senate’s public livestream.

When asked by one CUSG senator to elaborate on “the standard for intercultural competency,” Richardson responded that “it could be training, workshops, things like that. It could look very different, but it was just a suggestion that I made to some of the folks that came to me.”

In a follow-up question, the senator asked whether Richardson was “implying that if there’s a threshold that people who have been elected democratically to this body, are then not allowed to serve those peers, because of a certain level they don’t reach in certain areas.”

“Well, it could happen before the democratic election process,” she answered. “If that is set by your Elections Board as a standard, then if you’re vetting the candidates who are running, then it can happen even before the democratic process takes place.”