Category: Colleges acting badly

Bobo’s boo-boo: Harvard dean says faculty have no right to criticize University if it could lead to outside intervention in the school’s business

June 20, 2024 • 9:30 am

Just when you thought the turmoil at Harvard was over, its briquettes have ignited again, thanks to a big squirt of lighter fluid from Harvard’s Dean of Social Science, Larry Bobo.  Last week, Bobo posted a deeply misguided editorial in the Harvard Crimson, which you can see by clicking the title below. What he calls for is in-house censorship of Harvard faculty, and even sanctions applied to those who nevertheless adhere to First-Amendment-permitted free speech:

Click to read:

Apparently the target at which Bobo’s editorial is aimed is ex-President Larry Summers, who criticized Claudine Gay’s response to the October 7 butchery of Hamas as well as the University’s hamhandedness in dealing with antisemitism. But then Bobo goes on to say that faculty should be muzzled in general, so long as what they say could, down the line, cause “trouble”.

I’ll give a substantial excerpt of Bobo’s screed because it violates canons of academic freedom, academic neutrality, and simple common sense.

Having witnessed the appallingly rough manner in which prominent affiliates, including one former University president, publicly denounced Harvard’s students and present leadership, this first question must be answered: Is it outside the bounds of acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to excoriate University leadership, faculty, staff, or students with the intent to arouse external intervention into University business? And does the broad publication of such views cross a line into sanctionable violations of professional conduct?

Yes it is and yes it does.

Note that Bobo says that the faculty behavior is “sanctionable”, i.e., faculty could be punished for free speech—for criticizing the University. As for “the intent to arouse external intervention into University business,” that’s both hard to determine and, at any rate, remains free speech. It’s as if professors or other deans cannot bring to the attention of the public bad stuff going on at Harvard.  One possible example is donor Bill Ackman pulling his gifts to Harvard during and after the Claudine Gay affair. That was bad for Harvard, but faculty who publicized Gay’s missteps, which included plagiarism, should certainly NOT be punished.

And remember that, as Dean, Bobo has the ability to affect people’s tenure, promotions, and salaries within his division, as one professor critical of his stand has noted (see below).

Here’s Bobo evincing ignorance of the First Amendment, which Harvard is supposed to adhere to:

Vigorous debate is to be expected and encouraged at any University interested in promoting freedom of expression. But here is the rub: As the events of the past year evidence, sharply critical speech from faculty, prominent ones especially, can attract outside attention that directly impedes the University’s function.

A faculty member’s right to free speech does not amount to a blank check to engage in behaviors that plainly incite external actors — be it the media, alumni, donors, federal agencies, or the government — to intervene in Harvard’s affairs. Along with freedom of expression and the protection of tenure comes a responsibility to exercise good professional judgment and to refrain from conscious action that would seriously harm the University and its independence.

The response to these assertions is simply, “yes: so long as a faculty member’s speech is not prohibited by the First Amendment (and “inciting external actors to intervene in Harvard’s affairs does not count), faculty do have a blank check. Speech prohibited by the First Amendment includes incitement of imminent and predictable violence (no Harvard faculty have done that), and things like defamation, false advertising, harassment, and so on. Absent those kinds of speech, yes, Harvard faculty can say what they want. Bobo needs to understand the First Amendment. He shows further ignorance of the law in this paragraph:

But many faculty at Harvard enjoy an external stature that also opens to them much broader platforms for potential advocacy. Figures such as Raj Chetty ’00, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Jill Lepore, or Steven A. Pinker have well-earned notoriety that reaches far beyond the academy.

Would it simply be an ordinary act of free speech for those faculty to repeatedly denounce the University, its students, fellow faculty, or leadership? The truth is that free speech has limits — it’s why you can’t escape sanction for shouting “fire” in a crowded theater.

Note that Gates, Lepore, Pinker et al. are said to have “well-earned notoriety”—an interesting choice of words! Why not “renown”?

But the “shouting fire in a crowded theater” phrase, which, when used as a ruse, was construed as speech creating immediate and predictable panic and violence, came from a  1919 Supreme Court decision by Oliver Wendell Holmes—in a case in which a man was indicted for urging others to avoid the draft.  In fact, the anti-draft speech, held unlawful by the Court, was partly overturned 5 decades later precisely because it wasn’t “directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and [wasn’t] likely to incite or produce such action”

None of Harvard faculty speech, then, violated free speech, though Bobo added one other area in which faculty should shut up:

Following similar logic: Is it acceptable professional conduct for a faculty member to encourage civil disobedience on the part of students that violates University policies? Faculty advocacy for actions clearly identified as in violation of student conduct rules is extremely problematic. Doing so after students have received official notification of a potential serious infraction is not acceptable. Such behavior should have sanctionable limits as well.

. . .Modern student protest appears less and less likely to target major non-University events, businesses, or government bodies. Rather, they’re comfortably situated in the confines of college campuses, directing demands for change at university administrators and boards of directors.

While this certainly draws in media attention, it is flawed. Targeting protest at those charged with a pastoral duty of care for their students and an indirect-at-best relation to the protesters’ core grievance considerably removes these efforts from the inarguably heroic actions of college students who burned draft cards in protest of the Vietnam War, registered black voters in Mississippi or Alabama, sat in at segregated lunch counters, or joined marches for women’s liberation and gay rights.

Even this commitment to instruct students on protest, however, is not without justifiable limits. If we are prepared to sanction our students for a line of action contrary to our codes of conduct, then I believe professors or administrators who encourage and advocate for such actions should also face parallel consequences.

I disagree, as do many others.  Encampments (that’s surely what Bobo’s talking about here) are violations of Harvard’s policies, and some faculty did encourage students in their desire to encamp. But that is simply calling for civil disobedience, not calling for violence and the like.  If faculty promoting encampments is illegal speech, then so were the calls by civil rights leaders for illegal sit-ins, voter registration, and marches.  (Note, “lawless action” implies violence, not “peaceful disobedience of the law”.) I disagree with the politics behind encampments, of course, but I certainly wouldn’t sanction faculty for encouraging that behavior. Such speech may have been unwise, but it was neither illegal nor a violation of Harvard’s speech policy.

Remember, encouraging civil disobedience is legal, while civil disobedience itself is by definition illegal.  As for whether disobedience like encamping is “heroic”, that’s a matter for history to judge, not Harvard.

One more thing: Bobo didn’t emphasize that he was speaking personally rather than as a Dean of the College; in other words, he was not limning official policy. (He later clarified that he spoke personally.) Thus his first op-ed is a violation of institutional neutrality that was likely to chill the speech of people in the social sciences and keep them from criticizing him. In fact, someone of Bobo’s position is best off muzzling himself because the line between personal speech and official speech from administrators is unclear. Even now that he’s clarified that he was speaking as an individual, what faculty member in the social science wouldn’t feel inhibited from encouraging students to commit civil disobedience, or from criticizing the administration in a way that may draw outside attention?

The pushback on Bobo has already begun.  A letter appeared in yesterday’s  Crimson authored by three members of Harvard’s faculty Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard (CAFH), and signed by ten bigwig professors (including Randall Kennedy, The Notorious Steve Pinker, Jeannie Suk Gersen, and others) showing how misguided Bobo’s piece was. Click to read:

They correct a number of Bobo’s mistakes I’ve mentioned above, but here’s an excerpt:

It is downright alarming that such a stunning argument would come from a dean who currently wields power over hundreds of professors — without indicating that he would refrain from implementing his views by punishing the faculty he oversees.

We strongly reject Dean Bobo’s arguments. He does not invoke generally agreed-upon exceptions to the right to free speech, such as inherently verbal crimes like libel, or justifiable restrictions on time, place, and manner. Instead, he references an analogy from former Supreme court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Class of 1861, arguing that shouting fire in a crowded theater is sanctionable.

The analogy is inapplicable for many reasons. Holmes alluded to falsely crying “fire,” whereas the speech that Dean Bobo would sanction is reasoned opinion, not known falsehood. The analogy pertains to a reflexive and predictable mob reaction; faculty opinions may be evaluated and deliberated over time. And the actual legal decision Holmes justified, which convicted people who criticized the draft during World War I, was later effectively overturned in a judgment that limited suppression of speech to incitement of “imminent lawless action.”

Analogies aside, Dean Bobo’s assertion that faculty who criticized Harvard’s leadership should be sanctioned because of an “intent to arouse external intervention” is troubling. He has no grounds for imputing such intent, nor for asserting that outside attention “impedes the University’s function.”

. . . Finally, Dean Bobo is also prepared to sanction those who encourage students to engage in civil disobedience that violates University policies. This, too, is deeply concerning. If a professor or administrator says to student protesters that their actions are legitimate civil disobedience, then such advice — whatever one thinks of its merits — is fully protected by academic freedom. Even encouraging students to break rules must be given wide leeway. Criminal law sets a high bar for charging incitement, solicitation, or aiding and abetting, precisely because of concerns for freedom of speech.

Will this letter itself incite outsiders to withhold money from or write letters about Harvard? If so, Bobo’s first op-ed would call this behavior “sanctionable”. But it isn’t.

The letter, I’m told, will soon appear with many more signers on the CAFH website.

There is a lot of criticism of Bobo’s op-ed at both liberal and conservative venues. I’ll show but two (you can access them by clicking on the headlines); one from a liberal source (the Boston Globe) and the other from a conservative cite (the Wall Street Journal editorial board). I’ll give two paragraphs from each.

One Harvard professor, who works in the social sciences, said, “The suggestion that members of an institution should be punished for criticizing that institution represents an authoritarian mindset, with no place in a university.” The professor requested anonymity to criticize “the dean who determines [my] salary, particularly when the dean is saying that deans have the right to punish faculty who criticize deans.”

In December, Bobo, along with hundreds of other faculty members, signed an open letter urging Harvard leaders “to defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom.”

The first paragraph shows why Bobo’s op-ed violated institutional neutrality. He’s now clarified that his statement wasn’t “official,” but it’s too late.  I don’t think the chilling effect of Bobo’s threat to punish faculty members can be overcome now that he’s shot off his big bazoo.  I seriously think he should be replaced, for there will always be the suspicion that he’s policing faculty in the social sciences.

The second paragraph is just bizarre, since what Bobo wrote urged direct violatio of academic freedom: the right of professors to engage in whatever academic research and speech that they see fit, so long as it doesn’t violate freedom of speech or University policy (again, Harvard says that it does adhere to a First-Amendment-like freedom of speech).

And the Wall Street Journal (archived here):

An excerpt:

As an institutional matter, Mr. Bobo’s position as a Harvard dean is especially problematic. Harvard President Emeritus Larry Summers notes that the call to censure faculty members’ comments on university affairs is “an obvious intrusion on academic freedom” and worse because of his position. Mr. Bobo “has authority over salaries, setting promotions and resource allocations,” Mr. Summers notes, and until his views are repudiated by university leadership, “academic freedom at Harvard will be in jeopardy.”

The Harvard faculty hasn’t so far embraced Mr. Bobo’s speech notions, and it will be useful if the gaffe encourages them to reread the University of Chicago free-speech principles over summer vacation. But Mr. Bobo’s broadside is a reminder that censors haven’t vanished from the top rungs of America’s supposedly elite universities.

Instead of soothing the turmoil at Harvard, Bobo has exacerbated it by, as the WSJ suggests, urging the Harvard professors censor themselves—or else. This is not going to bring peace at Harvard, and in fact it’s roiled the University, uniting Right and Left against the administration. (Note the plaudits to the University of Chicago.)

Given Bobo’s boo-boo, here are my three suggestions about what Harvard should do:

1.)  Get rid of Bobo as Dean. Seriously.

2.) The rest of the Harvard administration, and the deans of all the divisions, should publicly say that Bobo’s views are not University policy and that the University adheres to Constitutional freedom of speech as well as academic freedom.

3.) Most important, Harvard should adopt the five provisions laid out by The Notorious Steve Pinker in his Boston Globe editorial last December, “A five-point plan to save Harvard from itself.”  Here are two provisions that need to be formally and immediately adopted by Harvard (a short excerpt from Pinker):

Free speech. Universities should adopt a clear and conspicuous policy on academic freedom. It might start with the First Amendment, which binds public universities and which has been refined over the decades with carefully justified exceptions. These include crimes that by their very nature are committed with speech, like extortion, bribery, libel, and threats, together with incitement of imminent lawless action. It also permits restraints on the time, place, and manner of expression. The First Amendment does not entitle someone to blare propaganda from a sound truck in a residential neighborhood at 3 a.m. or to set up a soapbox in the middle of a busy freeway.

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. . . . Institutional neutrality. A university does not need a foreign policy, and it does not need to issue pronouncements on the controversies and events of the day. It is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer. It’s even worse when individual departments take positions, because it sets up a conflict of interest with any dissenting students and faculty whose fates they control.

During the turmoil of the last year, Harvard has lost considerable money and, more important, a lot of its reputation. The school is now the butt of jokes. It’s also subject to a federal investigation of whether it failed to stop harassment of Jewish students. Harvard’s entire position as the Best College in America depends on its academic reputation, something that has been severely undermined. Bobo helped continue the undermining. Part of the school’s academic reputation depends, of course, on academic freedom and freedom of speech: two buttresses of truth-seeking.

I used to think that NOTHING could erode Harvard’s reputation, but that doesn’t seem to be true. Applications to the school fell 5% last year as students sought other selective schools whose applications have actually increased, and applications for early admission dropped a whopping 17%,  Yes, Harvard will still be able to get its quota of highly qualified undergraduates, but with declining applications, some of the best ones will simply go elsewhere.

Will DEI be dismantled this week in the University of North Carolina System?

May 22, 2024 • 10:00 am

A reader sent me the tweet below (I don’t spend much time on Twitter), but it intrigued me not so much because University of North Carolina (UNC) system spends millions on DEI (that’s not unusual), but because it reports that its DEI policy may be eliminated across all UNC schools this week.  Note that there are 686 DEI positions in the system, with salaries adding up to over $70 million ($91 million if you include benefits).

The article below, from the “Open the Books” Substack site, while a bit rant-y, does give useful information about spending and salaries, even though the UNC system has refused to answer Freedom of Information Act requests from the author.  And the presumably impending end to DEI is also of interest, as it seems to be part of a national trend. Click below to read:

First, the new (the article’s slant is clear):

On Wednesday, the system’s governing board may end the controversial program that institutionalizes bias and prejudice based on neo-Marxist principles and falsehoods.

. . .UNC appears to be joining a group of schools that repudiate the institutionalized bias of “DEI.”

The UNC Board of Governors oversees the entire UNC system. It is expected to vote on a measure this week that would reverse and replace its DEI policy.

This follows an April vote by the Board’s five-person committee on University Governance to dismantle DEI offices.

Last week, UNC Chapel Hill’s Board of Trustees diverted $2.3 million to Public Safety from DEI, as the campus has been embroiled in Pro-Palestinian protests and encampments.

I’ve already reported on the last statement: the diversion of money from DEI to campus cops and security—exactly the opposite of what progressives want.  Here’s how they calculated the payrolls (since the UNC system is part of the state government, salaries are publicly available).

Our audit team at OpenTheBooks.com reviewed official university payrolls after filing records requests and searched university websites for DEI committees and their membership lists. Here’s how the UNC program breaks down:

  • 288 are employed in DEI-related roles listed on the UNC system’s payroll.
  • Another 398 people were found to hold DEI-related roles not shown in the payroll records. Found on university websites, these employees are members of DEI committees, commissions and councils.
  • An additional 80 students were appointed to mostly volunteer DEI roles.
  • Another 66 employees are listed on the university websites for DEI committees but don’t appear in the university payroll – likely meaning the websites are out of date.

We found at least 30 DEI-focused groups steering DEI across the 16 universities. These pulled professors, lecturers, advisors, librarians, directors, and deans out of their academic functions and into efforts to spread DEI policies and principles.

We uncovered empirical evidence that DEI has permeated 300 departments across every aspect the UNC system of 50,000 employees.

For a truly complete picture, we know there is more research to be done. While we compiled a long list, there are indications that even more people are working in DEI-related roles.

Besides the money spent above, the site gives the salaries of the highest-paid UNC system officials connected with DEI, with salaries corrected for likely benefits:

In likely violation of North Carolina’s freedom of information laws, UNC has not acknowledged our April public records request for all university payroll to include all cash compensation (salaries, bonuses, other pay, benefits, etc.). UNC was required to respond, “as promptly as possible.”

After six weeks, the UNC system has only provided a ‘base salary’ payroll list. So, the payroll numbers are most likely 10-15 percent higher than disclosed. For total student and taxpayer cost — tack on another 30-percent for the cost of benefits.

It’s hard not to believe that UNC is stalling here. I wonder why. . .

It’s really a travesty to divert $91 from education to DEI initiatives.  A couple of million would suffice to prevent bias or expand admissions and hiring efforts to try to increase diversity. But “diversity” is invariably a euphemism for “racial diversity”, and while I do want to see that, I also want to see viewpoint diversity, which is the real meat of the college experience: the whetstone against which you hone your ideas.

There’s a lot more in the article, like some of the DEI-related courses taught or certificates conferred, but we’ll leave that for your own reading. The good news is that the UNC system is getting rid of a diversion that is ineffective (though generally well intended) and probably largely illegal.

If you want to see how DEI has been used as a way to eliminate candidates with the “wrong” sociological views, have a look at this New York Post article on how Cornell University has been using diversity statements as reasons to hire or dismiss job candidates. The data—e.g., 21% of candidates for a “hard science” faculty job were rejected based on DEI statements alone—were leaked from Cornell to its Free Speech alliance, which then made it public.

The University of Toronto encampment has a ceremonial fire; head of Sonoma State University in California suspended for deciding on an academic boycott of Israel

May 20, 2024 • 8:30 am

This message was sent to students at the St. George campus (the downtown branch) of the University of Toronto. The message doesn’t stand out insofar as college actions or capitulation to protestors’ demands, goes, but it does combine two of my favorite subjects: college free speech and indigenous knowledge. Only in two places—Canada and New Zealand—could you find such a mixture.

The students at St. George apparently had an encampment, and students were informed that occupying Tent City (Ville de Tentes) constituted trespassing and they were asked to leave, but the University says it’s also determined to end the encampment peacefully.  Since the students aren’t leaving, the encampment continues.

Click on the headline to read, but go to the May 16 update—the latest one. The ceremonial fire is in the forth paragraph:

Here’s the message:

Dear U of T community,

University representatives met again yesterday with students representing those at the encampment. This meeting is the latest in a series of discussions that have taken place.

The discussion was constructive and productive. Much of the focus at the meeting was on discussing the students’ demands.

The University and student representatives have worked together to mitigate the prior concerns regarding sanitation. Moreover, the ceremonial fire inside the encampment is burning under the careful supervision of experienced Indigenous Firekeepers in a manner that suits the unique conditions of the site. We continue to discuss signs and language and emphasize how important it is that they be consistent with the spirit of peaceful protest.

We aim to reconvene soon. We recognize that our entire community has a stake in this matter. Our next community update will be sent early next week, and all updates continue to be posted on the UTogether site.

Our goal remains the same: to find a peaceful and sustainable conclusion to the encampment on Front Campus as soon as possible, in line with University principles and policies.

Sincerely,

Christine Szustaczek
Vice President Communications

There’s a ceremonial fire! Well, it’s better than some acts of the entented, including violence and defacing buildings. Let’s hope the Indigenous Firekeepers are sufficiently experienced and that the tents aren’t flammable.

As of the next day, the encampment remained; here’s a news video from May 17. The encampment (on the St. George campus) appears to be surrounded by a sturdy fence, which means entry is controlled and there’s a part of campus where non-protesters aren’t allowed or welcome.

The President of the University of Toronto had previously responded to protestors’ demands, but the response was basically “no”: the U of T refused the demands to boycott and break off contacts with Israeli Universities, and also refused to divest from Israeli companies because it adheres to a Kalven-esque principle of institutional neutrality in investing:

. . . . . the University’s Policy on Social and Political Issues with Respect to University Divestment notes in its opening Preamble that “As a general matter, the University does not take positions on social or political issues apart from those directly pertinent to higher education and academic research.” Accordingly, “the University will not consider proposals for restrictions on its investments that require the institution to take sides in matters that are properly the subject of ongoing academic inquiry and debate.” It further notes, as a corollary, that the University’s response to any requests for divestment “must be governed by the fundamental place of diversity of opinion within its community. Except in those situations in which the University must settle on an answer to controversial questions about how best to achieve its academic mission, the University risks abandoning its core values if it takes sides in ongoing debates and is perceived to be advancing a specific political or social position.”

That’s an admirable policy. If only the University of Toronto had the same kind of institutional neutrality for speech and official university policy and announcements!  There are a few more points about investing, like the one below, but they’re above my pay grade.

Notwithstanding the above fundamental points, let me make clear that the investment of the University’s endowment, which is comprised of endowed gifts to the University, is managed by the University of Toronto Asset Management Corporation (UTAM), and does not hold any direct investments in companies. The Expendable Funds Investment Pool (EFIP), consisting of expendable gifts and working capital, holds direct investments in fixed-income products, but not in company securities.

The video above reports that the U of T is pondering creating an institute of Palestinian Studies (a form of bias that may be illegal) and creating two faculty chairs in Palestinian studies. My guess is that these demands won’t be met, though the protesters have given the University a June 30 deadline to meet their demand (or what?)

*************

Note as well that meeting protestors’ demands, including academic boycotts, can be dangerous to one’s career (and, I suspect, will give birth to many lawsuits):

The president of Sonoma State University in California was placed on an indefinite leave of absence two days after he sent an email to the university community announcing that he had acceded to campus encampment organizers’ anti-Israel demands.

Ming-Tung “Mike” Lee issued a statement on Tuesday informing SSU students, faculty, and staff that, after standing for 19 days, the anti-Israel encampment on the university’s lawn had achieved at least one of its goals: an academic boycott of Israel.

He went on to address the new academic boycott:

SSU will not pursue or engage in any study abroad programs, faculty exchanges, or other formal collaborations that are sponsored by, or represent, the Israeli state academic and research institutions. SSU also commits to immediately updating any SSU pamphlets and SSU-hosted websites that may still be circulating or searchable and to remove hosting or linking to any pamphlets, flyers, or brochures advertising the study abroad program where students are encouraged to study abroad in Israel. SSU will make it clear to any students that any such programs are terminated until further notice and not simply suspended.

. . . . California State University chancellor Mildred García, who oversees the state’s public university system, wrote in a statement on Wednesday that Lee’s decision to accede to protesters’ demands had not been approved by any entity with authority over the school.

“On Tuesday evening, Sonoma State University President Mike Lee sent a campuswide message concerning an agreement with campus protesters. That message was sent without the appropriate approvals,” García wrote. “The Board’s leadership and I are actively reviewing the matter and will provide additional details in the near future. For now, because of this insubordination and consequences it has brought upon the system, President Lee has been placed on administrative leave.”

Insubordination!

Some sensible views of David French on college protests

April 29, 2024 • 9:30 am

Here are a few misconceptions about college protests being bandied about the internet (in bold) with my responses below them (all text is mine)

a.) If the protests are “peaceful”, then colleges shouldn’t do anything about them

The criterion for colleges to allow free speech, as construed by the courts for state universities, are that speech much be expressed in a “time, place, or manner” in which it doesn’t interfere with the functions or operations of a university (the speech, of course, is not regulated; this rule is ‘content neutral’).  Thus state universities can restrict how, when, and where speech can be expressed given the limitations above. Private universities can do the same if “time, place, and manner” regulations are part of their own policy.  Note that illegal demonstrations can be peaceful but still prohibited, as when there is loud shouting that disturbs classes or sit-ins that occupy university buildings. Many people who should know better, like AOC or Ilhan Omar, seem to think that peaceful protests on campus must be allowable protests.

AOC instantiates this view below, especially because the protestors were warned but refused to leave. Apparently she wants chaos on the campus. Columbia has already gone to all-hybrid classes, and I suspect that they will cancel graduation, an important time in the life of all students.

This same kind of error is made by many faculty when they sign petitions defending illegal and disruptive demonstrations, like those at Columbia. Here they are prioritizing social justice over the function of their own university. As Jon Haidt would put it, they want to work at Social Justice University, not Truth University.

b.) If the protests are legal under the First Amendment, then colleges must allow them

Again, protests that are legal in public may still be illegal in government institutions like state universities if they interfere with university functions.

c.) Under no circumstances should cops or security people be called to remove protestors

If a disruptive protest is prohibited but protestors refuse to leave, they may and should be gently removed by security or police. Universities don’t like this, but what other way is there to break up an illegal protests that interferes with University function?

d.) Because protestors are practicing “civil disobedience,” they should neither be asked to leave nor be punished with suspensions or arrests

Civil disobedience, as discussed by David French in the article below, means deliberately violating a law that you consider immoral, doing so peacefully, and being willing to accept the punishment. The paradigm for such demonstrations are the civil rights marches and sit-ins of the Sixties.  They worked because, by taking their punishment, be it jailing, water hoses, or police dogs, the protestors moved the U.S. morally, showing Americans graphically how segregation was illegal and its proponents immoral. It’s thus almost funny that one of the demands of current protestors, who say they’re engaged in civil disobedience, is that they not be punished for their behavior. Further, what “immoral” law are they violating? Only the “time, place, and manner” restrictions of colleges, though of course they are protesting what they see as Israel’s so-called genocide in Gaza. (And of course they’re protesting their college’s supposed investments in “genocide”.) But they are removed by police not for these things, which constitute free speech, but for illegal and obstructive disruption of a university. The same holds for deplatforming speakers, which is usually not a First-Amendment violation but can be so in government institutions, or for colleges that have a “free speech” policy and take it seriously.

All of these matters are discussed in a new op-ed by NYT writer David French.  The NYT original is here, but if you click on the headline below, be able to read it.

French has had a varied career. He grew up in a small town in Kentucky but then went to Harvard Law school and became a lawyer, first a private litigator, then a constitutional lawyer, and finally serving as an Army lawyer. He adds this:

My most recent book, “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation,” outlined the dangers of polarization and the need to engage with people who have opposing viewpoints. I’m an evangelical conservative who believes strongly in a classical liberal, pluralistic vision of American democracy, in which people with deep religious, cultural, and moral differences can live and work together and enjoy equal legal protection and shared cultural tolerance. In both my personal and professional life I strive to live up to the high ideals of Micah 6:8 — to act justly, to love kindness, and to walk humbly before God.

We’ll leave aside the God bit as it’s not relevant here. What is relevant is his new piece, which should be sent to every college president, provost, and chancellor in America.  If you subscribe you can read it here, but I’ve put an archived version as the link to the headline below, so click on that if you want to read it.

The upshot is that French thinks that universities must observe three principles during this time of protest.

a. Universities must protect free speech
b. Universities must respect peaceful civil disobedience, but
c. Universities must “uphold the rule of law by protecting the campus community from violence and chaos. Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas, but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars.”

You may notice a bit of conflict between principles b. and c.  That means that breaking the rules may be permitted unless it leads to violence and chaos; I interpret “chaos” as the kind of disruption that’s going on at Columbia University. An example of peaceful civil disobedience on campus is the existence of a small encampment of a few tents at Vanderbilt University, the place where Chancellor Diermeier had students expelled and arrested for both sitting in in a campus building and also for injuring a worker as they stormed into the building. Clearly Diermeier (our former Provost) is respecting the right to protest, even though it violates campus regulations, by leaving the small encampment alone.

I’d quote the whole article if I could, but will limit myself to giving French’s take on the issues above. If you’re on a campus, be sure to send this articles to the Powers That Be. French’s quotes are indented. Here’s the gist of French’s “way out” of chaos on campus:

There is profound confusion on campus right now around the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness. At the same time, some schools also seem confused about their fundamental academic mission. Does the university believe it should be neutral toward campus activism — protecting it as an exercise of the students’ constitutional rights and academic freedoms but not cooperating with student activists to advance shared goals — or does it incorporate activism as part of the educational process itself, including by coordinating with the protesters and encouraging their activism?

The simplest way of outlining the ideal university policy toward protest is to say that it should protect free speech, respect civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law. That means universities should protect the rights of students and faculty members on a viewpoint-neutral basis, and they should endeavor to make sure that every member of the campus community has the same access to campus facilities and resources.

That also means showing no favoritism among competing ideological groups in access to classrooms, in the imposition of campus penalties and in access to educational opportunities. All groups should have equal rights to engage in the full range of protected speech, including by engaging in rhetoric that’s hateful to express and painful to hear. Public chants like “Globalize the intifada” may be repugnant to many ears, but they’re clearly protected by the First Amendment at public universities and by policies protecting free speech and academic freedom at most private universities.

Note that repugnant chants must be tolerated, even if they’re anti-Semitic.  I, for one, would not want to punish students for shouting “Gas the Jews,” something that the Columbia protestors come close to. That’s offensive but allowed by the First Amendment. Of course, if the repetition of such sentiments by many create a climate of harassment on campus, that’s a different matter, and a Title VI violation.

It’s a pity that the American public, and especially Representative Stefanik, doesn’t realize that calls for genocide can indeed constitute legal speech. The Presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn were accurate in saying that such calls were legal “if expressed in context,” but none of those schools have explicit First Amendment-based speech codes, and the three schools had been irregular and hypocritical in violating what speech codes they do have. This is why it’s essential for all schools to adopt the Chicago Principles of Free Expression—and over 100 of them have done so. (Remember, we’re a private university, too.)

French on time, place, and manner restrictions:

Still, reasonable time, place and manner restrictions are indispensable in this context. Time, place and manner restrictions are content-neutral legal rules that enable a diverse community to share the same space and enjoy equal rights.”

Noise limits can protect the ability of students to study and sleep. Restricting the amount of time any one group can demonstrate on the limited open spaces on campus permits other groups to use the same space. If one group is permitted to occupy a quad indefinitely, for example, then that action by necessity excludes other organizations from the same ground. In that sense, indefinitely occupying a university quad isn’t simply a form of expression; it also functions as a form of exclusion. Put most simply, student groups should be able to take turns using public spaces, for an equal amount of time and during a roughly similar portion of the day.

. . . But what we’re seeing on a number of campuses isn’t free expression, nor is it civil disobedience. It’s outright lawlessness. No matter the frustration of campus activists or their desire to be heard, true civil disobedience shouldn’t violate the rights of others. Indefinitely occupying a quad violates the rights of other speakers to use the same space. Relentless, loud protest violates the rights of students to sleep or study in peace. And when protests become truly threatening or intimidating, they can violate the civil rights of other students, especially if those students are targeted on the basis of their race, sex, color or national origin.

French on the meaning of civil disobedience (his bolding below)

Civil disobedience is distinct from First Amendment-protected speech. It involves both breaking an unjust law and accepting the consequences. There is a long and honorable history of civil disobedience in the United States, but true civil disobedience ultimately honors and respects the rule of law. In a 1965 appearance on “Meet the Press,” the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. described the principle perfectly: “When one breaks the law that conscience tells him is unjust, he must do it openly, he must do it cheerfully, he must do it lovingly, he must do it civilly — not uncivilly — and he must do it with a willingness to accept the penalty.”

. . . . There is a better way. When universities can actually recognize and enforce the distinctions among free speech, civil disobedience and lawlessness, they can protect both the right of students to protest and the rights of students to study and learn in peace.

In March a small band of pro-Palestinian students at Vanderbilt University in Nashville pushed past a security guard so aggressively that they injured him, walked into a university facility that was closed to protest and briefly occupied the building. The university had provided ample space for protest, and both pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian students had been speaking and protesting peacefully on campus since Oct. 7.

But these students weren’t engaged in free speech. Nor were they engaged in true civil disobedience. Civil disobedience does not include assault, and within hours the university shut them down. Three students were arrested in the assault on the security guard, and one was arrested on charges of vandalism. More than 20 students were subjected to university discipline, three were expelled, and one was suspended.

The students demanding amnesty are not practicing true civil disobedience.  They want to express their principles but aren’t willing to take the penalty for expressing them in an illegal way.  It doesn’t help them, either, that their claim of immorality—that Israel is practicing genocide—is not only wrong, but really does apply to the very entities they worship: terrorist groups like Hamas and Hezbollah. This blatant hypocrisy is called out all too rarely.

French on the importance of viewpoint neutrality:

The message was clear: Every student can protest, but protest has to be peaceful and lawful. In taking this action, Vanderbilt was empowered by its posture of institutional neutrality. It does not take sides in matters of public dispute. Its fundamental role is to maintain a forum for speech, not to set the terms of the debate and certainly not to permit one side to break reasonable rules that protect education and safety on campus.

Vanderbilt is not alone in its commitment to neutrality. The University of Chicago has long adhered to the Kalven principles, a statement of university neutrality articulated in 1967 by a committee led by one of the most respected legal scholars of the last century, Harry Kalven Jr. At their heart, the Kalven principles articulate the view that “the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic. It is, to go back once again to the classic phrase, a community of scholars.”

Contrast Vanderbilt’s precise response with the opposing extremes. In response to the chaos at Columbia, the school is finishing the semester with hybrid classes, pushing thousands of students online. The University of Southern California canceled its main stage commencement ceremony, claiming that the need for additional safety measures made the ceremony impractical. At both schools the inability to guarantee safety and order has diminished the educational experience of their students.

Only about four universities beside Chicago has adopted viewpoint neutrality (Vanderbilt and UNC Chapel Hill are among them), but this principle is just as important as our Principles of Free Expression in keeping open discourse alive at Chicago. Every university should adopt Kalven as well as our principles of free expression. Colleges where I have friends who tell me that their institution refuses to adopt institutional neutrality include Williams College and Appalachian State University. There are many more: for some reason, colleges wish to retain the ability to take political, ideological, and moral stands. Believe me, there is no upside in doing so, for it sets a very bad precedent as well as chilling speech.

Our own encampment by Students for Justice in Palestine is, says the grapevine, set for Wednesday. The plans apparently call not just for setting up tents, but also occupying buildings—acts that violate campus regulations.  I hope to Ceiling Cat that our administration finally grows a spine and enforces those regulations, especially because they have arrantly refused to enforce illegal demonstrations in the past. Right now, our administration appears to be adhering to what French says is a losing strategy:

At this moment, one has the impression that university presidents at several universities are simply hanging on, hoping against hope that they can manage the crisis well enough to survive the school year and close the dorms and praying that passions cool over the summer.

That is a vain hope. There is no indication that the war in Gaza — or certainly the region — will be over by the fall. It’s quite possible that Israel will be engaged in full-scale war on its northern border against Hezbollah. And the United States will be in the midst of a presidential election that could be every bit as contentious as the 2020 contest.

But the summer does give space for a reboot. It allows universities to declare unequivocally that they will protect free speech, respect peaceful civil disobedience and uphold the rule of law by protecting the campus community from violence and chaos. Universities should not protect students from hurtful ideas, but they must protect their ability to peacefully live and learn in a community of scholars. There is no other viable alternative.

**************

Just for fun, here’s one example of how allowing chaos on campus, and demanding that universities take ideological stands, destroy their academic mission. I don’t want our university to wind up full of faculty like this USC gender-studies professor, whose tweets are now protected (h/t Anna Krylov, who’s at USC). Kessler is using the demonstrations to destroy her mission of educating by canceling their final project and promising that she’ll give all her students a good grade. She’s doing this clearly because she’s pro-Palestinian, as well as a chowderhead (see more here).

Oh, and USC has canceled graduation.

Finally, some advice to Columbia University:

a. If the protestors return, as they have, continue to arrest and suspend them. Your actions have been inconsistent, and that prolongs the demonstrations.

b. DO NOT NEGOTIATE with the protestors.

Four new articles on Columbia’s encampment

April 26, 2024 • 10:20 am

Today we’re having a short warm-up protest at Chicago in preparation for the Big Encampment that’s supposed to start on May 1.  I’ll try to document today’s event later with photos and videos.  (I’m betting that the students will be masked.)  And the demonstrators still seem to think that this kind of protest will make the University divest.

As for the continuing encampment and “liberated zone” at Columbia, I have two things to say. First, Columbia President Namat “Minouche” Shafik didn’t enforce last night’s midnight deadline for protestors to leave. Instead, she’s continuing to “negotiate” with them, which worries me. What is there to negotiate? Is she negotiating over the pro-Palestinian demonstrators’ demand that Columbia divest from Israel? If she gives in on even part of that, it will hearten demonstrators everywhere and spur on more disruption. I think it’s more likely that she’s negotiating when and how they can dismantle the encampment, as implied in this NYT article.

Not even 12 hours after Columbia’s predawn assertion of progress in its negotiations with the demonstrators, a protest leader all but dismissed some of the university’s claims.

To extend talks, according to the university, the protesters agreed to remove a significant number of the tents erected on the lawn. Columbia also said the protesters had pledged that non-students would leave the encampment, and that they would bar discriminatory or harassing language among the demonstrators.

But on Wednesday morning, an organizer announced to other students at the encampment that they would not be “doing the university’s job of removing people from this camp for them,” insisting that demonstrators would not become “cops to each other.” And the organizer declared that the protesters were “committed to staying here and having people stay here.”

Second, the biggest of Shafik’s problems is that she’s caught between Republican lawmakers, who are watching her closely and will haul her back before Congress if she allows demonstrations—and their attendant anti-Semitism—to continue, and on the other side the Columbia faculty, which is largely against Shafik for calling the cops on a “peaceful protest”.  I think the faculty are mistaken because they misunderstand what “free speech” is. In my view the protestors can speak freely and even call for the death of Jews, but they should not be allowed to violate campus rules by camping on the quad and harassing other students. (The harassment is documented in nearly all the articles below.) The demonstration, at least inside Columbia’s gates, may be “peaceful,” but “peaceful” doesn’t equate to “legal” on most campuses. There are, as the courts have ruled, “time, place, and manner” regulations that can apply on campus.

At any rate, it now looks as though the Columbia Faculty Senate won’t even attempt to censure Shafik, but instead will try to pass a more tepid measure that won’t lead to her removal: a resolution “expressing displeasure with a series of her decisions, including summoning the police last week to arrest protesting students on campus.”  Right now I’m not sure what should happen to her, but am willing to wait to see what she does. If the students continue to insist on camping on the quad and harassing both visitors and those who are “visibly Jewish,” I think Shafik should call the cops again. The demonstrators cannot be talked out of their views, although one article below says that constructive dialogue is needed.  I would argue that in this case such dialogue is not possible, and will give some evidence why.

At any rate, I’ve found four articles worth reading on the Columbia crisis, which has prompted lookalike encampments across America.  I do this because I think these protests are in many ways as portentous as the protests by students of the Sixties against the Vietnam War, which did help end the war.  The difference is that the current protestors are no longer calling for a ceasefire: they’re calling for the extermination of Israel and, in some cases, killing Jews. They’re also implying that the intifada should be “globalized,” in other words, extend Islamism throughout the world.  Further, because I put the tragic deaths of Palestinian citizens at the door of Hamas, not Israel, I don’t agree with the main tenor of the protests.  Why aren’t the protestors, for example, calling for Hamas to rectify one of its many war crimes and release the hostages?

But I digress. Below are four articles and a brief excerpt from each. The first two are from The Atlantic and the second two from the Free Press. Although these are largely paywalled, if you click on the headlines you should be able to access the archived links. You should read them all if you have time: they’re not long.

First, from The Atlantic.  I start with this one because the optimistic author believes that since the Sixties colleges have failed as liberal institutions, no longer encouraging discourse. At the end, Packer suggests that the disruptions of the last eighty years could have been prevented had students been prompted and trained to “talk with one another”.

An excerpt:

But the really important consequence of the 1968 revolt took decades to emerge. We’re seeing it now on Columbia’s quad and the campuses of elite universities around the country. The most lasting victory of the ’68ers was an intellectual one. The idea underlying their protests wasn’t just to stop the war or end injustice in America. Its aim was the university itself—the liberal university of the postwar years, which no longer exists.

. . . Along, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

. . . The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés. Last week an editorial in the Daily Spectator, the Columbia student newspaper, highlighted the irony of a university frantically trying to extricate itself from the implications of its own dogmas: “Why is the same university that capitalizes on the legacy of Edward Said and enshrines The Wretched of the Earth into its Core Curriculum so scared to speak about decolonization in practice?”

Here’s Packer’s well-intended but misguided call for dialogue. But perhaps he thinks it’s too late for that, and if that’s the case, he’s right:

Elite universities are caught in a trap of their own making, one that has been a long time coming. They’ve trained pro-Palestinian students to believe that, on the oppressor-oppressed axis, Jews are white and therefore dominant, not “marginalized,” while Israel is a settler-colonialist state and therefore illegitimate. They’ve trained pro-Israel students to believe that unwelcome and even offensive speech makes them so unsafe that they should stay away from campus. What the universities haven’t done is train their students to talk with one another.

A second piece from The Atlantic; click to read:

The dynamics of the “zone” are well known by now: the poking of flagpoles into the eyes of Jews, the prevention of “outsiders” from discussing things with the Tenters, the elimination of “Zionists” from the area, and so on.  I’ll highlight a few indications that dissenting speech is demonized and the speakers expelled from Tent City:

“Attention, everyone! We have Zionists who have entered the camp!” a protest leader calls out. His head is wrapped in a white-and-black keffiyeh. “We are going to create a human chain where I’m standing so that they do not pass this point and infringe on our privacy.”

Dozens stand and echo the leader’s commands in unison, word for word. “So that we can push them out of the camp, one step forward! Another step forward!” The protesters lock arms and step toward the interlopers, who as it happens are three fellow Columbia students, who are Jewish and pro-Israel.

There is a “leader” who must be consulted if you want to enter Camp Hamas, much less talk to its inhabitants.

As the war has raged on and the death toll has grown, protest rallies on American campuses have morphed into a campaign of ever grander and more elaborate ambitions: From “Cease-fire now” to the categorical claim that Israel is guilty of genocide and war crimes to demands that Columbia divest from Israeli companies and any American company selling arms to the Jewish state.

Many protesters argue that, from the river to the sea, the settler-colonialist state must simply disappear. To inquire, as I did at Columbia, what would happen to Israelis living under a theocratic fascist movement such as Hamas is to ask the wrong question. A young female protester, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution, responded: “Maybe Israelis need to check their privilege.”

. . . Earlier in the day, I interviewed a Jewish student on a set of steps overlooking the tent city. Rachel, who asked that I not include a surname for fear of harassment, recalled that in the days after October 7 an email went out from a lesbian organization, LionLez, stating that Zionists were not allowed at a group event. A subsequent email from the club’s president noted: “White Jewish people are today and always have been the oppressors of all brown people,” and “when I say the Holocaust wasn’t special, I mean that.” The only outward manifestation of Rachel’s sympathies was a pocket-size Israeli flag in a dorm room. Another student, Sophie Arnstein, told me that after she said in class that “Jewish lives matter,” others complained that her Zionist beliefs were hostile. She ended up dropping the course.

This said, the students I interviewed told me that physical violence has been rare on campus. There have been reports of shoves, but not much more. The atmosphere on the streets around the campus, on Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue, is more forbidding. There the protesters are not students but sectarians of various sorts, and the cacophonous chants are calls for revolution and promises to burn Tel Aviv to the ground. Late Sunday night, I saw two cars circling on Amsterdam as the men inside rolled down their windows and shouted “Yahud, Yahud”—Arabic for “Jew, Jew”—“fuck you!”

I for one have never claimed that the protests were violent; they aren’t except for sporadic and rare instances of pushing or physical coercion. Yes, in that sense they are “peaceful”. But should they be permitted because they are instances of “free speech”?  My answer is “no, because they aren’t.” They violate campus rules for time, place, and manner of speech, and I’d have the same objection if pro-Israeli students were doing the same thing.

This one’s from the Free Press, and since its boss, Bari Weiss, is Jewish (and wrote a book on anti-Semitism), you’re not going to expect much sympathy for the demonstrators in that venue. There are actually three short articles here: one by Bari, one by Jonathan Lederer, and one from Sahar Tartak, the woman who was poked in the eye with a flagpole at Yale University. (Links are archived.).

From Lederer:

On Saturday night, the situation on campus hit a new low. Amid multiple protests both inside and outside of Columbia’s gates, my friends and I decided to show our pride yet again, as we have on so many occasions since Hamas began its war.

For an hour, 20 of us stood on the sundial in the middle of Columbia’s campus with Israeli and American flags and sang peaceful songs such as Matisyahu’s “One Day” and “V’hi She’amda”—a much-needed ode to the hope and perseverance of the Jewish people in the face of enemies who seek our destruction.

Even as we sang lyrics such as “We don’t want to fight no more, there will be no more war,” we were met with hostility. Masked keffiyeh-wearers came to us face-to-face, trying to intimidate us. They chanted, “Fuck Israel, Israel’s a bitch!” We were told, “You guys are all inbred.” They threw water in our faces. These groups are not fairly described as “pro-Palestine.” They are active supporters of Hamas and they say so explicitly: “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” one group chanted by the gates of my school. “Hamas, we love you. We support your rockets, too.”

One keffiyeh-masked protester came up to my friends and I and held up a sign with an arrow pointing toward us that read: “Al-Qassam’s Next Targets.” Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas.

The latter is, of course a veiled threat, and may be a violation of free speech. But clearly there’s antisemitism afoot.

Another Free Press article. I like the title:

I said I’d give evidence that the protestors aren’t willing to discuss things.  It’s anecdotal, of course, but that’s how it must be (there must be at least one protestor in America open to debate).  First, here at Chicago a Jewish group apparently reached out to Students for Justice in Palestine to host a joint event, one that had financial support. The Jewish group never got a response.

Further, the end of the article above shows the complete disdain for debate held by both the inhabitants and the Chairman of Columbia’s Tent City. There’s also evidence of well-funded outside groups contributing to the welfare of Tent City. Of course they don’t care if Hamas and Hezbollah are dancing with delight at their antics.

And it doesn’t seem to occur to these young people—supposedly the best and brightest in the nation—that the leaders of Hamas are using them. As Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said during an interview with an Arab TV station in January: “Palestine [is free] from the river to the sea. That is the slogan of the American students.”

. . . . At NYU’s protest, The Free Press watched one activist carry a generator stamped with the words People’s Forum, a radical NYC-based organization funded by a multimillionaire Marxist with ties to the Chinese government.

. . .A retired law enforcement official who has helped advise the federal government on issues of national security told The Free Press that groups egging on this movement “root themselves by and large on college campuses, because their greatest and most impressionable audience is the students.” And their organizing powers can be seen in the encampments—which have matching tents, identical chants, and shared tactics and guidelines at universities across the U.S.

“You can clearly see it in the uniformity and the sophistication and the appearance of the protest,” he added. “There’s an organizational character to it that we’ve seen many times before.”

Finally, the futile attempt of one student to engage the protestors:

On Tuesday afternoon, Isidore Karten, a 23-year-old recent Columbia graduate, walked into the camp holding an Israeli flag, hoping he might be able to change some of the protesters’ minds through conversation. He says anytime someone tried to talk to him, a “safety-trained” volunteer in a yellow vest quickly intervened.

“Whenever we start to get common ground, the organizers will come over and be like, ‘No, you can’t talk to them,’ ” says Karten, who tells me Hamas murdered his uncle in 1996. “It’s as if they can’t have their own opinion and they have to just blindly follow.”

To paraphrase Johnnie Cochran, “If they won’t debate, just leave the hate.”

A post I retweeted:

. . . and a 3.5-minute video from Columbia, NYU, and Yale by Tom Gross. Yes, they chant, “We love Hamas and their rockets, too!”; and no student interviewed think that Hamas should release the hostages.

McWhorter et al.: some new articles on Columbia University and similar college protests

April 24, 2024 • 10:00 am

I’ve collected several articles on the troubles at Columbia and other American campuses; two of these I found in Tom Gross’s newsletter. If you click on the headlines, you can access them all for free, as I’ve used archived links. I also give a brief excerpt from each article below the headline.

In my view, this is a far more troublesome time for colleges than the period of civil rights and anti-Vietnam-war protests of 1968 and after, for the protestors are not only bigoted and calling for the extermination of Israel, but seem opposed to all Western values—almost as if they would be delighted to live under Hamas. They’re certainly extolling Hama and Iran, both purveyors of terrorism.

And, if I don’t miss my guess, this trouble will spread off campus, for campus is where what is ideologically “cool” begins. (As Andrew Sullivan said, “We’re all on campus now.”)  Arresting or expelling the protestors won’t solve the problem, for arrested protestors are energized protestors.

The solution? I don’t know, but I put the blame on universities themselves, which, by buying into and selling DEI to campuses throughout America, have promoted the divisive idea that Jews are settler-colonialists who don’t deserve a state.

I’m not afraid that concentration camps will come to America, but these protests have exposed not only the ugly underbelly of anti-Semitism among many Americans, but also the hatred of Western values of young people, probably instilled in them by colleges themselves or adopted as the au courant ideology. As you’ll see in the second article, the protests are of course applauded by foreign terrorists and extremists Muslims, for the college students camped out across America are playing precisely by the Islamist rulebook.

The points that in common among these articles are that the student protests of today are not similar to the civil-rights and antiwar protests of the Sixties, as the ones going on now are pervaded by bigotry, hatred, and a wish to destroy a people. Further, several articles argue that preventing the disruption of society and academia in this way, or refusing to even call out the hatred, will ultimately redound to a weakening of American—and therefore Enlightenment—values. This is not going to end soon.

First, in the NYT, John McWhorter is appalled by the demonstrations, but lays them at the door not of antisemitism but of DEI:

Excerpts:

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans, or even something like “D.E.I. has got to die,” to the same “Sound Off” tune that “From the river to the sea” has been adapted to. They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus. Chants like that would have been condemned as a grave rupture of civilized exchange, heralded as threatening resegregation and branded as a form of violence. I’d wager that most of the student protesters against the Gaza War would view them that way, in fact. Why do so many people think that weekslong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?

Although I know many Jewish people will disagree with me, I don’t think that Jew-hatred is as much the reason for this sentiment as opposition to Zionism and the war on Gaza. I know some of the protesters, including a couple who were taken to jail last week, and I find it very hard to imagine that they are antisemitic. Yes, there can be a fine line between questioning Israel’s right to exist and questioning Jewish people’s right to exist. And yes, some of the rhetoric amid the protests crosses it.

Conversations I have had with people heatedly opposed to the war in Gaza, signage and writings on social media and elsewhere, and anti-Israel and generally hard-leftist comments that I have heard for decades on campuses place these confrontations within a larger battle against power structures — here in the form of what they call colonialism and genocide — and against whiteness. The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

. . .On Monday night, Columbia announced that classes would be hybrid until the end of the semester, in the interest of student safety. I presume that the protesters will continue throughout the two main days of graduation, besmirching one of the most special days of thousands of graduates’ lives in the name of calling down the “imperialist” war abroad.

Today’s protesters don’t hate Israel’s government any more than yesterday’s hated South Africa’s. But they have pursued their goals with a markedly different tenor — in part because of the single-mindedness of antiracist academic culture and in part because of the influence of iPhones and social media, which inherently encourage a more heightened degree of performance. It is part of the warp and woof of today’s protests that they are being recorded from many angles for the world to see. One speaks up.

But these changes in moral history and technology can hardly be expected to comfort Jewish students in the here and now. What began as intelligent protest has become, in its uncompromising fury and its ceaselessness, a form of abuse.

This Wall Street Journal column is important, for it’s by Steven Stalinsky, the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), an organization that translates articles, speeches, and sermons from Arabic into Hebrew, English, and other languages. MEMRI thus has its finger on the pulse of Middle Eastern Muslim society. Stalinsky notes that those who promote terror in the Middle East are also promoting these college protests (I suggest that they’re funding them, too), and certainly approve of them, for the protests will move worldwide Islamism forward. Globalize the intifada!

Excerpts:

What is most discouraging is the lack of attention to what the protesters are demanding, which goes far beyond a cease-fire in the Israel-Hamas war.

Take the March 28 re-election fundraiser for President Biden in New York featuring Barack Obama and Bill Clinton, which was disrupted by shouting in the auditorium. That made headlines, yet the protesters’ chants, including “Down with the USA” and the “Al-Qassam are on their way,” a reference to Hamas’s miliary wing, received no coverage. Neither did their physical threats to attendees outside, a common tactic. Also ignored are the flags and posters of designated terrorist organizations—Hamas, Hezbollah, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine—displayed at protests in the U.S., Canada and the U.K.

Major terror organizations have expressed support for these protests and disruptive actions, which have long been a key part of Hamas’s plan to win hearts and minds in the West. As early as a decade ago, during the July-August 2014 Israel-Gaza war, Hamas’s Interior Ministry issued guidelines to social-media activists on framing events for a Western audience.

. . . Every senior Hamas leader has also acknowledged the importance of the protests and said that influencing U.S. and Western policy is part of the organization’s strategy for destroying Israel. Khaled Mashal, the Hamas leader abroad, on Oct. 10 urged supporters to protest “in cities everywhere.” On Oct. 31, he said that the organization’s friends “on the global left” were responding to its appeal. On March 27, he called for millions to take to the streets in protest, saying there had been an unprecedented shift in global public opinion.

. . . Six months after the attack on Israel, Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis and others aren’t merely cheering those protesting in the streets. They are working with and grooming activists in the U.S. and the West, through meetings, online interviews and podcasts.

. . . On March 25, the Columbia University Apartheid Divest student group hosted an event called “Resistance 101” on campus. It featured leaders of the PFLP-affiliated Samidoun, Within Our Lifetime and other extremist organizations. At the event, former PFLP official Khaled Barakat referred to his “friends and brothers in Hamas, Islamic Jihad [and] the PFLP in Gaza,” saying that particularly after Oct. 7, “when they see students organizing outside Palestine, they really feel that they are being backed as a resistance and they’re being supported.” On March 30 on Hezbollah’s Al-Manar TV, Mr. Barakat said “the vast majority” of young Americans and Canadians now “support armed resistance” because of “the introduction of colonialism, racism, and slavery studies into history curricula.”

. . . The collaboration between senior terrorists and their growing list of friends in the U.S. and the West has real-world consequences. These groups are designated terrorist for a reason. They don’t plan marches and rallies—they carry out terrorist attacks. And when the U.S. and Western activists, including college students, see that their marches and protests aren’t achieving their goals, they may consider their next steps—which will be influenced by the company they have been keeping.

From Bret Stephens in the NYT, who begins his story with the visit of two Jewish Yale undergraduates, one visibly Hasidic, to the center of campus protests, where they were “yelled at, harassed, and pushed”.  Like McWhorter and others. Stephens notes that Jews are treated much worse in these demonstrations than other minorities would be, for DEI considers Jews as “white adjacent”.  Stephens not only sees administrators’ lack of action as a form of “bigotry,” but also argues that history will show the demonstrators ineffectual and wrong. And donors will speak with their wallets:

Excerpts:

Yale and other universities have been sites of almost continual demonstrations since Hamas massacred and kidnapped Israelis on Oct. 7. That’s just fine, insofar as students have a right to express their views about the war in Gaza — whatever one thinks about those views. It’s fine, too, to be willing to defy campus rules they believe are unjust — provided they are willing to accept the price of their civil disobedience, including arrest, jail time or suspension.

But as the experiences of scores of other Jewish students on American campuses testify, we are well past the fine stage.

At the University of California, Berkeley, students were spat on and grabbed by the neck by anti-Israel demonstrators. When a small group of students held Israeli flags in front of the Columbia protest, a young demonstrator, her face mostly masked by a kaffiyeh, stood in front of them with a sign that read, “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets,” a reference to the wing of Hamas that led the Oct. 7 attacks. At Yale, according to a video shared by Crispe, a demonstrator read a “poem” threatening those who “finance, encourage and facilitate this mass killing against us: May death follow you, wherever you go, and when it does I hope you will not be prepared.”

. . .The sad fact of campus life today is that speech and behavior that would be considered scandalous if aimed at other minorities are treated as understandable or even commendable when directed at Jews. The calling card of antisemitism has always been the double standard. How would the Yale administration have reacted if Crispe and Tartak had been Black students who said they were taunted, harassed and assaulted (whatever the ostensible political motive) by a mob of their white peers?

From the Harvard Crimson, published at a university where protests are muted, but a student organization was expelled for illegal demonstrations:

An excerpt from the above:

The Crimson reported on Monday that the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee was suspended for “violating student organization rules”— but that doesn’t mean that student organizing efforts will suddenly cease. It’s likely that, like on campuses across the country, the opposite will occur.

While inflated accusations of antisemitism on college campuses may undermine the ability to call it out where it actually exists in the pro-Palestine movement, the antisemitic scenes unfolding at Columbia University — and now other campuses, too — are as blatant as ever.

The ongoing demonstrations are led by Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (whose post-Oct. 7 statement makes the PSC’s words seem benign) and conducted in partnership with an organization called Within Our Lifetime and a few other campus groups.

WOL’s demonstrations at Columbia this weekend were advertised as “Flood Columbia For Gaza,” seemingly referencing Hamas’s name for the Oct. 7 massacre: “Operation Al-Aqsa Flood.”

. . .Pro-Palestine groups must acknowledge that proud extremist antisemites are joining campus protests at universities much like ours, and confront the fact that their hateful and violent theories of change are seeping into on-campus advocacy.

These extremists do not care about promoting peaceful coexistence and ending the onslaught on innocent civilians in Gaza. They are there because these protest spaces have opened a conduit that is permissive of violent extremism and overt eliminationist antisemitism. It seems student organizations have allowed it, or at the very least, turned a blind eye in the name of coalition-building.

That said, the students who were arrested for their specific encampment protest within Columbia’s gates — while their words and choices may be objectionable to some — were largely non-violent. Even the police said so.

But non-violent is not the same as non-hateful, and a peaceful act does not negate overt antisemitism and intimidation of students on Columbia’s campus.

. . .The chaos at Columbia — which blurred the lines between student and non-student protestors and unleashed a whirlwind of antisemitism reminiscent in tone to the “Unite The Right” rally in Charlottesville, V.A. — is a prime example.

If they are dedicated to peacebuilding, pro-Palestinian campus organizations — as they determine the goals of their movements, how to frame their rhetoric, and with whom to build coalitions — must reckon with an irrefutable fact: Over seven million Jews live between the river and the sea, too, and they sure as hell aren’t going “back to Poland,” where over 85 percent of the Jewish population was murdered in death camps.

Simplify their existence to settler-colonialism all you want, and the fact still stands.

A lasting ceasefire, Palestinian liberation, and any positive future in the region will not come from demonizing and attacking Jews and Israelis. It will not happen through eliminationist slogans and events where “Zionists are not welcome.” Boycotting Starbucks probably won’t do it either.

Until that reality is fully recognized in the ethos of pro-Palestine student organizations, their voices and demands will fall on deaf ears. They will be co-opted by violent and hateful extremists, making administrators all the more emboldened to repress their non-violent demonstrations.

Author Nekritz says that pro-Palestinian demonstrators will attain their goals only when they “treat other people with respect, afford our opponents dignity, and foster conversations across deep disagreement.” Good luck with that!

Below: Brendan O’Neill at Spiked is not known for gentle persuasion, and his anger is on view in this article. He sees the Columbia protests, as do others here (as well as I) as a harbinger of the dismantling of Enlightenment values after the entitled, propagandized, and antisemitic college students of our era grow up. (Note: that is of course not all college students, or even a majority, but does include the most vociferous and activist ones.)

Excerpts:

Hands down the worst take on the ‘Gaza Solidarity Encampment’ that has taken over Columbia University in New York City for the past week is that students have always done things like this. Students have forever occupied buildings and quads to make a political point. Students have long agitated against war. Students often find themselves in the grip of passionate radical intensity. Look at the Vietnam era, says every columnist in Christendom, as if the Gaza camp were just another explosion of youthful anti-imperialism.

The wilful naivety of this take is unforgivable at this point. To liken Columbia’s strange, seething ‘pro-Palestine’ camp to earlier campus uprisings against militarism is to gloss over what is new here. It is to whitewash the profoundly unsettling nature of this rage of the privileged against the world’s only Jewish nation. Until someone can point me to instances of those Sixties anti-war kids hurling racist invective at minority groups and demanding the wholesale destruction of a small state overseas, I’ll be giving their Gaza camp commentary a wide berth.

The camp might look and sound like student politics as normal, with its juvenile bluster, megaphoned virtue and the occasional appearance of pitiable university officials warning campers of suspension. But scratch the radical surface and you’ll swiftly find an ugly underbelly of reactionary cries and even outright racism. No sooner had the students erected their tent city ‘for Palestine’ last Wednesday than it became a magnet for genocidal dreaming about the erasure of Israel and plain old bigotry against Jews.

Columbia has rang out with cries of ‘We don’t want no two states / We want all of it!’. You don’t need to be an expert in Middle East affairs to decipher this demand. It’s a sick call to seize the entirety of Israel – all of it – and create a new state more in keeping with the Israelophobic yearnings of both privileged Westerners and radical Islamists. Their longing for Israel’s erasure was made even clearer in a follow-up chant: ‘We don’t want no two states / We want ‘48!’ That is, 1948, a time when the modern state of Israel didn’t yet exist. They want a world without Israel. They want to lay waste to the national home of the Jews.

. . .We need to be honest about what is happening at Columbia. This is solidarity with a pogrom. It is sympathy for fascism. It is privileged leftists getting a cheap moral kick from a mass act of racist violence against Jews that they catastrophically mistake for a blow against imperialism. It is the Socialism of Fools.

More than that, it is a howl of rage against civilisation. This rancid camp with its flashes of outright Jew hate is not an extension of the anti-war activism of old – it’s an extension of the loathing for civilisation that the young have been inculcated with these past few years. To these protesters, the Jewish State, and Jews themselves, represent Western values and Western modernity, and thus they must be raged against. Israel has become a moral punchbag for the sons and daughters of privilege whose hatred for their own societies has driven them over the cliff edge of reason and decency.

How foolish we were to think that education might deliver the young from the benighted ignorances of the past. For today, it is the most educated, the dwellers of the academy, who have allowed the world’s oldest hatred to wash over them. We can now see the consequences of teaching the young to be wary of Western civilisation and to treat everything ‘Western’ as suspect and wicked. All they’re left with is the lure of barbarism, the demented belief that even savagery can become praiseworthy if its target is ‘the West’. If events at Columbia do not wake us up to the crisis of civilisation, nothing will.

From the Wall Street Journal, where author Jason Riley is an opinion columnist. And as he’s African-American, he adds a civil-rights perspective to his piece, and calls for authority to curb illegal demonstrations:

Excerpts:

In 1957, white mobs in Little Rock, Ark., in defiance of the Brown ruling, were preventing black students from safely attending school. President Dwight Eisenhower decided to do something about it. In a prime-time television address, the president explained that “demagogic extremists” and “disorderly mobs” were thwarting the law and that he had an “inescapable” responsibility to respond if Arkansas officials refused to protect black students. “Mob rule cannot be allowed to override the decisions of our courts,” he said. Then Eisenhower sent in the 101st Airborne Division.

The particulars then and now may differ, but the same principle is at stake. The federal government was obligated to come to the aid of an ethnic minority group being threatened by mob violence. Jews in 2024 deserve no less protection than blacks in 1957. And if university officials can’t handle the situation, or won’t let police deal properly with the unrest, Mr. Biden needs to step up.

. . .Mr. Biden’s response to antisemitism is also tempered by political expediency. The young people acting out on campuses are a crucial voting bloc that Democrats worry about losing to independent candidates such as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Cornel West. “I condemn the antisemitic protests,” the president said on Monday, before quickly adding: “I also condemn those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” That sounds like someone who knows how badly he needs Michigan, a state with a large Arab-American population that has soured on him for supporting Israel.

Contrary to what Mr. Biden suggested, the outrage over what is happening to Jews isn’t the result of ignorance or a misunderstanding. Rather, it stems from yet another viewing of a movie Jews have seen too many times. It’s the one where those in a position to do something choose to do nothing.

Biden’s statement was craven: an attempt to placate everyone. The man is incapable of condemning attacks on one side without offering a bouquet to the other.  He’s certainly desperate to get as many votes as possible, but I’m tired of his waffling.  The fact is that the demonstrators at Columbia are worthy of condemnation for their act alone. It’s as if he said, “I condemn the attack of ships in the Red Sea, but I also condemn those who don’t have empathy for the Houthis.”

Live Congressional hearings on antisemitism at Columbia University

April 17, 2024 • 10:40 am

I forgot that Columbia University officials are being grilled in Congress about anti-semitism on its campus. You can watch it live below, and things are getting heated, as they did in the House hearings involving the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and Penn. The Republicans are loaded for bear, but I think I’ll have to watch most of this later. CNN has an article, with a live feed, about what’s going on. Here is some of their news:

All four Columbia officials testifying before Congress unequivocally stated that calls for the genocide of Jews violate the university’s code of conduct.

Rep. Suzanne Bonamici asked Columbia President Minouche Shafik, board co-chairs David Greenwald and Claire Shipman and David Schizer, co-chair of a task force on antisemitism, for a simple yes or no response. All four said “yes,” calls for the genocide of Jews would violate Columbia’s code of conduct.

The response offered a stark contrast to the lawyerly answers that university presidents provided during the December hearing before the same committee. That moment went viral, sparking an uproar that eventually contributed to the ousters of the presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.

Of course, the Columbia officials had the advantage of having months to prepare for that question.

Days after the December hearing, Columbia issued a statement saying: “Calls for genocide against the Jewish community or any other group are abhorrent, inconsistent with our values and against our rules.”

Columbia certainly has learned from what happened in the last hearings! But apparently Columbia doesn’t adhere to the First Amendment, under which calls for genocide are, under many circumstances, legal. This means that their code of conduct does not completely comport with the First Amendment.

Here, quickly, are the YouTube notes:

The Committee on Education and the Workforce, chaired by Virginia Foxx (R-NC), will hold a hearing to call on the leadership at Columbia University to answer for the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses and threatening their Jewish students.

 

Here’s FIRE’s free-speech ranking for Columbia University. It’s below average: #214 out of #248 schools (Harvard was the lowest). Click to look it up: