Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
Since I was in an upsetting kerfuffle with the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF, and I call the squabble “The KerFFRFle”), over which I resigned from its Honorary Board along with Steve Pinker and Richard Dawkins, I haven’t paid much attention to the organization. I do get their alerts, for they’re still doing good work in upholding the First Amendment’s Establishment Clause, reinforcing the wall between church and state. Their condemnations, like the one I highlight here, don’t usually accomplish much, but their lawsuits or amicus briefs have been effective, and the FFRF does raise awareness about Constitutional violations. Yes, they are overly woke, which is why I resigned (see the first link), but that doesn’t mean that their overall effect is bad. It isn’t!
I noticed the other day that they’ve gone after New York City’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, who I see as both an antisemite and an Islamist. And by “Islamist” I mean a Muslim who is active in trying to make countries adopt Islam as part of their system of governance. In this case, Mamdani is mixing Islamic religious celebrations with city business: a violation of the First Amendment. I have little doubt that he would like the U.S. to become the Islamic Republic of America.
Click the screenshot below to read:
An excerpt:
The Freedom From Religion Foundation is again warning New York City’s mayor that the Constitution prohibits government officials from using the machinery of public office.
FFRF has sent its second letter in a couple of months to Mayor Zohran Mamdani after receiving a complaint from a New York City employee regarding a recent religious event organized through official city channels. The national state/church watchdog previously contacted Mamdani in February after he posted on the official New York City Mayor’s X account about participating in a suhoor meal and praying with Department of Sanitation workers during Ramadan. [JAC: he appears to have deleted the tweet, and if that’s the FFRF’s doing, good for them],
Despite that warning, FFRF has now learned that the mayor’s office held a “City Workers Iftar” on March 12 to “celebrate workers who keep New York City running while fasting.” The event notice was emailed to city employees by Interim Commissioner Melissa Hester and it noted that the event included a call to prayer.
A city employee who contacted FFRF observed that it is “completely inappropriate for a government agency to have a religious celebration.” The employee expressed concern that events like this may create the perception that the mayor’s office favors one religion and that employees attending city-sponsored events may be expected to participate in religious activities.
“While you are entitled to observe your faith in your personal capacity, the Constitution prohibits government officials from organizing, promoting or participating in religious exercises in their official roles,” FFRF Legal Counsel Chris Line writes to Mamdani. “Hosting a religious observance for city employees of one religion and facilitating a call to prayer through official government communications and personnel crosses the line between private religious expression and government-sponsored religious worship.”
FFRF emphasizes that city employees work under the authority of elected leadership, creating a dynamic where even “voluntary” religious events can carry implicit pressure. “Public employees should not be placed in a position where they may feel compelled to attend a religious event or appear supportive of a particular faith tradition to maintain favor with their employer,” the letter states.
I oppose Mamdani not only because of his Islamism and apparent antisemitism, but because he’s a faux Democrat, promising much but likely to deliver little. (See his latest gaffe on St. Patrick’s day!) And I worry that because the Democrats are so befuddled and besotted by “oppressor/victim” ideology (Mamdani, being a Muslim, is seen as “oppressed”), he will have a future in politics beyond being mayor. He could become a Congressman, though fortunately not President, as he wasn’t born in the U.S.
Anyway, be aware of what’s going on in NYC, and kudos to the FFRF.
I’ve long urged all colleges and universities, including private ones, to adopt a speech code that adheres as closely as possible to the First Amendment of the Constitution. The few exceptions, like specifying the “time, place, and manner” of protests, are made simply to avoid demonstrations from disrupting the main business of colleges: teaching and learning.
Further, fewer than a dozen schools have adopted the principle of institutional neutrality embodied in Chicago’s “Kalven Report”, which prevents the university and its units from making any political, ideological, or moral statement—with the rare exception that statements are permitted when they bear directly on the teaching, learning, and research mission of the university. A neutrality principle is important because it prevents the university from taking official ideological positions that might chill the speech of those who dissent from such positions.
A similar defense of the neutrality principle, for scholarly associations, by the way, just appeared as an op-ed in the WSJ, written by our former provost Daniel Diermeier, now Chancellor (aka President) of Vanderbilt University. You can read it by clicking below, or find it archived here:
A quote:
The American Association of University Professors sparked a firestorm in higher education last month by reversing its longstanding opposition to academic boycotts. As wrongheaded as that move was—and as poorly received as it was by many, including the group representing America’s leading research universities—the real trouble with the AAUP began in February, when the organization signed on to a petition from organized labor calling for a cease-fire in Israel’s war in Gaza.
It is inappropriate for the AAUP to take a position at all on the war in the Middle East. Here is an important guardian of academic freedom—the essential rights of professors to study, write and say what they like—espousing a particular ideological position, thereby sending the message to its members that there is only one correct way to think about the war.
. . . This is a problem for several reasons. There is the chilling effect on debate, and the potential silencing of dissenting members, that occurs when a professional association declares there is only one right way to think about an issue. There is the risk of eroding the organization’s legitimacy and effectiveness by turning it into one more political player or advocacy group. And there is the undermining of respect for earned and credentialed expertise, the foundation of academia, that results when leaders of an association whose discipline is unrelated to the topic at hand opine on the issue nonetheless. But what concerns me most are the damaging consequences that position-taking by academic associations can have on the careers of individual faculty members.
But I digress, for the topic at hand is Sunstein’s op-ed. I just happen to agree nearly completely with both pieces, which lay the ground work for free speech and academic freedom.
At any rate, Cass Sunstein, a professor of law at Harvard (and formerly at the University of Chicago), has written a NYT op-ed emphasizing that yes, colleges and universities should follow the free speech guidelines of the First Amendment as they have been interpreted by the courts. You can read the article by clicking on the headline below, or you can find it archived here.
I’ll add the Sunstein is of Jewish descent given his statements about speech that may be anti-Semitic. His introduction:
Last spring, protests at numerous American universities, prompted by the ongoing conflict in the Middle East, produced fierce debates over freedom of speech on campus.
Colleges and universities struggled mightily over how to mount an appropriate response. The University of Pennsylvania refused to allow a screening of a movie that was sharply critical of Israel. Brandeis University barred a pro-Palestinian student group in response to inflammatory statements made by its national chapter.
At Columbia, police officers arrested more than 100 students in an effort to empty the school’s pro-Palestinian encampment; classes were later moved online. But at Northwestern, the administration entered into a deal with protesters in which almost all of their tents were removed in return for multiple commitments by the university, including an agreement to provide the “full cost of attendance for five Palestinian undergraduates to attend Northwestern for the duration of their undergraduate careers.”
There have been intense debates about whether antisemitic speech, as such, should be banned on campus and about the right definition of antisemitic speech. With the new academic year starting alongside a looming presidential election, we can expect protest activity on a host of issues, raising fresh questions about free speech on campus.
To answer those questions, we should turn to the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which states that Congress “shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech.” Those words provide the right foundation for forging a new consensus about the scope and importance of free speech in higher education.
. . . It is true that the First Amendment, as framed, does not apply to private colleges and universities — only to public officials and institutions. If Harvard, Stanford, Baylor, Vanderbilt, Pomona or Colby wants to restrict speech, the First Amendment usually does not stand in the way (though a state might choose to apply First Amendment requirements to colleges and universities, as California has in fact done).
Still, most institutions of higher learning, large or small, would do well to commit themselves to following the First Amendment of their own accord.
As a rallying cry, that consensus should endorse the greatest sentence ever written by a Supreme Court justice. In 1943, Justice Robert H. Jackson wrote, “Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
Agreed, and remember, as Sunstein emphasizes, the courts have placed limits on free expression: no defamation, no false advertising, no sexual harassment, no speech intended to provoke imminent and lawless violence. The last one, and several others, are relevant to the abrogations of speech likely to occur on campus this year:
If students want to take over a building or to destroy university property, the First Amendment will not help them. The Constitution does not forbid universities from enforcing the law of trespass.
Nor does the First Amendment protect criminal conspiracy. If a group of students or professors conspires to violate the law, it is not protected merely because the conspiracy consists of speech.
More subtly, the First Amendment allows universities to punish speech that is intended to incite, and is likely to invite, “imminent lawless action.” Under this standard, students or professors can be punished for inciting an angry crowd to take over the president’s office.
But they cannot be punished for saying, “The United States is a racist country” or “Capitalism Is Rape” or “Israel is committing genocide” or “Abortion is Murder.”
The First Amendment protects speech that is angry, unpatriotic, insulting, hateful, hurtful, offensive — or even harmful.
Sunstein then quickly lays out a program of what speech should be permitted (and again, he’s talking largely about campuses, for this is where the problem has become most acute, at least for academics). Colleges should not ban speech because of its viewpoint. Colleges should not restrict speech based on its content—unless that content inhibits the mission of the college (for example, if a professor in an evolution class starts fulminating about politics). Here’s another sensible exception:
It follows that even if colleges and universities choose to follow the First Amendment, they can impose restrictions that would not be permissible elsewhere. They can direct professors to treat their students respectfully in class. If a teacher of physics says he believes it is hopeless to try to teach physics to women, he can probably be disciplined; it is hard to teach physics if you are on record as saying that your female students are incapable of learning.
Most important, colleges and universities should not (and public ones cannot) forbid “hate speech”, for that’s a slippery term that, unless designed to incite imminent and predictable violence, could encompass any statements that people find offensive, including criticism of affirmative action or religion. I, for example, should be free to stand in the middle of the University of Chicago campus and shout “gas the Jews!”. (If you’re shouting it to a group of Jews who could enact violence, however, that is banned speech.) Such words are reprehensible, of course, and I’d never say them, but I would defend those who would. And for sure that’s “hate speech”.
Sunstein shouldn’t have to write such an op-ed, as the value of the First Amendment is obvious, especially on campus, where the clash of ideas, many of them “offensive,” is supposed to take place as the way to sort out good ideas from bad, truth from falsehood. But each generation of students needs to learn this anew, which is why our University, and many others, will be giving entering students a short introduction to the meaning and application of the First Amendment. As Sustein concludes,
. . . freedom always deserves the benefit of the doubt. The educational mission does not give colleges and universities a green light to punish speech that their alumni, their donors or influential politicians abhor or perceive as harmful. As Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. put it, “we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe and believe to be fraught with death.”
Colleges and universities exist for one reason above all: to promote learning. They are democracy’s greatest arsenal. They do not need the unanimity of the graveyard. They need the noisy, teeming pluralism of living communities that search for truth.
There is a new law in the benighted state of Louisiana requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in all public school classrooms, including colleges. It is an arrant violation of the First Amendment—indeed, it was intended to test whether it comports with the First Amendment—and it is motivated by religion. The fact that the law is admittedly religious in origin and nature is pathetically masked by saying that the Commandments are really an important part of American history, and that three other secular documents like the Declaration of Independence may also be displayed alongside Moses’s Laws.
The NYT article above has a brief summary of the law and the motivations of its promoters, which I’ve excerpted below.
Gov. Jeff Landry signed legislation on Wednesday requiring the display of the Ten Commandments in every public classroom in Louisiana, making the state the only one with such a mandate and reigniting the debate over how porous the boundary between church and state should be.
Critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Freedom From Religion Foundation, vowed a legal fight against the law they deemed “blatantly unconstitutional.” But it is a battle that proponents are prepared, and in many ways, eager, to take on.
“I can’t wait to be sued,” Mr. Landry said on Saturday at a Republican fund-raiser in Nashville, according to The Tennessean. And on Wednesday, as he signed the measure, he argued that the Ten Commandments contained valuable lessons for students.
“If you want to respect the rule of law,” he said, “you’ve got to start from the original law giver, which was Moses.”
The legislation is part of a broader campaign by conservative Christian groups to amplify public expressions of faith, and provoke lawsuits that could reach the Supreme Court, where they expect a friendlier reception than in years past. That presumption is rooted in recent rulings, particularly one in 2022 in which the court sided with a high school football coach who argued that he had a constitutional right to pray at the 50-yard line after his team’s games.
. . .The measure in Louisiana requires that the commandments be displayed in each classroom of every public elementary, middle and high school, as well as public college classrooms. The posters must be no smaller than 11 by 14 inches and the commandments must be “the central focus of the poster” and “in a large, easily readable font.”
It will also include a three-paragraph statement asserting that the Ten Commandments were a “prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries.”
That reflects the contention by supporters that the Ten Commandments are not purely a religious text but also a historical document, arguing that the instructions handed down by God to Moses in the Book of Exodus are a major influence on United States law.
I’ve put the bill that became law below, and there’s a lot to unpack in it. But read for yourself; I’ll simply single out the highlights.
Click to read:
The bill begins with a long rationale trying to show that the Ten Commandments are an important part of American history, and therefore should be displayed because it’s not really promoting religion, but recounting our history. After all, some of the Founders mentioned God! But doesn’t explain why, say, the Constitution or Declaration of Independence are NOT required to be displayed. No, the Ten Commandments is the only historical document required to be displayed; other documents are optional. Here’s some of the rationale for making that display mandatory—the “historical context” argument that Christians use to push religion into schools (and put “In God We Trust” on our money):
Recognizing the historical role of the Ten Commandments accords with our nation’s history and faithfully reflects the understanding of the founders of our 9 nation with respect to the necessity of civic morality to a functional self-government. History records that James Madison, the fourth President of the United States ofAmerica, stated that “(w)e have staked the whole future of our new nation . . . upon the capacity of each of ourselves to govern ourselves according to the moral principles of the Ten Commandments.”
. . . The text of the Ten Commandments set forth in Subsection B of this 17 Section is identical to the text of the Ten Commandments monument that was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Van Orden v. Perry, 545 U.S. 677, 688 19 (2005). Including the Ten Commandments in the education of our children is part of our state and national history, culture, and tradition.
The Mayflower Compact of 1620 was America’s first written constitution and made a Covenant with Almighty God to “form a civil body politic”. This was the first purely American document of self-government and affirmed the link between civil society and God.
The Northwest Ordinance of 1787 provided a method of admitting new states to the Union from the territory as the country expanded to the Pacific. The Ordinance “extended the fundamental principles of civil and religious liberty” to the territories and stated that “(r)eligion, morality, and knowledge, being necessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall forever be encouraged.”
. . . .The Supreme Court of the United States acknowledged that the Ten Commandments may be displayed on local government property when a private donation is made for the purchase of the historical monument. Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summan, 555 U.S. 460 (2006).
The bill cites other religious statements by the founders, but of course the word “God,” while appearing in the Declaration of Independence, does not appear at all in the Constitution. The Founders barely believed in God, were not very religious at all, and it’s misleading to suggest that this nation was founded on the rules adumbrated in the Ten Commandments. (Or were there Eleven Commandments? See below.)
Note too that the Supreme Court ruled—and this too seems a First Amendment violation—that one could display the Ten Commandments on government property if the money for the display did not come from the public. This, I suppose, is a lame attempt to avoid excessive entanglement of the government and religion vis-à-vis the Lemon Test, and, indeed, this bill requires that the money for the many classroom copies of the Ten Commandments must come from “donations”. That tells you right away that something fishy is going on.
Display of other documents is optional:
A public school may also display the Mayflower Compact, the Declaration of Independence, and the Northwest Ordinance, as provided in R.S. 26 25:1282, along with the Ten Commandments.
The Northwest Ordinance? What about the fricking Constitution?
There is another requirement: the Ten Commandments must be displayed along with a “context” statement, to wit:
The History of the Ten Commandments in American Public Education
The Ten Commandments were a prominent part of American public education for almost three centuries. Around the year 1688, The New England Primer became the first published American textbook and was the equivalent of a first grade reader. The New England Primer was used in public schools throughout the United States for more than one hundred fifty years to teach Americans to read and contained more than forty questions about the Ten Commandments
The Ten Commandments were also included in public school textbooks published by educator William McGuffey, a noted university president and professor. A version of his famous McGuffey Readers was written in the early 1800s and became one of the most popular textbooks in the history of American education, selling more than one hundred million copies. Copies of the McGuffey Readers are still available today.
The Ten Commandments also appeared in textbooks published by Noah Webster in which were widely used in American public schools along with America’s first comprehensive dictionary that Webster also published. His textbook, The American Spelling Book, contained the Ten Commandments and sold more than one hundred million copies for use by public school children all across the nation and was still available for use in American public schools in the year 1975.
This is all more striving by the sweating lawmakers to show that, because the Ten Commandments were mentioned in early textbooks, they have become an integral part of American education and thus should remain so today. But since then the courts have tried erect and maintain a “wall of separation between church and state”, a metaphor used by Jefferson, who drew on earlier ideas of Roger Williams.
The enforcement of the Establishment Clause hasn’t been perfect: as I said, we have “In God We Trust” on our money; the Pledge of Allegiance includes the phrase “0ne nation, under God”; and the Supreme court has allowed various First Amendment violations to slip through, including, as the NYT mentions, affirming a “Constitutional right” of a football coach to kneel on school property and publicly say a Christian prayer after football games. Christians, it seems, cannot seem to keep their religion out of public schools. (That is, of course, why we have to eternally battle against creationism, which comes from the fictional narrative of Genesis 1 and 2.
Will this law stand? It’s certainly going to be challenged by the ACLU and FFRF, and I’ve no doubt that these and other groups will take the law all the way to the Supreme Court. What happens then? The answer is murky. The court has allowed public prayer after public-school games, and a display of the Ten Commandments on public property if it’s funded privately. The latter ruling may provide a precedent to uphold this law as well.
And we all know that the court is largely religious: 7 of the 9 justices are Catholic (I’m counting Gorsuch, who is “Anglican Catholic”), Jackson is a Protestant, and Kagan is the lone Jew. It’s not hard to imagine that most of the Supremes will be sympathetic to this law. And then. . . I’m worried about the resurgence of creationism.
By the way, as Steve Orzack pointed out, somehow the bill lists not ten but eleven commandments, to wit:
I count ELEVEN, right? The authors of the bill have some revision to do!
One of my favorite secular organizations is the Freedom from Religion Foundation (FFRF), of which I’m a member of the “honorary board”. But even honorary boards should play an advisory role, and so I’m doing that here by calling attention to the organization’s mission creep.
In previous posts, I noted that the organization, which is dedicated to keeping church and state separate—a most laudatory goal—had branched out into areas that didn’t really aim at that goal. For example, they’ve gotten involved in legislation that promotes the participation of trans women in women’s sports, which is not only not a church/state issue, but is unfair and, I think, harmful to women’s rights. The FFRF also branched out into disability rights. That’s a cause I do support, but is not in the stated ambit of the FFRF. At the time I posted about this, I wrote:
This time, the FFRF is making a push for disability rights. While I’m in favor of disability rights, I don’t see them as connected in any way with the separation of church and state. This latest move, on top of the unwise support for transsexual girls participating in public school sports (especially when they’re post pubescent), shows that the organization is expanding into the realm of social justice, just as the ACLU and SPLC has. In general, I see such an expansion as unwise, especially when it involves misguided stands like those about transgender women athletes.
This, too, isn’t a church/state issue, but in both cases above the FFRF has tried to justify entering these areas by saying that they’re forms of “Christian nationalism.” That is, Christian nationalists may oppose trans activism more than do “regular” Americans, and may also be more often against disability rights, though that connection seems more nebulous. Here’s what the FFRF said about that:
Disability rights are a state/church issue.
While America’s conscience has not consistently recognized this, there are clear ties between the Christian nationalist ideology that pervades legislation and the ongoing reality of stagnant and inadequate disability rights laws. The dangerous theocratic Christian ideology that led to Roe v. Wade being overturned is the same ideology that continues to play a part in the oppression of the 61 million disabled adults across the United States. This ideology has guided both harmful disability rights policy and the dismantling of abortion rights. To put it simply, if you care about disability rights, then you also care about the separation of state and church
That didn’t convince me that much. Several of us wrote to the FFRF about this expanding mission, but the organization simply stuck to its guns that these are church/state issues.
Now the FFRF has expanded its mission again—this time promoting voting rights and some legal attempts to make it hard for minorities to vote, even if they’re citizens. That, too, is a form of activism I favor, but, like the cases above, the FFRF justifies this activism as opposing Christian nationalism. In the latest issue of their paper, Freethought Today (click on the headline), there’s an article by Sammi Lawrence, “FFRF’s Anne Nicol Gaylor Legal Fellow,” justifying a push for voting rights on the grounds that opposing those rights is one goal of Christian nationalism. Click the headline to read.
Again, I favor opposing attempts to restrict voting, but that is simply not a church state issue. Here’s how Ms. Lawrence justifies it:
A vibrant, fully franchised electorate is the best guarantee to protect our secular Constitution and government. Without a functioning democracy, the wall of separation between state and church cannot be protected or rebuilt. A diverse and fully enfranchised electorate ensures that no single religion, sect or group can take charge of government and privilege itself or discriminate against others. Protecting voting rights, and thus our democracy, is therefore a state/church issue that should concern all secular Americans
. . . . A three-judge panel in Arkansas State Conference of the NAACP v. Arkansas Board of Apportionment has ruled that private parties, including membership organizations, cannot sue to enforce Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. Judge David Stras, a President Trump appointee who FFRF highlighted in its 2020 report on the Christian nationalist takeover of the federal courts, wrote for the majority, saying only the federal government may sue to enforce Section 2. For context, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act prohibits states from creating voting laws that discriminate against voters on the basis of race, and it has become one of the cornerstones of our country’s civil rights laws since it was enacted in 1964.
This is thin gruel and tortured logic. To say that this is a church/state issue because only a fully franchised citizenry can enforce the Constitution, or that the federal courts are being infested with Christian nationalists, does not show that voting rights is a church/state issue. If you want to say that, then any belief or act that can be connected with Christianity or Christian nationalism becomes a church/state issue. But fighting for voting rights does nothing to keep that First Amendment wall up.
In fact, I’d say that those who benefit most from enforcing voting rights, minorities who are mostly black, are those most likely to be religious. As a 2018 Pew Poll found, and this has been true for decades, “Black Americans are more likely than overall public to be Christian, Protestant.” That doesn’t mean that they’re more likely to be “Christian Nationalists,” of course, but the more religious someone is, the more likely they are to favor erasing the wall between church and state. Atheists don’t oppose the Establishment Clause.
The issue is certainly one of civil rights, but not Establishment Clause rights.
If the FFRF wants to expand its mission, it should admit that frankly, and not engage in this kind of circumlocution to justify its expansion. It’s unseemly and illogical. And, in the case of transgender activisim, by buying into progressive politics, the creep can even be harmful.
And this is my say as an Honorary Board member. The ACLU and the SPLC were once fine secular organizations devoted to protecting everyone’s civil rights. Now both are circling the drain (the SPLC is actually in the drain) because they decided that social justice is as important—or more important—than civil rights. I’d hate to see my beloved FFRF go the same route.
A lot of the fracas around Presidentgate, when Republican members of Congress questioned—some might say bullied—the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn about their speech policies, centered on how the Presidents answered questions about hypothetical calls for the genocide of Jews. Their answers ultimately led to the resignation of Penn President Liz Magill as well as of the head of Penn’s Board of Trustees. Harvard’s President Claudine Gay squeaked through after scrutiny by the university’s board of Overseers. It was after Magill walked back her “it depends” answer, and issued a video calling for censorship of calls for genocide, that I decided that she should go—and she did. In my view, nobody should run a University who favors serious curbs on the First Amendment.
Much of the arguments then and now involved whether calls for genocide of the Jews should be permitted—permitted under both the universities’ speech codes and, I suppose, the First Amendment. I don’t know about the speech codes of those three schools, which, according to the Presidents, largely do conform to the courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment. And, as I said at the time, using the First Amendment standard one would have to answer the question, “Do your speech codes prohibit calling for the genocide of Jews?” by saying “it depends.” That is the correct answer, but the Republican bullies didn’t like it, yelling and demanding a “yes or no” answer. But such an answer isn’t feasible for many First Amendment questions, which often do depend on how and when speech is uttered.
The problem in Congress, I’ve added, came not from these correct answers (though Magill retracted hers, which was a big mistake), but from the arrant hypocrisy exercised by these schools, so that minor infractions of speech were punished while calls for genocide of the Jews—at least in the “river to the sea” mantra—were fine. It doesn’t look good to suddenly adopt strict First-Amendment principles right at the time when they involve criticism of Jews.
Also acceptable would be more explicit calls for genocide—under most circumstances. My solution (and Steve Pinker’s) was to enact both a Chicago-style First Amendment speech code and a policy of institutional neutrality. (Steve had three other suggestions, too.)
I was glad to see, then, that the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) laid out the legal issues behind calls for genocide on campus, and concluded, as you can see below, that yes, most calls for genocide are protected speech under the First Amendment. The exceptions are things that you’ll already know if you’re a free-speech maven.
Click to read (or listen). The piece is by Aaron Terr, FIRE’s director of public advocacy, and Matthew Harwood, FIRE’s vice president of communications. I’m certain that they consulted with FIRE’s legal experts as well, so I’d take this as a pretty definitive view.
Excerpts from the short article are indented, and my own text is flush left.
FIRE agrees that the issue at the hearings was not free speech, but double standards, and that Magill abandoned free speech entirely in her apologia (bolding and headings are mine, FIRE’s words are indented):
Many of those pressuring universities to punish anti-Semitic speech are rightly calling out these institutions for having double standards — policing microaggressions while letting enthusiastic support for Hamas go unpunished. They’ve correctly identified the problem, but are pursuing the wrong solution. The right solution is to eliminate all speech codes and protect free speech consistently — not to censor consistently.
Nonetheless, Magill has chosen to open the door to morecensorship — and it’s a decision that will reverberate across our nation’s campuses and have consequences for the very Jewish students and faculty she rightly wants to protect in this turbulent moment. While it may not be intuitive at first blush, there are good reasons why both the First Amendment and most colleges’ free speech promises generally protect even “calls for genocide.”
What does the First Amendment allow about this issue?
Harvard, Penn, and MIT are private institutions, but they commit — on paper, though often notinpractice — to protecting free speech, so their students and faculty reasonably expect to benefit from First Amendment standards.
And the First Amendment protects advocacy of violence, so long as it doesn’t cross the line into unprotected conduct or speech like incitement or true threats. These narrow, well-defined exceptions protect individuals from immediate threats to their physical safety, without risking a widespread crackdown on dissenting or unpopular speech.
The Supreme Court defined incitement in the landmark case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. The justices held that the First Amendment protected speech at a Ku Klux Klan rally — complete with a burning cross — where armed Klansmen used slurs against black and Jewish people, called for “revengeance” if the government “continues to suppress the white, Caucasian race,” and announced a march on Congress on the Fourth of July.
Ergo, the Presidents were correct in saying that some time—indeed, most of the time, as you see below—it’s okay under the First Amendment not just to imply genocide (“from the river to the sea. . “) but to explicitly call for genocide. You can read more about Branderburg v. Ohiohere, a case that set out the limits on calls for violence.
What legal curbs are there on calls for violence? There are a few, but as far as I know none of the campus calls for violence, implicit or explicit, have crossed these boundaries.
The Court made clear that speech promoting unlawful action loses First Amendment protection only if it is directed to and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That’s a necessarily high bar, designed to protect a great deal of charged political expression by capturing only that speech that is all but inseparable from the unlawful action that directly follows it. Quoting an earlier decision, the Court reiterated that “mere abstract teaching . . . of the moral propriety or even moral necessity for a resort to force and violence, is not the same as preparing a group for violent action and steeling it to such action.”
The First Amendment also makes an exception for true threats — statements that communicate to another person or group a serious expression of intent to cause them unlawful physical harm.
Advocacy of genocide or violence remains protected speech, unless it meets one of these exceptions in the particular circumstances in which it’s uttered. So, the First Amendment would generally protect, for example, students peacefully marching across the quad chanting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” even if the chant were interpreted as supporting the ethnic cleansing or genocide of Israelis.
But as FIRE’s Legal Director Will Creeley recently explained, if the slogan were “directed at a specific Jewish student by a student or group moving threateningly towards him, during a protest that has turned violent and unstable, it may arguably constitute a true threat.” Moreover, “a campus speaker’s exhortations to a willing audience to attack a passerby might lawfully face punishment as incitement.”
I’ve seen none of these violations so far, but we now have a list the exceptions that fell under the “it depends” answers of the three university presidents. And there’s one more form of calls for genocide that is not protected speech—speech that amounts to harassment. Bolding is mine:
Whether a call for genocide amounts to harassment also depends on context. Harassment is a pattern of unwanted behavior targeted at specific individuals, which may or may not include speech. Under the Supreme Court’s standard for discriminatory harassment in the educational context, the conduct must be targeted, unwelcome, and “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.” The Department of Education has emphasized that harassment “must include something beyond the mere expression of views, words, symbols or thoughts that some person finds offensive.”
But to be clear: Calling for genocide or violence could rise to the level of harassment. For example, if students repeatedly gathered outside a Jewish student’s dorm room and loudly called for Israel to be wiped off the map, that would almost certainly satisfy the Supreme Court’s standard. The issue is not so much the content of the speech — it’s the targeted, extreme, repetitive, unwanted nature of it, which crosses the line into harassing conduct.
Some of my colleagues at the University of Chicago still object to calls for genocide of the Jews that are considered protected speech under the criteria above. “What,” they ask, “do calls for genocide really accomplish?” This is a question asked and answered by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty (a must-read that you can read for free here). FIRE gives another answer: the “slippery slope” one, which I find reasonable. Another one is the “outing the baddies” answer: allowing people to utter even detestable speech enables you to identify those who hold odious views, people who could not be identified were they ordered to keep silent. Finally, there’s also the “sharpen your arguments” answer: you can only formulate your best response to such hatred if you encounter it in its most blatant and convincingly expressed form. The article explains:
But why protect even calls for genocide?
It’s completely understandable for people to pose this question. After all, the vast majority of us agree that genocide is evil and horrific. But most everyone also agrees in the abstract that “hate” is bad. While a ban on advocating genocide or mass killing may be somewhat more specific than a general ban on “hate speech,” it ultimately suffers from the same problems of vagueness and subjectivity.
As we’ve seen in the debate over the Israel-Hamas war, people can’t even agree on what constitutes genocide or advocacy of genocide. (It’s thankfully rare for someone to say explicitly, “We should murder all the Jews.”) When questioning the college presidents, Rep. Elise Stefanik equated calls for “intifada” with advocating genocide, but others say the term merely refers to a mass uprising seeking liberation from Israel. Meanwhile, many claim Israel’s invasion of Gaza, which has killed of thousands of civilians, is a genocide, while Israel’s supporters call it self-defense.
The right to engage in any of this speech would be subject to the whims and biases of whoever happens to be enforcing the ban on “genocide” advocacy. And the result would be stunted debate and discussion about the Israel-Hamas war and other highly consequential geopolitical conflicts.
Indeed. As someone pointed out, the Sixties claim that “violence is speech” has now morphed into the claim that “speech is violence”, and there aren’t many controversial issues I can think of that can’t be characterized as “hate speech”—even as hateful as calls for genocide of the Jews. And who shall be the arbiter of what speech is to be banned? That was a salient point raised by both Mill and Hitchens. After all, aren’t calls to abolish affirmative action hateful to minorities, and a form of bigotry?
But won’t calls for genocide of the Jews create a campus climate of intimidation? Is it not antisemitic action? No, I don’t think so—not so long as those calls are not used to promote imminent lawless violence (no, action a few days later doesn’t count); don’t constitute harassment against individuals; or don’t create such a climate of hostility on campus that students can’t participate in the proper mission of a university: teaching, learning, and doing research. I haven’t yet come across an example on this campus, or on other campuses, involving calls for genocide that rise to this impermissible level. But I hasten to add that at other schools there are indeed lawsuits pending arguing that various speech and actions by universities, or failure to act when a climate of hostility is in place, have created an atmosphere of antisemitism that impedes learning. Two examples are suits against the University of Pennsylvania or the University of California.
I’m not saying, then, that Universities cannot be complicit in creating a campus climate that deprives students of educational opportunities. What I’m saying is that I’m unaware that any of that complicity involves calls for genocide of the Jews—this topic of this post. As always, I believe that all universities should have a code of conduct like ours: one that conforms to the First Amendment as the courts have interpreted it. So yes, if a group of, say, Students for Justice in Palestine were to call for genocide of the Jews without transgressing the legal boundaries noted above, that would be okay by me. Likewise for calls for genocide against Palestinians or African-Americans. I find such speech reprehensible and hateful, but that’s not the issue.
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FIRE has spread its message of free speech further, and emailed a list of other op-eds that its members wrote about the “genocide” issue. What’s below is from an announcement they sent out today:
Critics were right to blast university presidents for their hypocritical defenses of free speech. But the solution to their moral cowardice isn’t censorship — it’s free speech. We took our message everywhere: TV, radio, and our nation’s biggest newspapers. Here’s a taste of our most prominent hits:
HBO: FIRE President and CEO Greg Lukianoff appeared on “Real Time with Bill Maher” to discuss his and Rikki Schlott’s new book, “The Canceling of the American Mind.” But with the events in Congress last week, the conversation took many turns. Watch the interview here.
CNN: Executive Vice President Nico Perrino was in-studio with Jake Tapper for this insightful segment on defending free speech under the most difficult of circumstances. Then, Director of Campus Rights Advocacy Alex Morey provided expert testimony for this report on why context matters when determining what’s protected (and unprotected) speech.
The Boston Globe: Nico’s second big hit of the week is an op-ed covering why colleges should not use this moment to usher in a new era of restrictive speech codes.
X, formerly known as Twitter: Greg and Nico hosted a wide-ranging X Space conversation that covered the current campus crisis and fielded questions from the public. You can listen to the replay here.
Not too long ago, a large group of us published an article in Peter Singer’s Journal of Controversial Ideas, “In defense of merit in science“. The point was that both science and scientists should be judged by merit alone rather than by identity, equity, or other ideological considerations. To publicize the piece and defend it against the inevitable pushback, Anna Krylov and I also wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, “The ‘hurtful’ idea of scientific merit.” (I quite like that op-ed, by the way.)
Now our cudgels have been taken up by none other than respected journalist Fareed Zakaria, and at CNN, of all places! I’m flabbergasted! (Zakaria, by the way, identifies as a secular Muslim, violating my claim that the only religion that has a credible secular version is Judaism.)
Click below to read, or watch the six-minute video at the site:
After mentioning Professorgate in Congress and then giving statistics on the effects of wokeness—the continuing decline in respect for higher education and smaller proportion of high-school students going to classes—Zakaria decries the emphasis on “other agendas”, namely DEI ones, over emphasis on merit. In fact, as Zakaria recognizes, it is DEI itself that has led to the idea that Jews are at the top of the oppressor heap, leading to their unequal treatment in free-speech issues that became evident in the Congressional fracas. After all, it’s only when the Jews come under fire do many universities suddenly raise the flag of free speech. While it may be okay to call for gassing the Jews, it’s not okay to call for lynching African-Americans (I hasten to add that I consider both calls odious but still forms of allowable speech so long as they conform to the courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment).
Zakaria:
American universities have been neglecting excellence in order to pursue a variety of agendas — many of them clustered around diversity and inclusion. It started with the best of intentions. Colleges wanted to make sure young people of all backgrounds had access to higher education and felt comfortable on campus. But those good intentions have morphed into a dogmatic ideology and turned these universities into places where the pervasive goals are political and social engineering, not academic merit.
As the evidence produced for the recent Supreme Court case on affirmative action showed, universities have systematically downplayed the merit-based criteria for admissions in favor of racial quotas. Some universities’ response to this ruling seems to be that they will go further down this path, eliminating the requirement for any standardized test like the SAT. That move would allow them to take students with little reference to objective criteria. (Those who will suffer most will be bright students from poor backgrounds, who normally use tests like the SAT to demonstrate their qualifications.)
In the humanities, hiring for new academic positions now appears to center on the race and gender of the applicant, as well as the subject matter, which needs to be about marginalized groups. Based on conversations with dozens of academics, my impression is that today a White man studying the US presidency does not have a prayer of getting tenure at a major history department in America. Grade inflation in the humanities is rampant. At Yale College, the median grade is now an A. New subjects crop up that are really political agendas, not academic fields. You can now major in diversity, equity and inclusion at some colleges.
The ever-growing bureaucracy devoted to diversity, equity and inclusion naturally recommends that more time and energy be spent on these issues. The most obvious lack of diversity at universities, political diversity, which clearly affects their ability to analyze many issues, is not addressed, showing that these goals are not centrally related to achieving, building or sustaining excellence.
Out of this culture of diversity has grown the collection of ideas and practices that we have all now heard of — safe spaces, trigger warnings, and micro aggressions. As authors Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff have discussed, many of these colleges have instituted speech codes that make it a violation of university rules to say things that some groups might find offensive. Universities advise students not to speak, act, even dress in ways that might cause offense to minority groups.
I always considered CNN irredeemably woke, but this certainly is not that: it would be considered “hate speech” by many!
And this is the salient point, one that I hope people recognize:
With this culture of virtue signaling growing, the George Floyd protests erupted, and many universities latched on and issued statements, effectively aligning their institutions with these protests. By my memory, few took such steps even after 9/11 or during the Iraq War.
In this context, it is understandable that Jewish groups would wonder, why do safe spaces, micro aggressions, and hate speech not apply to us? If universities can take positions against free speech to make some groups feel safe, why not us? Having coddled so many student groups for so long, university administrators found themselves squirming, unable to explain why certain groups (Jews, Asians) don’t seem to count in these conversations.
Zakaria concludes, with Van Jones (watch the video), that “the point of college is to keep you physically safe but intellectually unsafe, to force you to confront ideas that you disagree with passionately.”
He then proffers gives a remedy, but it’s a bit weak on specifics:
What we saw in the House hearing this week was the inevitable result of decades of the politicization of universities. America’s top colleges are no longer seen as bastions of excellence but as partisan outfits, which means they will keep getting buffeted by these political storms as they emerge. They should abandon this long misadventure into politics, retrain their gaze on their core strengths and rebuild their reputations as centers of research and learning.
But what does that involve? Well, here are solutions I’ve given, and I add Zakaria’s call for more political and intellectual diversity (you don’t need DEI groups to produce that, and they couldn’t anyway):
a.) Colleges should adopt the two Chicago Principles of free expression and institutional neutrality—and enforce them.
b.) Colleges should spell out where First-Amendment freedom of speech ends (e.g., no violence, no obstruction of the University’s mission, and so on). That is, there should be clear “codes of conduct” that are compatible with the courts’ interpretation of free speech and with what universities are designed for: teaching, learning, and finding the truth. This may occasionally clip the wings of free speech very slightly, as when colleges enact bans on shouting down speakers. That’s legal in public but should be banned in colleges.
c.) And I add a new principle: dismantle all DEI bureaucracy at colleges. As far as I can see, it has done no good, sucked up a lot of time and money, and created a lot of bad stuff, setting student against student and group against group. Now that affirmative action is illegal, DEI no longer has a clear mission. Complaints of bias and harassment can be handled by the normal college procedures.
John Strauss, an economics professor at the University of Southern California (USC), has suffered one of the most ridiculous instances of professorial “cancellation” that I’ve heard of. He’s being punished by USC simply for exercising his right of free speech. (Although USC is a private school, it has a free-speech code that is close to the University of Chicago’s, and does not exempt “hate speech” so long as it conforms to the courts’ interpretation of the First Amendment.) Here’s an excerpt from their code:
Our longstanding policies also declare that the University of Southern California is committed to fostering a learning environment where free inquiry and expression are encouraged and celebrated and for which all its members share responsibility. Dissent — disagreement, a difference of opinion, or thinking differently from others — is an integral aspect of expression in higher education, whether it manifests itself in a new and differing theory in quantum mechanics, a personal disagreement with a current foreign policy, opposition to a position taken by the university itself, or by some other means. The university is a diverse community based on free exchange of ideas and devoted to the use of reason and thought in the resolution of differences. The university recognizes the crucial importance of preserving First Amendment rights and maintaining open communication and dialogue in the process of identifying and resolving problems which arise in the dynamics of life in a university community.
Sadly, Professor Strauss, who is Jewish, uttered a statement that, while conforming to USC’s definition of free speech, has gotten him into big trouble. Click below to read about it in the Los Angeles Times.
Most of the incident was filmed, and, indeed, Strauss was simply using his free speech. There are data!
The details from the LA Times:
Until recently, USC professor John Strauss was known mostly for his research on the economics of developing countries, with decades of fieldwork in Indonesia and China.
That changed Nov. 9, when Strauss stopped before students staging a walkout and protest calling for a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip and holding a memorial to thousands of Palestinian civilians killed in the Israel-Hamas war.
The economics professor’s interactions with students that day ended with the 72-year-old Strauss, who is Jewish, declaring: “Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are killed.”
Strauss told a group of pro-Palestinian students demonstrating on campus: “No, shame on you. You people are ignorant. Really ignorant. Hamas are murderers. That’s all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”
Students captured those remarks on their cellphones, almost instantly seeming to recognize a viral moment. “Can you say that for the camera?” one pressed.
Within hours, Strauss’ comments were posted online, shared and reshared on X, Instagram, Facebook and TikTok.
Here’s the full clip of the interaction with pro-Palestinian students that got Strauss in trouble. I can’t make out what he’s saying, but even the complaining students verified that what he said is what’s given above: wishing for Hamas members to all be killed:
More from the paper:
As his remarks raced across the internet, his condemnation of Hamas was often excised, leaving only his “hope” for “all” to be killed. Captions and comments online framed his demand for “every one” to be killed in myriad, at times deceptive, ways. One Instagram post shared to millions of users claimed falsely that Strauss told the students, “[I] hope you get killed….”
Some of the clip was truncated to make Strauss looks as if he were saying that all Palestinians should be killed. Here’s that clip:
He was punished by USC almost immediately after “offended” students complained to the University. Need I add that saying one thinks members of Hamas should be killed is simply freedom of speech? It can’t even be considered hate speech or incitement to violence because presumably there were no members of Hamas in attendance! Further, trying to kill all members of Hamas is in fact Israel’s precise goal in the recent war.
Within a day, an associate dean told Strauss that he was on paid administrative leave, barred from campus, and that he would no longer teach his undergraduates this semester.
Within the week, a petition demanding that USC fire Strauss for his “racist, xenophobic behavior” and comments that “promote and incite violence” had collected more than 6,500 signatures.
Meanwhile, more than 9,000 signed a counter-petition decrying USC’s treatment of Strauss as “unjust,” saying he was the victim of online misinformation, and demanding that the university reinstate him.
Hussam Ayloush, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, called for USC to launch an investigation into Strauss and to take actions to protect “Muslim, Palestinian and Arab students as well as any others who are targeted by hate and bigotry.”
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Jonathan Friedman, director of free expression at PEN America, criticized USC for “a shocking overreaction,” adding in a statement, “What USC has done runs counter to the university’s obligation to foster dialogue and debate.”
By now, millions have viewed portions of Strauss’ remarks, and his statements — and USC’s response — have become a Rorschach test for a war raging 7,500 miles away.
With its political, ethnic, generational and religious fault lines, the incident has reignited intractable debates over campus censorship, academic freedom and student safety. Nearly every student who spoke to The Times for this article would do so only on condition of anonymity, citing a fear of online harassment
Need I add that that this is punishment, both investigations and barring a professor from campus—punishment for exercising free speech? That violates USC’s own policies and is something for which Strauss could sue the school. Oh, and he stepped on a paper list of putative killed Palestinians, which he avers (and I believe) was an accident. And, at any rate, that “offense” is not why Strauss was punished:
Near a busy campus corridor, the event also included a memorial to Palestinians killed in Gaza since Oct. 7, a death toll that was then about 10,000 and that has since grown to more than 13,000, according to the Hamas-run Health Ministry. Partly enclosed by a fence, the memorial featured four long rolls of paper, at least 18 inches wide, unfurled several feet across the ground. On the paper were printed thousands of names.
Students said that when Strauss came to the demonstration, he stepped on the paper. One student said he was “desecrating the names.”
“All I did was walk through the crowd,” Strauss said, insisting he never saw the list of names but spotted the memorial later in the day after the crowd had dissipated. He acknowledged that he “might well have accidentally walked on” the list but said it was “completely unintentional.”
No one appears to have recorded the first interaction, but students say his presence caused a stir.
Yes, of course it did; he’s known, he’s Jewish, and he wished for Hamas to be killed—a sentiment that many of us probably share. The event blew up more as Muslim or pro-Palestinian students weighed in to damn Strauss. This puzzles me because pro-Palestinian students finally admitted that Strauss was referring to Hamas, not Palestinians. But it didn’t matter: once you’re offended, the cortisol keeps circulating until you get the professor fired. I’ve bolded one bit of the report below:
But as the clip circulated online, it was at times trimmed to a few seconds of Strauss uttering, “Every one should be killed.”
The captions and superimposed text in social media posts could be minimal, misleading or wrong.
“This zionist econ professor purposefully stepped on the list of martyrs before our march and came by again after & said ‘everyone should be killed,’” a student group posted on Instagram.
Another post on Instagram, shared by @CravingPalestine and activist Shaun King, among others, said Strauss “threatened these students ‘hope you get killed and I hope they all are (*Gaza)” during a campus rally for Gaza.” That post has been viewed more than 3.2 million times.
At one point, the group Trojans for Palestine clarified on Instagram that Strauss “did not say he wanted Palestinians to be killed, but Hamas,” according to screenshots of the post.
Then, the group appeared to walk it back: “With his hateful rhetoric, you can draw your own conclusion about whether or not he wished death upon just Hamas or civilians as well.”
Within hours of Strauss’ recorded comments, USC’s Muslim Student Union issued a statement saying that Strauss was “repeatedly calling for the murder of the entirety of Palestine” and expressing “a desire for the death of those supporting Palestine.”
What we see here is a group of The Offended admitting that Strauss was talking about Hamas, but then adding, in a reprehensible bit of rhetoric, “you can draw your own conclusions”. But there’s a video, and the video, even according to the Trojans for Palestine, shows that Strauss was talking about Hamas. The conclusion to be drawn is simply that Trojans for Palestine are trying to get a Jewish professor punished for wishing for the extermination of Hamas.
Since then, USC has backed off a bit: it now allows Strauss to teach undergrads, too, but only remotely. He is still banned from campus. And now he is, as expected, being deluged with hate mail (this is of course legal unless that hate mail threatens him). Complaints have also been fired against him by USC’s “equity, diversity, and Title IX office”. For what, I wonder? Haven’t the administrators viewed the “incriminating” video? If they had acted properly, they would have seen the clip and dismissed the case as in conformity with the University’s freedom of speech policy. But they didn’t.
And so the Academic Freedom Alliance has provided Strauss with a lawyer, and FIRE has written a letter to Carol Folt, USC’s President, which includes the following paragraphs:
Neither theFirst Amendmentnor USC’s policiesshield Straussfrom every consequenceofhis expression—including criticism by students, faculty,orthe broader community.Criticism is “morespeech,”theremedytooffensiveexpressiontheFirstAmendmentprefersto censorship. Butuniversity policiesthat invoke the First Amendmentlimit thetypesof consequences that may be imposedon protected expression,and who may impose them.
Restricting Straussto teachingremotelythe restof the semesterispreciselythe type of consequenceforconstitutionallyprotectedexpressionthatUSC’sFirstAmendment– mirroringFaculty Handbookplainly prohibits,becausesuch a restrictionis likely to chill future faculty speech.The question is not whether formal punishment is meted out,but whether the institution’s actions “would chill or silence a person of ordinary firmness from future[expressive]activities[.]” Courts have explicitly recognized consequences similar to those imposed on Strauss, such as changes to working conditions or restricting access to the institution’s facilities as sufficiently chilling speech.Whether the university labels the restriction “administrative leave”is irrelevant tothe analysis:USCviolated Strauss’s free speech rights by imposing the remote–teaching restriction in response to his protected expression.
They’re right and USC is acting shamefully. It doesn’t matter what Strauss said so long as it conformed to protected First Amendment speech, which it surely did. And I’d be just a peeved if he walked by a bunch of pro-Israel students and said that Israeli West Bank settlers who attacked Palestinians should all be killed.
USC has a history of both administrative and student anti-Israel or antisemitic actions (see the open letters here, here, here, and here). While some of this is protected speech, and other letters call for the University to violate institutional neutrality (which it does NOT have anyway), these incidents have, in toto, created a climate at the University in which Jewish students feel endangered. And if that impedes the function of the University, which is to teach such students and not chill their speech, the atmosphere needs to be addressed. I don’t know what to do about that without asking for violations of the First Amendment or of the principle of institutional neutrality (USC doesn’t have it, but all schools should). Still, the one thing that USC can do is not cancel professors who criticize Hamas.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: If you think Dr. Strauss has been unfairly treated, you can send an email to USC here via the FIRE website. I did, and I wrote my own email although there’s a boilerplate one on the site.
