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Over the past several decades, few places in America have become more hostile to free speech than our universities. These institutions of higher education have become cloistered echo chambers of leftist thought where voicing a dissenting opinion is cause for abrupt dismissal or being hauled before a disciplinary board and sentenced to reeducation.
Yet in the wake of rising anti-Semitism, university administrators seem to have had a sudden change of heart. Free speech, once considered suspect, is now declared to be of paramount importance to the healthy functioning of a university, even—or perhaps especially—when the group being targeted by it is Jews.
The Freedom Center’s Spring 2025 Campus Campaign targeted these elite universities and their leaders as “Ivory Tower Hypocrites” in a published report and a wide-reaching social media campaign.
“At far too many campuses, the same administrators that have defended the free speech rights of Jew-haters, Hamas supporters, or radical gender activists have blatantly failed to secure the same rights for those with opposing views,” explains the report.
Universities named in the report include UCLA, Columbia, UPenn, Georgetown, Wake Forest and the University of Nevada-Las Vegas, among others. These schools allowed woke leftist activists to run roughshod over campus rules and violate codes of conduct with impunity, while failing to extend even basic free speech protections to students and faculty with opposing views.
Former University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill defended a blatantly anti-Semitic Palestinian literature festival on campus, claiming to “fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission” but persecuted conservative law professor Amy Wax for declaring that sex is binary and airing the inconvenient truth that black law students “rarely” finish in the top half of their class.
Columbia allowed pro-Hamas activists to illegally threaten Jewish students and disrupt campus life for months but then suspended Israeli professor Shai Davidai and banned him from campus after he publicly confronted university administrators for their failure to protect Jewish students.
Campus police at the University of Nevada-Las Vegas allowed a pro-Hamas mob screaming about genocide to disrupt and then completely shut down a science lecture on black holes being given by a Jewish Israeli professor who was targeted for his ethnicity and national origin.
The Freedom Center’s campaign called on President Trump and Congress to hold the administrators of these universities to account for their double standards in protecting free speech on campus and withdraw federal funding from those who do not immediately rectify this duplicity.
The spring campaign culminated in a cutting-edge social media campaign targeting individuals with a connection to each campus. The campaign generated over 90,000 impressions and reached over 50,000 individuals associated with the universities.
“It’s time to cut federal funding to my beloved UCLA,” one alum responded to the campaign. “I hope every cent of not only Jewish money, but any monies from anyone with a 21st century and democratic mindset are withheld until all of these campuses are de-radicalized,”added another commenter.
Other readers denied that there was any problem with either anti-Semitism or persecution of conservative speech on campus. “Glad to be a Bruin alumnus and glad to shout out ‘Free Palestine!!!’” stated one UCLA graduate. “Israel is committing a genocide,” claimed another commenter.
It is clear that much work remains to be done to ensure that intellectual diversity and Jewish students are protected on our nation’s campuses. To expand the reach of its spring campaign, the Center also published its report as an ebook titled “Ivory Tower Hypocrites: The American Universities Enforcing Double Standards in Free Speech.”
View images from the Freedom Center’s social media campaign below.
