A merica’s top universities have, over the past several decades, consolidated and nationalized the role they had carved out for themselves in New England in the years of the early republic: They are the formatory institutions of the political class of this nation. Their graduates will expect to fashion the rules, and rule the fashions, of this nation. They will man the bureaucracies and shape the political and social norms for their entire country.
No testament to their inadequacy for this role could be more comprehensive than the encampment at Columbia University, which the NYPD finally was called in to clear on Tuesday night: full of masked students shouting half-understood Islamist slogans — “Globalize the Intifada” — and intimidating “Zionist” students, guarded from exposure by the media, or punishment from the administration, by a phalanx of tenured professors, also shouting slogans from behind masks.
The masks are an important feature to note because aspiring elites wearing them in a free country has a different meaning than it did when beleaguered citizens wore them in Hong Kong. For Hong Kongers, it was a guard against the unaccountable power of the Chinese Communist Party deploying facial-recognition software and punishing as political crimes what had been allowed as a matter of common law. On Columbia’s campus, the masks communicate the desire of our future elite to remain unaccountable themselves and to act with criminal impunity.
Conservatives have sought to prevent the encampments from spreading by drawing strong distinctions between free-speech protections for the students and standards of manners, anti-harassment regulations, and the like. This may be what is legally required of state universities like the University of Florida, where Ben Sasse made those distinctions as clear as possible. But it’s entirely inadequate for the role that Columbia and the other Ivy League colleges want to play in our republic. The standard is not just free speech, or more speech to counter bad speech, but truthful speech.
The approach of allowing free speech while regulating only harassment or other disruptive behavior has been championed by Professor Robert George at Princeton, both during the recent encampments and before in a debate with Yoram Hazony, who argues that universities ought to have higher standards for their students than “free speech” if that free speech is being used as a cover for antisemitism.
George’s strongest argument is that granting powers to college administrators to discipline students for their speech will only result in the further weakening of protections for “dissenters” — that is, those people like himself who adhere to the mission and purpose of universities going back to their foundings.
George is clear on what’s allowed and what is not allowed.
“The academic project entails norms that restrict some instances of speech, and more general norms of social order apply, too: threats and harassment are prohibited, as are slander and libel; incitement to imminent lawlessness is subject to sanction; and so on. . . .
I believe that, for reasons both principled and pragmatic, university administrations should not prohibit and punish speech on account of the moral, political, or religious views expressed—no matter how fiercely I or anyone else judges those views to be wrong, evil, or even dangerous.
Unfortunately, this just shifts the principled and pragmatic problems elsewhere. Those same administrators that George doesn’t trust to advocate for an orthodoxy must now judge the orthopraxis. The problem is that the administrators are committed to an orthodoxy that necessarily shapes and prejudices their judgment of the praxis.
When a student in the quad said, “Go back to Poland,” to a Jew, was the student calmly expressing a viewpoint, however abhorrent, or was the speech act an attempt to harass? The disciplinary board will bring with it a judgment about which side of the verbal exchange represents a settler colonialist project that must be dismantled in order for students to feel safe, and which one is just voicing the cry of the oppressed. I propose that the content of the speech, “Go back to Poland,” is malicious, even if it is the cool-headed and sincere political opinion of the speaker. So too is the speech that all Zionists deserve to die because of their participation in systems of oppression.
The content of the speech reveals that the character of the speaker is unfit to be a student at a university that prides itself on its formatory role over the American elite. That formatory role includes inculcating the virtues that make a republic of diverse citizens possible.
And we know that Columbia has failed in this. Khymani James made clear his views that Zionists do not deserve to live as a student of Columbia. He made those views explicitly clear in a disciplinary hearing, over his statement, “I don’t fight to injure or for there to be a winner or a loser; I fight to kill.” According to the New York Times, in the disciplinary hearing, he compared Zionists to Nazis and explained himself: “The existence of them and the projects they have built, i.e. Israel, it’s all antithetical to peace. It’s all antithetical to peace. And so, yes, I feel very comfortable, very comfortable, calling for those people to die.”
One can argue justly that James’s incendiary speech is not a matter for the law to punish. But nobody can argue well that the character it reveals in the speaker is fit to be a member of the American elite in good standing, credentialed by a university whose motto is “In Thy light shall we see light.”
Students at our elite universities should be trained to a higher standard. Their liberality as leaders of their fellow citizens depends on their self-restraint and adherence to durable truths. That is, the cure for bad speech on campus isn’t more speech — more speech is just the mob. The cure for bad speech on campus is wisdom.
If George is right that holding students to a higher standard than James’s brag — “Be grateful that I’m not just going out and murdering Zionists” — brings with it the inevitability that people like him cannot coolly discuss the philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe because of some ignorant Marxoid excuse that it is a “danger to women,” then that is a pity.
This cannot be cured by more speech. Perhaps it is listening to that Light referred to in Columbia’s motto. Perhaps it is calling out now: “Come out of her, my people, lest you share in her sins, and lest you receive of her plagues.”