Consider This from NPR - The Fight Over Free Speech on College Campuses

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

Protests by students supportive of Israeli and Jewish communities, and protests by students supportive of Palestinian communities, have reignited the debate over free speech on college campuses. That debate only intensified when the Presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and MIT testified before a Congressional committee last week about antisemitism.NPR's Scott Detrow talks with NPR education correspondent Elissa Nadworny and first amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff about the climate on college campuses and the tension between protecting students and supporting free speech. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Am Yisrael Chai! Am Yisrael Chai! Am Yisrael Chai! Am Yisrael Chai. The people of Israel live. Hundreds of activists and students at Columbia University chanted those words Thursday night. Protests in support of Israeli and Jewish communities. Behind me we have children here, teenagers, students, rabbis. And protests in support of Palestinians. Free Palestine! Free Palestine!

Up, up, up with liberation! Up, up, up with occupation! Have reignited conversations about free speech on college campuses. In part, because we're seeing more university students and faculty voice concerns about rising anti-Semitism along with anti-Palestinian rhetoric and actions. The issue was at the center of a heated congressional hearing last week. The college presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania

were called to testify specifically about anti-Semitism on their campuses. And it all came down to this one question. At Penn, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard's rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no? And it was a variation on this answer by the three college presidents that incited a rapid and intense and prolonged backlash. It can be depending on the context. Targeted at individuals not making public statements. It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman. It's a context-dependent decision. That's your testimony.

Pence president Liz McGill ended up resigning, and there was days of debate over the fate of Harvard president Claudine Gay. Gay ultimately kept her job. Harvard constitutional law scholar Lawrence Tribe supported Gay, but called her testimony hesitant, formulaic, and evasive. I've heard from students that there is a chill in the air in general, that people are afraid to speak their mind because they think they might be ostracized or might cross a line. I don't think

Harvard or any institution that I know has done as good a job as all of us should in avoiding that chill and encouraging dialogue. Encouraging dialogue even when people on differing sides of an issue might object to what's being said. Here's First Amendment lawyer Greg Lukianoff. His organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, advocates for free speech on college campuses. My very first letter was defending a professor who on 9-11 joked that anyone who can blow up the Pentagon has my vote.

Now, that's obnoxious, and he immediately apologized for it. But, you know, I knew that that was going to be the end of his career if he didn't fight. So if you're not willing to protect things that you don't agree with or actually even deeply offend you, you really should get out of the First Amendment business. Consider this. How do universities reconcile their responsibility as an institution to protect their students while also protecting free speech? From NPR, I'm Scott Detrow. It's Thursday, December 14th. It's Consider This from NPR.

After the congressional hearing, student response was swift, particularly at Harvard. Student support for Claudine Gay, remaining as Harvard's president, was mixed. Shabas Kestenbaum is a Jewish Divinity School student who doesn't think Gay should be president. She has let the calls for violence against Jewish people, she has let this become normalized at Harvard. I entirely blame her. She has let a lot of anti-Semitism at Harvard run rampant. The opposition to Gay also comes from Palestinian students like Harvard Law student Leah Katali, who feels like the conversation about prejudice on campus has been one-sided. It has been abundantly clear that President Gay does not support Palestinian students and those in solidarity with us. We've seen her do, you know, the opposite of that. What it has led to

is a conversation that is existing on a totally different plane of reality that Palestinian students are living in. But there are students who support gay, like Harvard Law student Parth Kotek. I think the job of university president is really hard. There's a lot of competing people to try and police at any given point in time. And I think it's really unfair to sort of make them act in like a political sphere, I guess. I think about what's going on in Israel and Gaza and how it makes sense that we're so oppositional and confrontational because that's the attitude of an actual war. And there is a war over there. So it makes sense that we're like launching into each other with a vengeance. Harvard student Jeremy Ornstein is Jewish. He doesn't agree with how President Gay handled her testimony, but he

doesn't think removing Gay is the solution to the larger issue. And we need freedom of speech. We need freedom of speech, not just in a legalistic way, but in a true way on campus to speak honestly and clearly about how to heal our battered world. There was a lot to keep track of in the world of higher education leading up to that controversial hearing, but this is an issue that's been happening across college campuses since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th, and Israel began retaliating. NPR's Alyssa Nadwarny covers higher education, and she's here to help us get the bigger picture. Hey, Alyssa. Hi, Scott. So let's start by rewinding and broadening out a little bit. Remind us of what's been

going on on college campuses this fall and winter. So across the country, following October 7th, there were vigils and protests on campus. At many of those, there were clashes between pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian student groups. And then there were specific incidents on campus. So at Cornell University, a student was arrested for allegedly threatening to slit Jews' throats. At Drexel University, a Jewish student's dorm room door was set on fire. At Tulane University in Louisiana, protesters assaulted a Jewish student, breaking his nose. And there were attacks and assaults on Muslim students as well as, more broadly, pro-Palestinian student protesters.

That's right. Many have been harassed and doxxed, have lost jobs because of their advocacy. A student at Stanford who is Arab and Muslim was hospitalized after a hit and run on campus that's now being investigated as a hate crime. You know, hard numbers for incidents specifically on campus are hard to come by. But this uptick was enough to get the Biden administration involved. So in November, they told colleges they must condemn anti-Semitic and Islamophobic incidents on campus and take aggressive action to curb it. And how did, broadly speaking, how did colleges and universities initially respond to all of this? Well, you know, there's been a range of responses.

Some campuses have increased police presence on campus, made it easier for students to report incidents. But overwhelmingly, their responses have been met with frustration from students, faculty, and certainly community members, politicians. You know, they say their responses have just been inadequate. And putting out these blanket statements about news events is a new phenomenon for colleges. It got more widespread during the summer of Black Lives Matter. And a lot of experts I talked to said that set a bad precedent. They've been advising colleges to not say much, to not have a stance when news happens, to keep their messages super clear and simple and say, look, people are hurting and we care

and support our students. I do think that that neutrality helped fuel this environment that colleges found themselves in ahead of the hearing last week. Right. And to that hearing, look, all congressional hearings have a political lens. And this one certainly did. Republicans control the House of Representatives. And Republicans in recent years have really taken aim at free speech on college campuses. That's right. I mean, this hearing was called by a Republican-led House committee. The committee chair is Virginia Fox, a Republican from North Carolina. She is very open about her

disdain for higher education. And even in watching the several long hour hearing, there were questions totally separate from anti-Semitism on campus. Things like, how liberal is your curriculum? How many conservatives do you have among your faculty? And even after the hearing, Fox put out a statement, including one sentence that kind of stuck out to me. She wrote, above all, none recognize the direct causal link between campus left-wing ideologies and anti-Semitism. I mean, you've seen in recent years a lot of Republicans try to make this a front and center issue. Ron DeSantis, who's running for president, has really focused on high school curriculums and trying to overhaul the higher ed system in Florida.

Glenn Youngkin really won the governor's office in Virginia by focusing in on education, higher education. Absolutely, yes. And it is important to understand that the conservative movement in the U.S. has long made universities a target. I mean, we're talking about since post-World War II. At the state level, of course, we've seen state legislatures move to control university boards, what gets taught on college campuses, and rules around faculty tenure. And it is a tricky issue because universities, certainly the Ivy Leagues, the elite schools like Yale and MIT and Harvard, are not perfect. And

across the political spectrum, there are different wants in terms of reform. How has all of this, I mean, whether we're talking about the last few months and the response to this hearing or more broadly, the political culture you're talking about, how has all of this changed Americans' perceptions of universities? Okay, so a decade ago, research showed that Americans were pretty supportive of higher ed. I mean, it was a different time. There was a recession, which sent many more people back to school to get job training,

to get degrees. Now in 2023, almost half American parents say they prefer that their child not enroll in a four-year college. And Scott, the consequences for this is economic because, you know, the majority of the time we're not talking about Harvard. Most people don't go to Harvard. They're going to community colleges, public four years. It's about job training. It's about skills training. It's about skills training. And America has a lot of jobs that need to be filled. That was NPR's Alyssa Nadd warning. Now to get more into why the issue of free speech continues to be such a sticking point on college campuses, I'm joined by Greg Lukianoff, who heads the

Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, which advocates free speech. Lukianoff says he was mystified as he watched the college presidents testify last week. I really was kind of amazed to find out that anyone prepared the presidents from Harvard and Penn because they just didn't manage to get through in a sympathetic way that actually explained the philosophy behind it, that actually could be compelling. And I really think you can make an argument if you're used to making free speech arguments, particularly from a philosophical standpoint, you can actually make this make sense. So I thought they were a real mess. Big picture, how does FIRE think about free speech and college campuses and what the pressure

points are right now and what the trends are seeing right now are? Yeah, definitely we're seeing a lot of students getting in trouble for pro-Palestinian speech on campus. We're seeing about, last time I checked, we're seeing maybe two or three times as many cases involving pro-Palestinian speech as we do in a normal year. Now, to be clear, for a matter of perspective, when we look at the things that are likely to get you in trouble on campus, Israel-Palestine was probably eighth or ninth on the list of topics. But this year, it's going to be much closer to the top. One thing that is disturbing, though, is we're also seeing more examples of unprotected speech than we're used to seeing. You know, actual

threats, death threats, for example, at Cornell. You know, actual assault in some of the videos coming out of Harvard. People disrupting classes of sometimes of Jewish professors, you know, like all things that universities don't have to tolerate. They shouldn't. When you think about all this right now, it feels hard to me, and I'm not a lawyer, to have a one size fits all fix, right? Because you're talking about theoretical legal problems. You're talking about policies put in place by large institutions. You're talking about speech that has, at several instances, turned into physical violence in recent months. And at the end of the day, we're talking about college students who are pretty young in the end of the day, right? Like many people are right to feel scared in this moment.

So how do you think about all of those things and come up with a policy? You know, it's tough, but you got to careful and you've got to draw these distinctions. And one of the things that I repeat endlessly is that universities need to have very, very high tolerance for opinions, even offensive ones, but they should have zero tolerance for violence. And what we're seeing in some cases, and that includes, as far as we're concerned, violence includes blocking people being able to get to speakers, speaker shout downs, for example. And I think that there are things that universities should be cracking down on more,

but it's not speech or opinion. And I think one of the reasons why Dartmouth, for example, has handled this better is because they actually did the groundwork first. They actually were having popular programs with dialogue between pro-Palestinian and pro-Israeli students. And I think when you actually take advantage of speech, discussion, open-mindedness, intellectual curiosity, and humility, you can actually have a depolarized environment where some of the nastiest incidents are less likely to happen. Now, of course, if incidents do cross the line into incitement, threats, and discriminatory harassment, by all means, those students need to be punished regardless of what their political opinion is. This is this moment of national focus on this issue you have personally been working on for so long.

What do you want the takeaway to be for people who are maybe thinking about free speech on college campuses for the first time in a long time? Yeah, I, you know, like, FIRE is committing in this next year to a back to basics kind of approach where we realize, you know, what our goal is, is to explain from the most basic kind of principles on up the profound importance of freedom of speech. And one of the most important ones that I think that people don't understand enough is the simple value in knowing what people really think. And I think that's the thing that I actually think is naive, because sometimes you'll have people talking about free speech being naive. What I think is naive is the

idea that censorship will actually solve something. And, you know, as someone who, you know, loves social science as well, one thing that does tend to happen when you have a regime of censorship that says these following opinions, these following statements can get you in trouble, it encourages people to only talk to people they already agree with. And that leads to group polarization. It actually can make radicalization far worse. So we're going back to basics to try to explain the most basic principles of free speech clearly, but also really explain that it can be an essential tool for progress, for innovation, and for understanding. That was Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

and author of The Canceling of the American Mind, How Cancel Culture Undermines Trust, Destroys Institutions, and Threatens Us All. Today's episode was produced by Brianna Scott. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Scott Detrow.