E-Pluribus | May 3, 2024
All speech is free, but some speech is freer than other speech; don't let the students run the schools; and the whitewashing of Hamas.
A round-up of the latest and best musings on the rise of illiberalism in the public discourse:
Abigail Shrier: There Are Two Sets of Rules for Speech
George Orwell’s Animal Farm contains the immortal line, “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” Writing for The Free Press, Abigail Shrier makes clear the sentiment can apply to “free speech” as well in the minds of many.
A police officer who pulls over speeding black motorists—and only black motorists—isn’t protecting “law and order.” He’s engaging in invidious discrimination. So too the university administrators who suddenly discover they are free speech absolutists only when student protesters call for the death of their Jewish classmates.
[. . .]
On campuses that have—for a decade or more—repeated ad nauseam that priority one was the creation of a “safe, inclusive, supportive, and fair” community, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators wave Hezbollah flags, wear Hamas headbands, and conceal their faces with masks. They ignore all time, place, and manner restrictions on student demonstrations set by their schools, and refuse all demands from the universities to take down their tents or to move their protests elsewhere. And at Columbia, until April 30, when protesters took over Columbia’s Hamilton Hall and the NYPD was at last called in, they almost got away with it.
At UCLA, protesters blocked students from entering the library during the midterms, asking those who wished to enter: “Are you a Zionist?” After a Jewish girl was reportedly beaten unconscious by pro-Palestinian protesters, pro-Israel counterprotesters at UCLA arrived in masks and hoodies, shooting off fireworks, firing tear gas, and throwing objects at the pro-Hamas protesters and attempting to physically destroy the encampments. Only then did UCLA call in the police to remove the encampments.
Instead of immediately suspending the pro-Hamas protesters for breaking university rules, for weeks, university administrations instead chose to “negotiate” with the rule-breakers. At Columbia, the administration offered to review its policy on “socially responsible investing” (read: divesting from the world’s only Jewish state), and offered to “make investments in health and education in Gaza.” At Brown, the administration promised protesters that they would put divestment from Israel on the agenda. At Northwestern, the administration meekly tossed rewards, including the promise to establish a full-ride scholarship for Palestinian students and guaranteed faculty jobs for Palestinian academics.
[. . .]
Consider how racist speech (or even racially insensitive speech) has been received on virtually any major American campus for decades.
In 2017, an anonymous jerk put flyers up around American University’s campus. The flyers displayed a Confederate flag, a stem of raw cotton, and read “Huzzah for Dixie” and the like.
American University immediately launched into emergency response mode, treating the flyers as a criminal threat. It published CCTV video and solicited help from the public in identifying the man who posted the flyers. An all points bulletin called “CRIME ALERT” went out for the man’s arrest. The New York Times covered the incident; the words “free speech” do not appear once in the article. Instead, it approvingly noted that in a previous incident—when bananas were found hanging from nooses around campus—the FBI had been called to investigate.
Read the whole thing.
Shalom Auslander: Dear Media, Stop Taking Students Too Seriously
While many commentators say it is vital that we listen to young people’s opinions on the pressing issues of the day, Shalom Auslander is not one of them, to say the least. Auslander says adults should stop exploiting masses of immature college students for their own purposes, and let the kids learn and grow up instead. Via Persuasion.
For the record, I am anti-Netanyahu and I am anti-Hamas. I am strictly anti-death, which is why I support any demonstrations trying to halt it. I also firmly believe that anti-Semitic violence, on campus and off, ought to be handled appropriately, say with a baseball bat or a large mallet, and that no student or group should ever be made to feel fear. But the salient fact about college age children (as Vonnegut referred to those of that age sent to die in war) is that their brains simply aren’t done.
As the National Institute for Mental Health puts it in layman’s terms, “The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”
In even laymannier terms, they’re literally half-baked.
Their batter is sticking to the toothpick.
[. . .]
And so watching these media stories, I began to get an uncomfortable feeling, a feeling that I was participating in a terrible exploitation, the exploitation of half-baked children: by the parasitic media of the IAC, who will wrap the foulest turd in the First Amendment and claim they are heroes for doing it; by the ADL, who wouldn’t know what to do without anti-Semitism; by Michael Moore, trying to stay relevant to a generation that has never heard of him; by the cowards of PEN, the same disgraces who took offense when their organization honored the comedy writers of Charlie Hebdo murdered by batshit crazy fundamentalists. “Authors in search of character,” Salman Rushdie called them at the time, Salman being one of the few writers with a spine.
This, then, is not a criticism of college students. It is a criticism of the people using them and manipulating them, of the media who should know better; of the people training cameras on them, enflaming them with their hot lights and mics and location vans for no greater goal than getting clicks. One can almost feel the reporters’ orgasms building as they report from 116th Street by Columbia, or outside the gates of Yale, or across the street from my son’s university, fixing their hair for the camera whose dead gaze makes them feel something like love; hoping, begging for the police to show up, oh yes, just like that, for the National Guard, please, yes, keep doing that, for that climactic moment they have been so desperate for, that sweet release when riot gear is strapped on, arrests are made, and they achieve… content.
Read it all.
Jeffrey Herf: Springtime for Sinwar
Every generation has those who run interference for mad men and mass murderers. At Quillette, Jeffrey Herf says the current beneficiary of this convoluted thinking is Yahya Sinwar, the military leader of Hamas in Gaza. Herf takes a long look at what drives these useful idiots.
On the evening of 29 April 2023, demonstrators occupied Columbia’s Hamilton Hall, barricaded themselves inside, and refused to move until Columbia agreed to divest its endowment funds from Israel. A video published by the Free Press shows a masked person using a hammer to smash the glass in the building’s doors, before using what appears to be a bike lock to secure them. Other masked protesters build a makeshift barricade out of chairs. That evening, protesters outside the occupied building cheered its “liberation” and denounced Israeli “apartheid” and “genocide.” One young woman can be seen in a sweatshirt from Choate Rosemary Hall—one of the most expensive and exclusive private boarding schools in the United States. It is a feeder school to the Ivy League, and the alma mater of President John F. Kennedy (among other members of the American establishment).
In unaccented American English, the supporting crowd chants that “Israel will fall! Brick by brick, wall by wall! We want all of it! Settlers, settlers go back home! Palestine is ours alone!” These young Americans at Columbia university and at other demonstrations this spring are openly—and proudly—calling for the destruction of the state of Israel. Though they have no claim to use the word “ours alone” regarding any territory in the Middle East, in the name of anti-racism and anti-imperialism, they support the “martyrs” of Hamas who aim to create an ethnically and religiously cleansed “Palestine” free of Jews.
These disgraceful scenes are one result of the emergence, over the last decade or so, of a pro-Hamas Left among the faculty and students in America’s universities. Since the 7 October massacre of over twelve hundred Israelis was orchestrated by Hamas’s military leader in Gaza, Yahya Sinwar, this contingent has burst into full and unapologetic public view. While many in the professoriate would strenuously deny that they are supporters of Hamas, their stubborn refusal to call for the organisation’s surrender and their vehement denunciations of Israel’s military response both lend objective moral support to the terrorist group during the ongoing conflict.
In one way, this development is not surprising—antagonism to Israel has long been a defining element of leftist ideology, and there is nothing new to be heard in the protesters’ chants and slogans. The calumny that Israel is a racist and genocidal colonial state has been a part of the assault on Israel in world politics since the late 1960s. For most of that time, American and European decolonial leftists—including professors, students, activists, and journalists—supported what they regarded as an equally leftist and decolonial project represented by the Palestine Liberation Organisation. Accordingly, they made excuses for the PLO’s terrorism and insisted that its effort to destroy the state of Israel by force of arms was not motivated by antisemitism. Yassir Arafat entered the romantic pantheon of global Third World revolutionaries and became a regular visitor to Moscow and East Berlin. These decades of secular antagonism to Israel created the foundation for the Left’s willingness to defend Hamas in spite of its reactionary religious fanaticism.
But in another way, the academic Left’s enthusiasm for Hamas is remarkable. The enthusiasm of leftist professors and students for the Islamic Resistance Movement in Gaza is unprecedented in the history of modern leftism. Scepticism and even outright rejection of what Marx called “the opiate of the people” has been a salient theme of leftist sensibilities since the French Revolution. Yet Hamas’s punishing fundamentalism has not deterred the secular American Left from embracing what I have called “fascism with a religious face.” Over the past decade, I have drawn attention to the emergence of the pro-Hamas Left, and to the bizarre fact that secular intellectuals and students are now supporting an organisation that grew out of the Muslim Brotherhood and Nazi collaborators. Today, the Islamisation of the Left has become unignorable on college campuses.
Read it all here.
Around Twitter (X)
The Cornell Philosophy Department is coming across as a little petty these days, but Kathleen Stock is trying to get along:
Here’s Davidson College Professor I.J. Bailey and The Bulwark’s Cathy Young with some back and forth over The Foundation for Individual Rights & Expression:
And finally, via Conor Friedersdorf, when looking for a lawyer in the future, you might want to make a mental note to check if they were student editors at the Columbia Law Review circa 2024: