Israel-Palestine Protest at Duke, Free Speech Meltdown at Stanford, and a Stack of Papers
There is a generational divide on the value of free speech. Advocates for the robust exchange of ideas need to do more than lecture young people that free speech will fix our problems.
The Holland Sentinel (2017)
Last week, I recommended that students critical of Israel should attend the event at Duke featuring former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett in order to better understand the Israeli perspective and engage in meaningful dialogue with Mr. Bennett. Every faculty and administrator I bumped into on campus loved the article. The students? Not so much.
Unsurprisingly, the pro-Palestinian contingent on campus ignored the advice. As people lined up outside to gain entry to the event – a perfect time to call out Israel’s various human rights abuses against the Palestinians – the protestors were nowhere to be seen. Then, when Bennett began to speak, some catcalls from the audience began – calling Bennett a “liar” and, when Bennett described his policy on Gaza, shouting out “Gaza is a jail.”
The discussion proceeded without too much disturbance, and I began to think, maybe the protestors would listen and engage. But no. At a pre-designated moment, a chunk of the audience stood up, started chanting slogans, and walked out. The protest leader called out “from the river to the sea” – a long-standing trope that essentially calls for the elimination of Israel. Say what you want about Mr. Bennett, he at least had a firmer grip on reality, recognizing that both Israelis and Palestinians are “not going anywhere.”
The protestors held a picnic outside the event, where, according to the Duke Chronicle, they spoke mainly to each other about the mistreatment of Palestinians. They had dispersed by the time the event ended. Students and faculty aligned with the groups that invited Mr. Bennett filtered from Page to a reception where they too ate food and spoke with each other about the issues.
What was missing? Dialogue between those who walked out and those who listened to the former prime minister.
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This episode at Duke comes on the heels of the fiasco at Stanford earlier this month when law students rudely shouted down a speech by a conservative federal judge. The law school administrator on hand then humiliated herself and Stanford by failing to defend free speech principles, but instead taking the podium and lecturing the judge on how “your opinions from the bench land as absolute disenfranchisement of [the students’] rights.” When Stanford Law School Dean Jenny Martinez apologized to the judge for his mistreatment on campus, students papered over her classroom with posters claiming that that their disruptive behavior was “counter-speech” deserving of protection. This action, as well as the widespread outrage that the episode generated, prompted Dean Martinez to write a 10-page memorandum outlining the university’s free speech principles, suspend the associate dean who sided with the students instead of protecting the judge’s right to speak his mind, and schedule a mandatory half-day seminar on free speech issues.
In light of the fallout, perhaps the students now recognize that a far better way to advance their critique of the judge’s views (a critique with which I agree) would have been to engage with him at the event instead of attempting to shout him down and spewing vulgar epithets.
At both Duke and Stanford, we need to ask ourselves why some students seem to be more comfortable expressing outrage than they are engaging in vigorous debate over ideas.
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This brings me to a written assignment in a new class I am teaching with my colleague Abdullah Antepli on “Combating Hate in the Digital Age.” We are blessed with open-minded, inquisitive students who bravely elected to take this class knowing that it would feature a lot of difficult discussions on sensitive issues relating to antisemitism and Islamophobia. This assignment required analysis of how a university should handle a series of student-run events commemorating the 9/11 anniversary that we very deliberately crafted to straddle the line between criticizing terrorists and anti-Muslim bigotry. To my surprise, not only did students uniformly view the set of activities as deeply Islamophobic, but most of them advocated that the students who spoke about a connection
between Islam and terrorism should be punished under the student code of conduct. Many of them argued that these opinions were not protected free speech and should not be permitted on campus because they created an “unsafe environment” for marginalized students.
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What I take away from these three examples is that these free speech issues need to be debated and taught much more rigorously than we are doing on campus. We also can’t just repeat the traditional First Amendment shibboleths and expect young people to blindly endorse them. “Tsk, tsk” from the elders is not working.
While I disagree with many young people’s views on speech issues, I get where they are coming from.
They were inspired by the activism that arose following the murder of George Floyd, but are shellshocked by the societal backlash to this activism: the attacks on efforts to teach about the realities of systematic racism in America, harsh anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and “Don’t Say Gay” laws, grotesque antisemitism coming from both the far left and far right, an epidemic of anti-Asian hate crimes in the wake of COVID-19, and painful mockery of transgender people. All of these ideas are flooding over their phones and into their social media feeds unmitigated, with no sign that the civil discourse people like me are advocating will stop it. The bigotry feels pervasive. Where is the “more good speech” that theory tells us should prevail in the “marketplace of ideas?” What is society doing to protect communities from people who are mobilized to violence by the constant stream of invective?
These are really tough issues for which the First Amendment alone does not have good answers.