It wasn’t too long ago that some of the loudest voices on the right were screaming bloody murder about the suppression of speech on college campuses. One oft-cited example, from 2020, concerned Robert Dailyda, a doctoral student at New Jersey’s Stockton University who was charged with student-conduct offenses including “harassment” and “cyberbullying” for using an image of Donald Trump as his Zoom background during a virtual class. The public university’s administration, in an incident report, said this caused several students “to feel offended, disrespected, and taunted.”
The free speech advocacy group FIRE, which at that time stood for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, rushed to Dailyda’s defense, saying “The First Amendment protects the expression of students at public universities, including nondisruptive expression during class that other students may find offensive or outrageous.” All charges against Dailyda were soon dismissed.
Today the group, which maintains the same acronym but now stands for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression after broadening its mission in 2022, is hard at work defending students and others against conservatives who are demanding that they be punished for supporting Palestinians in the Israel-Hamas war.
Take Madeline Ward, a student at Rockland Community College in New York, who was disciplined last fall after shouting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a pro-Israel rally on campus. The public college found she violated student conduct rules against “discriminatory/harassing behavior,” “endangering conduct,” and “intimidation,” even though, as FIRE noted, “Ward didn’t block anyone from attending the gathering and her remarks lasted only a few seconds before she peacefully left the venue.”
Rockland suspended Ward through the fall 2024 semester, declaring her persona non grata on campus. “If you fail to adhere,” she was warned, “you will be subject to arrest.” FIRE, in a letter, said this punishment appeared to be tied to “her pro-Palestinian viewpoints,” and as such was “impermissible.” The college denied Ward’s appeal.
Meanwhile, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill and Harvard University President Claudine Gay were both forced to resign after failing to state unequivocally in a Congressional hearing that calling for the genocide of Jews would violate their school policies.
“It is a context-dependent decision, Congresswoman,” Magill said, in response to aggressive questioning by Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York. “It depends on the context,” Gay agreed. Stefanik then unloaded with palpable rage: “It does not depend on the context. The answer is ‘yes.’ And this is why you should resign.” Magill and Gay, the latter of whom was also subsequently accused of plagiarism, were forced to do so.
Stefanik’s showmanship powerfully furthered the agenda elucidated by Representative Jim Banks, Republican of Indiana and a member of the House Education Committee, in a December meeting with business leaders. Banks said Republicans had set out to show that Ivy League schools were “creating an unsafe environment for Jewish students” in order to suspend federal aid, including student loans, and to tax their endowments.
But actually, to say that the enforcement of student conduct rules depends on the context is not, on its face, a bad answer.
Private universities, unlike public ones, are not obligated to afford their students the protections of the First Amendment. But, as FIRE has argued, most bill themselves as places “where free speech is esteemed and protected” and should act accordingly. And that means taking an expansive rather than constricted approach to student and faculty expression.
In that light, what is actually said should matter more than how it is interpreted. Students like Ward are not saying “Kill all the Jews.” They are saying things like “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” which others insist is a coded call for genocide.
FIRE, in a thoughtful analysis, cited a survey finding that more than half the students using this phrase “were unable to name either the river (Jordan) or the sea (Mediterranean), and many students do not realize some people interpret the phrase as a call for genocide.”
Nevertheless, Brandeis University President Ronald Liebowitz claimed these words invited “the erasure of the Jewish state.” (He also pegged the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, or BDS as “another blatant demonstration of antisemitism” that has been “tolerated for far too long.”) The university banned a pro-Palestine students group and shut down a campus protest that occurred in response, with Liebowitz contending that it had “devolved into the invocation of hate speech.”
FIRE hotly contested both actions, to no avail. Ironically, the school’s namesake, Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, famously wrote that the “freedom to think as you will and to speak as you think are means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.”
In October, Florida State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues, at the urging of Florida’s Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, ordered the deactivation of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapters at that state’s public universities over comments made by SJP’s national organization. The American Civil Liberties Union sued, noting that the Florida student group had no hand in these comments and had issued its own statement saying, “We hope that no more lives, Israeli or Palestinian, are lost.” A court later dismissed the case because no action had been taken to follow through on Rodrigues’s directive.
In November, Harvard University blocked publication of an article by doctoral candidate Rabea Eghbariah arguing that Israel’s response to Hamas’s attack amounted to genocide. (See “Call It Genocide, Pay the Price” at Progressive.org.) In December, Indiana University, a public school, canceled an exhibit by Palestinian artist Samia Halaby due to complaints over her pro-Palestinian social media advocacy.
The federal Department of Education has opened civil rights investigations into seven private institutions including Columbia, Cornell, and the University of Pennsylvania over allegations of antisemitism or Islamophobia. In late January, it also launched Title VI probes at the University of Wisconsin, Arizona State University, and Binghamton University in New York, all public schools, as well as Northwestern University, a private school in Illinois, looking into whether they failed to protect Jewish students from harassment.
The complaint that led to the Wisconsin probe concerns pro-Palestinian protesters who were filmed chanting “glory to the martyrs” at a campus rally. At Arizona State University, the offending speech included chanting “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” In Binghamton, a student is seen in a video posted to X saying, “Israel is worse than Nazi Germany.”
At Northwestern, the alleged misconduct includes projecting the colors of the Palestinian flag onto a campus building, chanting “Northwestern, you can’t hide, you’re paying for genocide” at a protest, and posting an open letter from the school’s Asian American Studies Program faculty that referred to Hamas as a “political group.” The letter also expressed “profound sorrow for the massive loss of life and ongoing violence in Palestine and Israel.”
The urge to purge disfavored expression on college campuses has both conservative and liberal proponents. Indeed, students on the left may have paved the way for the repression now being brought to bear against critics of Israel by insisting on protection against hurt feelings over the expressions of others.
The Associated Press recently observed that a “new understanding of free speech has been evolving on college campuses for years, marked by the introduction of safe spaces, trigger warnings, and a rise in disruptive protests that silence speakers with offensive views. But the Israel-Hamas war and its rhetoric appear to be widening the fault lines and pushing students to demand that university leaders take a side between clashing versions of free speech.”
At the University of Wisconsin in 2023, a Black student group called for the expulsion of a white student using racial slurs in a video posted to social media. They were outraged when the university responded by saying it couldn’t punish constitutionally protected speech. Now the school is under federal investigation for not punishing students who have expressed affinity for Palestinians.
Famed Harvard psychology professor Steven Pinker, in an op-ed for The Boston Globe, had this to say: “Deplorable speech should be refuted, not criminalized. Outlawing hate speech would only result in students calling anything they didn’t want to hear ‘hate speech.’ ”
That, unfortunately, is already occurring, with students saying that the lack of consequences for speech they find objectionable makes them feel unsafe. But it is not the role of universities to keep students safe from ideas they abhor; it is their role to teach them how to stand up for themselves and speak their own truths, as hard as that may be.