Public Reason: The problem with a university’s balancing near-total freedom of “extramural speech” on one hand with freedom of scholarly inquiry on the second hand and with protection of the rights of all members of the university to feel welcome and valued inside the institution on the third is this: quite often one of the major purposes of the “extramural speech” or of the “scholarly inquiry” is to make some members of the university community feel profoundly unwelcome. Does anybody believe that Harvey C. Mansfield blamed grade inflation at Harvard on the admission of African-Americans who, he said, could not keep up because he knew anything about the issue, or because he wanted to make African-Americans feel unwelcome. Does anybody believe that the fact that Charles Murray burned a KKK cross to terrorize his Indiana neighbors was not a plus for those at Stanford who invited him for purposes of “scholarly inquiry”? Just as the attempt to draw bright lines is futile in internet moderation, so the search for principled bright-line boundaries is futile here. But that is why university administrators are paid the relatively big bucks—to be sensitive to context and nuance, and to think about how to balance all three of these off against one another:

Jacob T. Levy: Campus culture wars are a teachable moment in how freedom of speech and academic freedom differ: ‘The principles governing university life are… strange… counterintuitive… complicated to defend… tempting to abandon... educators haven't put in the work….

Undergraduate activists on any issue are often prone to immoderation…. Universities offer very robust protection for political and protest speech… as an incidental byproduct… [of] academic freedom… to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods... to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class… limited by the freedom of students to be secure that they will be assessed fairly.... The front of the classroom isn't a pulpit or a political platform.

But within those constraints, professors have substantial freedom… to teach… [plus] freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds…. An economist couldn't be fired for being an atheist, a mathematician for being a socialist…. The technical phrase here is freedom of extramural speech.... Protections of extramural speech are very strong… to protect the academic integrity of what goes on inside….

[That is] very strong protection for the freedom of protest, not because protest is important to a university the way it is to a democratic society, but because it's academically irrelevant. It's wrong to question a student's (or professor's) standing in the academic community because of what they say at a protest…. The only appropriate limits are not about the content of what's said, but about the conduct of the protest action....

When faced with demands to denounce Hamas, or student activists who endorsed Palestinian armed resistance, or Israel, or Zionist speech on campus, or whatever, universities often fell back on the rule of institutional neutrality. But critics found it hard to take that rule seriously…. The rule that the university shouldn't take any interest in the rhetoric that's used in a protest or on social media was harder to take seriously in an era of hate-speech rules, restrictions on exclusionary speech… a discourse around "safety" that treated hostile language as violence… by critics who noted that denouncing bad things and restricting hateful or unsafe speech seemed to be very much part of the institutional tool kit these days. These were problems of universities' own making….

Jewish and pro-Israel members of university communities... have seen universities themselves shift away from the principles of academic freedom, freedom of nonacademic speech, and institutional neutrality, often in the name of protecting vulnerable populations, and, in the wake of the murders of Oct. 7, asked whether Israeli Jews are somehow outside the category of the vulnerable...

The best time to have started to do the right thing was yesterday, but the second-best time is today. University leadership… can recommit to academic freedom, freedom of extramural speech, and institutional neutrality, starting now… <theglobeandmail.com/opi…>