When Free Speech Turns Into Harassment
Universities are navigating a minefield. But there are right—and wrong—answers.
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Events in the drama of the pro-Palestinian campus protests and the police response have been moving so rapidly that an up-to-date account is almost impossible to write. On Tuesday, the New York police stormed the Columbia campus and cleared an occupied building, arresting dozens; earlier, the school announced that those involved in the occupation faced expulsion. Meanwhile, at the University of California Los Angeles, tensions between the protesters and pro-Israel counter-protesters erupted into violence after the authorities took a hands-off approach.
Wherever things go from here, this story has brought the spotlight on two thorny, and related, questions: When does protected speech in public spaces cross the line into unlawful conduct? And when does political speech about Israel/Palestine on campus cross the line into antisemitism?
It’s clear that vandalism and the occupation of college buildings are illegal and call for a police response. It also seems clear that preemptive crackdowns on peaceful protests in a public space in anticipation of possible disruptions, as happened at the University of Texas at Austin, are not only a counterproductive overreaction but a First Amendment violation. In between, many questions remain.
The great challenge is sorting out conflicting and biased narratives of the facts. For instance, a viral Twitter thread by NBC/MSNBC correspondant Antonia Hylton three days after Columbia first cleared out the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on the Columbia campus painted a benevolent picture of the protests:
Yet the Columbia Spectator reported on the same day that “around 10 pro-Israel counter-protesters faced instances of antisemitism at the Sundial [a campus location where students often congregate].” While the widely-reported incident in which a protester shouted, “Go back to Poland!” at Orthodox Jewish students leaving the campus occurred outside the school gates—where even Hylton has acknowledged seeing “moments of conflict or aggression”—many other troubling confrontations happened inside the campus and almost certainly involved students, not outsiders.
A particularly creepy video showed an organizer whose every line is repeated by the crowd telling the protesters in the encampment that “we have Zionists who have entered the camp” and urging them to form a human chain to block and push out the intruders. The revelation that the organizer who led the chant, Khymani James, had repeatedly made statements that justified “killing Zionists” makes the episode even more unsettling.
More extreme examples from other campuses include a protester knocking a camera from the hand of a student journalist trying to film the newly formed pro-Palestinian encampment at Northwestern. In March, protesters who stormed a building at Vanderbilt University not only smashed a window but knocked down a security guard, injuring him seriously enough that he was off the job for two weeks. And at UCLA, the violent attack by counter-protesters on an encampment was preceded by a bizarre situation in which keffiyeh-clad protesters occupying various areas of the campus denied passage to Jewish students perceived as, or self-identifying as, Zionists—or even to any students who were not a part of the protest. At one point, someone who attempted to pass through the blockade was mobbed and chased by protesters.
At the same time, there have been many instances of overreaction and exaggeration by those who oppose the protesters. Some social media personalities with a large following, such as the eccentric British figure “Oli London,” have shared videos of innocuous activities by protesters such as dancing and clapping to Arabic music with comments labeling them “tribal” and “cultlike.” Columbia’s controversial assistant business professor and pro-Israel activist Shai Davidai was widely criticized across the political spectrum for posting a clip implying that a Muslim group prayer was something shocking and sinister. Pro-Israel counter-protesters at UCLA violently assaulted student journalists on Wednesday. And however illegal and outrageous it may be to block people’s passage on a college campus, comparing this to “1939, when Nazi’s (sic) blocked Jewish students from entering Vienna University” is outrageously hyperbolic.
So what is the right response?
Your answer to this question may depend on how you view the problem of antisemitism, including whether it’s a threat from the left or the right. A thoughtful recent article by University of Stony Brook sociologist Musa al-Gharbi argues that antisemitism still seems to be a primarily right-wing phenomenon, and that critical attitudes toward Israeli policies—which are often espoused by American Jews themselves, as well as many Israelis—do not seem correlated with classic anti-Jewish tropes.
But while al-Gharbi’s observations are interesting, one may ask whether he may miss specifically left-wing forms of antisemitism. The use of anti-Zionism as a vehicle for antisemitism, and of “Zionist” as a code word for “Jew,” is a distinct problem on the left that, as Soviet-born Jewish writer Izabella Tabarovsky and others have noted, has roots in Soviet propaganda. In the Substack newsletter The Banter, Washington-based liberal journalist Ben Cohen writes that he now fears antisemitism from the left more than from the right. He points to an Anti-Defamation League campus climate survey in the fall of 2023 which found that nearly three-quarters of Jewish college students surveyed had either experienced or witnessed some form of antisemitism since the start of the 2023-2024 school year.
Obviously, this doesn’t mean that critiques of Zionism should not be permitted on campus. I have previously criticized attempts to shut down anti-Zionist campus panels and conferences. But demonstrations that, while not physically violent, nonetheless have a distinctly aggressive and intimidating vibe—with yelling, angry gestures, sometimes verbal abuse directed at other people, the storming of spaces, the use of physical coercion to keep someone from entering the protest space—are a different story.
Some analogies are in order. Critiques of feminism, say, should obviously be a legitimate part of academic discourse; the claim that such critiques should be suppressed because they make women feel unsafe is an egregious example of left-wing authoritarianism. But ongoing raucous protests with slogans calling for the destruction of feminism and chants of “Fuck feminism!” or “No places for feminists on this campus!” would, I think, be rightly regarded as creating a hostile climate for female students, especially if they targeted the campus Women’s Center—and even more so if they were associated with actual incidents of women being told to “go back to the kitchen,” or with praise for killing sprees targeting women.
Likewise, critics of radical Islamism, and even of Islam in general, certainly shouldn’t be barred from speaking on campus or holding conferences and other events. But ongoing, disruptive and aggressive protests against “radical Islam” that targeted Muslim centers on campus and sometimes escalated into harassment of individual Muslims would be rightly perceived as unacceptably hostile toward Muslim students. No university would be criticized for enforcing policies that ban the long-term occupation of campus spaces to remove anti-feminist or anti-Islamist encampments.
So when “Zionist” becomes a pejorative, chances are that Jewish students—who, however critical they may be of the current Israeli government or of Israel’s response to October 7, still overwhelmingly support the existence of Israel as a Jewish state—are going to experience a hostile environment. Ditto when “anti-Zionist” protesters target mainstream Jewish campus groups.
The biggest challenge is working out how to keep protests from infringing on the rights of students and faculty members without infringing on the rights of protesters themselves. Strong-arm police tactics should be the response of last resort, especially for rule violations that are not seriously disruptive or threatening. A few schools such as the University of Chicago and Wesleyan have come up with solutions that emphasize viewpoint neutrality, freedom of non-disruptive expression and respectful dialogue. For this approach to be effective, the protesters, too, need to be open to compromise and respectful dialogue.
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found the right balance when it issued a statement stressing that “colleges and universities must ensure students can engage in peaceful protest on campus” and that institutional responses to violations of reasonable campus rules “must be measured.” It also notes that schools “must ensure the swift arrest of anyone engaging in violence on campus” and that “no one on campus should have any sense whatsoever that violence will be tolerated or excused.”
This eminently reasonable approach has been criticized by some on the left as inviting aggressive preemptive intervention, supposedly because no actual violence has occurred. But even leaving aside actual assaults associated with the protests—such as a pro-Israel Arab Israeli activist being shoved and punched during an argument with protesters near the Columbia campus—physical behavior such as mobbing people to block them from accessing a space on the campus is not peaceful. It involves unlawful use of force; it also poses an imminent threat of violence. And when Jewish students are on the receiving end of this behavior, it ultimately makes little difference why they are being targeted—whether as counter-protesters, as Zionists, or as Jews.
Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.
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Thank you for this thoughtful essay! Such a welcome respite from "the protestors are heroes" or "the protestors all belong in jail," which appear to be the two opinions on offer
Minefield or not universities must still make decisions and, hopefully, act in accordance with the law and their own policies and procedures. Protesters, if they truly believe in their cause and actions, must be willing to accept the punishments meted out by the civil authorities and the universities. The outcome of how the universities react and what the protesters do will (I believe) indicate where we are as a nation and society.