Why Campus Speech Is Vexing

The Hamas-Israel war has caused so much turmoil on campuses partly because it has highlighted a tension that university administrators haven’t fully acknowledged.

Many colleges have embraced broad notions of safety in recent years, promising to make their students feel comfortable and welcome. The goal is in many ways understandable, especially for students who find campuses to be uneasy places because they are among the first in their families to attend college. One way to make students feel safe, schools have decided, is to restrict speech that upsets students.

By now, you have no doubt heard about some of the examples, most of which involve sanctions on conservative expression. M.I.T., for instance, disinvited a geophysicist from giving a lecture because he criticized aspects of affirmative action. But there have also been restrictions on left-leaning expression: Late in the Covid pandemic, M.I.T. barred students from asking others to wear a mask.

Expression is safety

Either way, a basic tension exists. Maximizing everybody’s sense of safety and comfort is often impossible. On many of society’s biggest political issues, the expression of certain views will make some students feel uncomfortable. Yet the restriction of those same views will make others feel uncomfortable — because the ability to speak honestly about important issues is a part of feeling welcome in a community.

The Covid mask debate is a useful example. Being around unmasked classmates who might spread germs makes some students feel uncomfortable. And being pressured to cover your face with a mask for months on end makes others feel uncomfortable. Neither group is necessarily wrong. Each has different priorities.

There are plenty of other examples. Debates over affirmative action are often struggles about whether colleges should enroll more or fewer students from different groups — Asian, Black, Hispanic and white. Strong opinions will make some students feel more or less welcome on a campus.

These tensions have remained somewhat sublimated until recently, partly because the debates are often one-sided. Fewer than 20 percent of students at most selective colleges identify as conservative, according to surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conservative share is below 10 percent at dozens of colleges, including Brown, Colgate, Emory, Grinnell, Johns Hopkins, Middlebury, Oberlin, Penn, Pomona, Williams and the University of Vermont.

This war is different

The Hamas-Israel war has brought these tensions to the fore because both sides in the debate have large campus constituencies.

Many Jewish students — and conservatives — believe that colleges have hypocritically allowed celebrations of Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and antisemitic calls for future violence. (This belief underpinned the tough questioning of three university presidents last week by Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman, which led to apologies from two of the three and the resignation of one, as my colleague Nicholas Confessore has explained.)

At the same time, many Palestinian students — and their allies, who tend to be on the political left — believe they are at risk of harassment, and the loss of future jobs, for making principled arguments about human suffering and democratic rights.

The problem for universities is that they can’t always make both sides feel safe. Pro-Palestinian students, for instance, may understandably feel unwelcome if they cannot criticize Israel as an occupying power that has seized Palestinian land in the West Bank and has killed thousands of people in Gaza since Oct. 7. These students may advocate a “free Palestine from the river to the sea” or a “right of return” as ways to express support for a single nation that incorporates all of Israel and its occupied territory.

Pro-Israel students, for their part, may understandably hear these statements as calls for the elimination of the world’s only Jewish nation, to be replaced by yet another Muslim-dominated one. They may point out that many college activists seem to care more about the human rights record of Israel than, say, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Hamas.

In recent years, U.S. colleges have indeed focused more on restricting speech that upsets liberals than conservatives. That inconsistency — which Jewish students and their allies have highlighted — has put university leaders in an awkward position. Whatever their own politics, they are uncomfortable publicly defending one standard for one ideology and another for a different ideology.

Many are now trying to figure out what to do. The answers are not easy. Some political speech does cross the line into harassment or even advocacy for violence. And universities, especially private ones, have the right to adopt a more restrictive standard than the First Amendment does.

But university leaders do face a basic choice. Do they want to expand the list of restricted speech to include more statements that make conservatives, Jewish students and others feel unsafe? Or do they want to shrink the list and tell all students that they will need to feel uncomfortable at times?

For more

• Harvard’s governing board is expected to announce today whether the university’s president, Claudine Gay, should remain in her job.

• In Times Opinion, Maureen Dowd, Michelle Goldberg, David French and Bret Stephens have each written columns on campus speech.

• “The anti-Israel activists complain that their critics stop caring about free speech when the speech is pro-Palestinian, while the pro-Israel activists accuse the pro-Palestinian left of abandoning its commitment to safety and tolerance when the victims are Jewish,” Jonathan Chait wrote in New York magazine. “Both criticisms have a lot of truth.”

THE LATEST NEWS

Israel-Hamas War

Politics

War in Ukraine

Strange toy: Cookeez Makery has beguiled children and adults by combining elements of Build-a-Bear and the Easy-Bake Oven.

Lives Lived: Dr. John A. Talbott championed the care of vulnerable mentally ill people, especially the homeless. He died at 88.

SPORTS

Monday Night Football: The New York Giants earned some possible playoff positioning with a fun win over the Green Bay Packers, 24-22. The Tennessee Titans mounted a comeback to upset the Miami Dolphins, 28-27.

M.L.B.: Shohei Ohtani will defer most of his $700 million contract, giving the Dodgers unexpected flexibility to spend elsewhere.

Bonjour Vincent!: The Musée D’Orsay in Paris has undertaken a bold attempt at championing Vincent Van Gogh’s legacy: an A.I. reconstruction of him, based on his letters and early biographies, that fields questions from visitors. The most common questions so far relate to his suicide in 1890. Read more here.

More on culture

THE MORNING RECOMMENDS …