Protest and Perish

My certainties and convictions about free speech have been somewhat upended of late. For the past decade, I have been researching controversies triggered by exceedingly opinionated artists, especially comedians and novelists. When I started, I was a garden-variety free-speech absolutist. Platitudes like “The more speech, the better!,” and “censorship is always wrong” struck me as unproblematic. On principle, I stood with the stand-up. On principle, I fronted for the fictionalist. So what if they roasted this or that religion, racial group, or gender?

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I remain a committed proponent of expressive liberties. But all that immersion in the whirligig of First Amendment scrums has made me more mindful of the complexity that surrounds these issues. To analyze them effectively, you must be sensitive to Context. To resolve them, you must consider Accommodations and Balancing Interests. To really understand free-speech debates in liberal democracies, you must recognize that their outcomes usually lead to Anguished Resolutions That Rarely Satisfy Anyone.

Awareness of all that is lacking in The Chronicle Review’s recent article “Student Activism Is Integral to the Mission of Academe.” The authors, Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder, write “If colleges and universities are genuinely committed to preparing students for citizenship, they must protect their right to protest.” I agree with that as I do with their claim that student demonstrators needn’t be “unfailingly courteous, measured, and polite. There must be room for passion and provocation.”

The problem is that these directives are pitched at a level of abstraction so high that it makes the authors sound like judges in powdered wigs gaveling in verdicts from a hot air balloon. Although well-intentioned, Khalid and Snyder’s championing of student activism fails to consider the evolving contexts in which it is taking place. Those contexts include the ongoing casualization of academic labor and social media’s cratering of the free-speech landscape. More fundamentally, their analysis never asks if colleges are even capable of functioning amid nonstop dissent.

First, a quibble. The authors misrepresent my position on student activism. They cite me in conversation with Mark Oppenheimer on his podcast, The Syllabus. The host was inquiring about an op-ed I wrote following the October 7 Hamas massacre in Israel. There, I remarked: “An academic campus can be a protest space. To a certain degree, it should be a protest space. But to reduce it to primarily that ... is really bad for students and professors.”

Oppenheimer came in hot. He criticized me for suggesting that campuses can and should be protest spaces. In brief, Oppenheimer advocated for a protest-free quad. I retorted that I didn’t want such a thing, and couldn’t imagine it even if I did.

My topline views on campus activism, therefore, are distinct from Oppenheimer’s more conservative approach to campus free speech. They overlap with the libertarian approach of Khalid and Snyder. We agree protest is necessary, but restrictions, or what they call “basic ground rules,” must obtain. They oppose “shouting down campus speakers” (yup), “violating reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions” (check), and “targeted harassment of individuals” (agreed).

On that we concur. But there are new realities on the ground, and they demand a more nuanced approach to student campus activism.

Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed by Israel in the aftermath of Hamas’s attack, which killed 1,200 people and led to the abduction of hundreds of hostages, with dozens now thought to be dead. The tragic events in Israel and Gaza are the backdrop to Khalid and Snyder’s piece, as well as hundreds of other reflections about free speech and campus activism.

Perhaps future historians will be intrigued, even baffled, by a question which those of us doing the reflecting rarely pose: Why is campus activism today so narrowly focused on pro-Palestinian advocacy? Other human catastrophes — in Syria, Tigray, Sudan, not to mention the looming dissolution of American democracy — receive comparatively scant attention on the quad.

The question we are currently asking concerns whether the demonstrations taking place around the country are peaceful and lawful or not. Defenders argue that the incidents are being created by outside (non-campus) agitators and overzealous law-enforcement officials. Their critics predictably disagree. But both may be answering the wrong question.

Let’s look at it this way. On any given campus, there’ve been countless peaceful and lawful protests about Israel/Gaza. There’ve been many unruly, but likely lawful, protests about Israel/Gaza. And there’ve been a menacingly growing number of unlawful and unpeaceful protests about Israel/Gaza, such as the recent takeover of Hamilton Hall at Columbia University.

That’s a whole lot of protests about Israel/Gaza, especially for institutions that don’t have a seat at the United Nations! Especially for institutions not chartered to scrutinize Israel/Gaza to the exclusion of every other issue that can be debated at leading global universities. Which leads me to ask: Is the issue even being debated? Is the campus community gaining a more rigorous understanding of the conflict as a result of the agitations?

Khalid and Snyder’s celebration of protest as a means to learn about citizenship is one-sided. Doesn’t citizenship require recognizing that some compatriots may not share your passions? I would also remind Khalid and Snyder that the fallout from 24/7 protesting goes way beyond “ruffling feathers.” Across the country, routine educational functions, like graduation exercises, are being disrupted. There is less free speech, because new restrictions are being placed on speakers. Campuses are on lockdown; classes are being canceled.

Constant political protest, even if mostly peaceful and lawful, degrades the entire educational mission of the university.

Throughout last month’s hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Republican representatives called out well-known anti-Zionist Columbia faculty by name. The congressional questioners inquired about their employment status — and whether it would be revoked. President Nemat (Minouche) Shafik, who was fairly surefooted in parrying Republican performative rage, stumbled here. Hers was not a rousing defense of academic freedom.

The failure of a president at an elite university to stand up for professors (whose ideas she does not agree with) meshes with a national assault on the once-inviolable institution of tenure. State legislatures in red states are either trying to drastically reduce the protections of tenure, or do away with it altogether.

At Columbia, the views of many student protestors and professors are in harmony. What happens, however, when the two clash? Khalid and Snyder leave this dilemma unaddressed. But let’s think it through.

In the fall of 2022, Erika López Prater became embroiled in a free-speech controversy. The Hamline University art historian had shown her class an image of the Prophet Muhammad (in some Islamic traditions, visual representations of him are forbidden). No one disputes that screening these slides conformed to canons of scholarly and pedagogical necessity. The professor followed protocols, issued trigger warnings, and was receptive to student concerns.

López Prater was employed as an adjunct. Thus, when some students complained about the images, she had no one to protect her other than free-speech and academic-freedom advocates. It was students who complained about this professor’s lecture materials. It was students who activated the response from the Hamline administration. It was faculty, by contrast, who contested her removal by the administration.

The fiasco illuminated a 21st-century equation for academic freedom: Angry Students + Supine, Clueless Administration = Newly Unemployed (Adjunct) Professor. This equation is in play because the institution of tenure is being slowly, methodically “sunsetted” by our administrative overseers. With each passing year, a smaller percentage of the professoriate will have proper free-speech protections.

It emerges from the Hamline and Columbia cases that the free-speech interests of: 1) administrations, 2) students, and 3) faculty, are not necessarily aligned. They may even be mutually antagonistic, though two of the three may join hands against one.

If there are, at least, three estates on campus, then what kind of speech is a university most committed to defend? On behalf of my estate, and in accord with the analysis of Richard Amesbury and Catherine O’Donnell, I respond: “Expert Speech.” A university’s responsibility is to create the conditions in which the ideas of credentialed scholars can be generated and conveyed. When students study, criticize, refine, and even rationally refute Expert Speech, they are privy to its protections.

A thunderous chant, an encampment adorned with flags, a “die-in” — I refer to this as “Quad Speech.”

With Khalid and Snyder, I concur that administrations should try to accommodate Quad Speech. This accommodation, however, must adhere to a hierarchical logic: Quad Speech is less integral to the institution’s mission than Expert Speech. Ergo, a professor’s lecture trumps a “Hey Hey! Ho Ho!” chant. If the chant disrupts the lecture, the course of action is obvious. If those doing the chanting are professors, the same rules apply.

Expert Speech and Quad Speech should both be prioritized over a third form of communication: Speaker of the House Speech. Why Rep. Mike Johnson and his entourage were allowed on Columbia’s campus to sow further division is a mystery to me. Then again, the 18 minutes of nonstop verbal abuse they endured from the quad sort of achieved an inadvertent equipoise; I guess lots of people on both sides got to speak their piece.

Quad Speech has an elective affinity with social media. Its hostility to nuance, emotional volatility, and its missionizing ethos make it ideal for digital display. In fact, one plausible rationale for not expanding basic Quad Speech freedoms is how easily it migrates to, and thrives in, cyberspace.

The internet is a platform which gives most of humanity an unprecedented “voice” of sorts. One’s effusions can now be radiated afar with unparalleled ease, speed, and capacity for audience penetration. This has changed “speech.” Something I’ve been mentioning to my “Global Secularisms” class is that this one development forces us to rethink free-speech absolutism — a position which characterizes many secular social movements since the Victorian era.

The 19th century is over, and so is the 20th. Our speech laws need to reckon with that. Digital speech, which is Gen Z’s mother tongue, is a boon to campus activists. Those beholden to a notion that #silenceisviolence can now “flood the zone” (e.g., X, TikTok, Instagram) with their political opinions. The internet is bottomless. A college campus, I fear, cannot bear so much inundation.

Khalid and Snyder describe my approach as “shut up and study.” A more accurate platitude might be a bemused “can everyone please stay in their lane?!” Students and professors should not be grinding the university to a halt. Professors should not abandon reasoned analysis and inconvenient facts. Armed law enforcement should be called in only as a last resort. University presidents, like Shafik, should not be abandoning the professoriate. Mike Johnson should not be needlessly instigating rage on the steps of Low Library.

As for Shafik, she mentioned that Columbia’s antisemitism task force made the following recommendation: “If you are going to chant, it should only be in a certain place so people who don’t want to hear it are protected from having to hear it.” To my mind, that’s the best possible anguished resolution that will rarely satisfy anyone.