Brandeis University has banned the activist student organization Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP). At Columbia University, the SJP and another pro-Palestinian activist group, Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), have been temporarily suspended, supposedly for breaking campus rules. Do these actions violate the principles of academic freedom?
Certainly, in the Brandeis case, and probably, in the Columbia one. That’s because academic freedom, although primarily applicable to faculty members, also includes students’ “freedom … to form associations in accordance with their intellectual, political, and convivial interests,” as the sociologist Edward Shils put it. This associational freedom obviously extends to activist organizations like the SJP.
In the case of public universities, associational freedom for students was established as a constitutionally protected right in the 1972 Supreme Court Case Healy v. James, which required Central Connecticut State College to recognize its chapter of Students for a Democratic Society. As Justice Lewis Powell wrote for the majority, “The precedents of this court leave no room for the view that, because of the acknowledged need for order, First Amendment protections should apply with less force on college campuses than in the community at large. Quite to the contrary.”
The existence of such constitutional protections seems to have compelled Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican of Florida, to cancel his own attempts at banning SJP from Florida’s colleges. Neither Brandeis nor Columbia, of course, is bound by the First Amendment. But Brandeis’s own “Principles on Free Speech and Expression” don’t appear to offer any valid grounds for restricting SJP. “In narrowly-defined circumstances,” the document says, “the university may restrict expression, as for example, that violates the law, that falsely defames a specific individual, that constitutes a genuine threat or harassment, that unjustifiably invades substantial privacy or confidentiality interests, or that is otherwise directly incompatible with the functioning of the university.”
Brandeis would presumably insist that, because on Brandeis’s own construal SJP endorses Hamas’s “call for the violent elimination of Israel and the Jewish people,” the organization is indeed incompatible with the university’s functioning. It’s a stretch.
At Columbia, SJP and JVP have not been banned but merely “suspended,” supposedly for breaking campus rules. In his statement announcing the suspension, Gerald Rosberg, a Columbia vice president and chair of its special committee on campus safety, was indefinite about which policies specifically had been violated, though he did mention “an unauthorized event … that proceeded despite warnings and included threatening rhetoric and intimidation.”
That’s vague, although Brandeis might give a clue. In explaining why they shut down a demonstration protesting their de-recognition of SJP, senior Brandeis administrators described “from the river to the sea” and “Intifada, intifada,” both of which the protesters had been chanting, as “threatening language that has been explicitly described as hate speech.”
Whether such chants are “hate speech” is a matter of dispute; colleges are supposed to be dedicated arenas for such dispute. As a group of Harvard faculty told university’s president, Claudine Gay, in response to her official condemnation of the slogan, “the phrase ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free’ has a long and complicated history. Its interpretation deserves, and is receiving, sustained and ongoing inquiry and debate.” Jeffrey C. Isaac, a political-science professor at Indiana University at Bloomington, rejects the hate-speech characterization: “I do not agree with some of my Jewish American friends who assert that ‘from the river to the sea’ is ‘obviously’ an eliminationist call for the conquest and expulsion of Jews or at least the violent defeat and destruction of Israel.” Nevertheless, he says:
It is obvious that this is how most American Jews and their allies, and virtually all Israeli Jews, interpret this phrase — as not simply a statement to which they might object, but as a rallying cry that threatens them, especially in Israel but not only there, for there is no doubt that the slogan has furnished an occasion for acts of antisemitism in many places in the Middle East but also Europe and the U.S.
Slogans like “from the river to the sea” are ideal objects of academic analysis, inviting questions of history, of political theory, of rhetoric, and even of ethics. To what extent do a speaker’s intentions matter when speech is perceived as hateful? What tactical considerations should political actors make when using such speech? And so on. In categorically declaring these slogans out of bounds, Harvard and Brandeis and Columbia are abrogating an opportunity to do what they are supposed to do: teach.
