Should Universities Protect Campus Anti-Semites?
by Yoram Hazony, Public Discourse:
Perhaps the time has finally come for anti-Marxist professors to concede that the liberal theory of the university as a “neutral” forum is too far removed from reality to be feasible. Instead, anti-Marxist liberals and conservatives should be defending a theory of the university as an educational institution that has no choice but to uphold at least minimal standards of substantive decency.
The explosion of anti-Semitism at American universities has been much discussed since the Hamas massacres in Israel on October 7, 2023. And it is likely to continue roiling public life now that the controversy has forced the resignation of Harvard University’s president, Claudine Gay.
This issue is so troubling because it pits two pillars of the postwar American liberal order against one another. On one hand, there is the principle that, in the wake of the Holocaust, anti-Semitism cannot be tolerated in decent societies. On the other hand, we have the principle of “free speech” (and with it “free inquiry”), which many Americans have elevated to the level of an “absolute.”
For decades, it was assumed that these two principles—absolute free speech and zero tolerance for anti-Semitism—could be made to live together in peace. This was thanks to the magic of John Stuart Mill’s well-known proposal that the free exchange of divergent ideas will eventually lead society to truth and virtue.
American universities love this argument. It is a staple of introductory political theory courses, and versions of it are taught in courses in economics and natural science as well. Indeed, the belief that free inquiry is the only road to truth has been promoted as the principal dogma of the postwar liberal university for nearly sixty years—since the “free speech” movement of the 1960s.
But now something has obviously gone wrong. In the wake of October 7th, American universities have revealed themselves to be the driving force behind the return of open anti-Semitism in America. Across the country, university faculty and graduate students have led teach-ins and demonstrations justifying Hamas’s massacre, dismemberment, rape, burning alive, and hostage-taking of more than a thousand Israeli civilians, as well as its explicit promises to do the same to all Jews everywhere. For anyone who still thought the universities were more or less committed to Mill’s theory of the free exchange of ideas, these events have been earth-shaking—because they seem to tell us that, over time, the free exchange of ideas leads to a rampaging hatred of Jews.
This, at any rate, is what you would have to conclude from watching then-President Gay’s now-infamous testimony before Congress on December 5th. When asked whether calling for the extermination of the Jews was an infraction of Harvard’s standards of conduct for faculty and students, Gay replied that “we embrace a commitment to free expression even of views that are objectionable, offensive, hateful.”
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
