Would You Believe Student Protesters Say They’re Free-Speech Martyrs?
Examining which view on the Middle East conflict is most likely to be censored
“It’s clear that this is just another attempt to honestly make Palestinian students and their allies more vulnerable to doxing, make them easier to identify, make it easier to suppress their speech.”
So says Zaid Yousef, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley and president of the campus Muslim Student Association.
Yousef is reacting to new rules that many universities are putting in place this school year. Administrators hope that time, place, and manner restrictions will reign in protests and encampments. They seek to prevent protesters from masking in order to hide their identities or intimidate others. They’re also targeting other forms of intimidation such as blocking walkways and doorways.
In news reports these days you can find plenty of comments like Yousef’s. As a new school year begins, pro-Palestinian protesters want to cast themselves as free speech martyrs. But does that role reflect reality?
Which point of view is most likely to be censored on campus today?
Let’s take a big-picture view.
The First Wave
For decades, universities have worked to construct a very peculiar campus environment.
Campus leaders decide what the “correct” and “incorrect” opinions are on a wide range of issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then they deploy massive taxpayer subsidies to support the “correct” point of view and punish the “incorrect” point of view.
The monoculture’s first wave hits students at freshman orientation.
Administrators’ presentations introduce the newbies to the oppressor-oppressed fable that will be retold to students throughout the next four to seven years of their lives. The story mostly stays the same, but occasionally administrators reshuffle the angel and demon roles. It seemed like a safe bet that straight white males would remain atop the oppressor hierarchy indefinitely, but then campus mandarins quickly replaced them with Jews—oops, I mean, Zionists (wink, wink).
Students quickly learn that the administration absolutely supports free speech (for oppressed groups) but has zero tolerance for hate speech (unless it’s directed at oppressor groups). Misgender someone and administrators will release the hounds. But call for the genocide of the Jews, and campus leaders stroke their chins and pontificate about context.
The blase attitude persists even at schools with large Jewish populations. At Columbia University, three deans were recently caught mocking students’ concerns about antisemitism. And according to a new report, Columbia administrators routinely dawdled as Jewish students were subjected to threats, harassment, and attacks.
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The Second Wave
Then comes the monoculture’s second wave—professors.
Yes students can choose from a wide array of classes, but professors generally hew to the same oppressor-oppressed narrative. Good luck finding any actual debate in class because the fairly decent levels of intellectual diversity that endured through the mid 90s have vanished. At liberal arts campuses, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans stands at 17 to 1 in psychology and 70 to 1 in religion.
Republicans have gone extinct in departments of anthropology and communications. Today’s students are more likely to encounter a socialist at the head of the class than any flavor of conservative, classical liberal, or libertarian.
Like their administrative colleagues, professors are eager to stick up for oppressed people, as long as they’re the “correct” kind of oppressed people. Students shouldn’t expect to be excused from class if they’re protesting the treatment of Venezuelans, North Koreans, or Nigerian Christians. But as long as they stand on “The Right Side of History,” they’ll receive plenty of special treatment when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
From UCLA to the Ivy League, professors have locked arms with pro-Palestinian students on the front line of the protests. They jumped on emergency phone calls and risked arrest. The professors did all this, said one, because “the students asked the faculty members to protect them.”
How many professors rushed to protect Jewish students who were in actual physical danger?
At Columbia, Jewish students reported being “being followed, stripped of necklaces and pinned against walls.” Sometimes professors join in on the harassment: