The NY Times Magazine published a lengthy article today titled "The Battle Over College Speech Will Outlive the Encampments." The article attempts to summarize the history of free speech arguments going back to the 1960s and to put the current campus protests into context.

One aspect of the story I found interesting, which appears later in the article, involves how an argument introduced by an early proponent of Critical Race Theory impacted all of this.

In an influential 1989 law-review article, Mari Matsuda, a law professor at the University of Hawaii and an early critical-race theorist, argued that the significance of speech and its acceptability on a university campus turned on who was speaking and who was being spoken to. Racist speech, in particular, could be more than offensive. When it reflected historic imbalances of power — when a white student hurled a racial slur at a Black student, for instance — it reinforced and perpetuated those imbalances in ways that shut down discussion, debilitating students’ academic lives. That meant that schools should treat it not as a matter of expression but as a real-world harm and sanction it. “Racist speech is particularly harmful because it is a mechanism of subordination,” she wrote.

By the early 1990s, more than 350 colleges and universities had adopted hate-speech codes imposing sanctions on students who demeaned someone’s race, sex or religion. But the codes collided with the First Amendment. Every court that considered a university speech code between 1989 and 1995 reached the same conclusion: The rules were vague, overbroad or discriminated against speakers because of their points of view and were thus unconstitutional.

So CRT is really the source of the idea that hate speech should be silenced on campus. And while there was pushback to that idea in many places, leading eventually to the Chicago principles outlined by the University of Chicago in 2015, the idea that speech was violence in some cases never really went away. They became a core part of what many now call wokeness. On college campuses where wokeness was incubated, the view of what constituted hate speech grew to include anything to the right of Mao. Silencing bad speech became an accepted form of protest on the far left.

The Chicago principles, as they are called, have since been adopted by more than 100 other schools. But this view of free speech never achieved a consensus. Within many humanities departments, Matsuda’s theories have retained currency. Ideas about identity and power have suffused progressive politics more broadly in recent decades.

...as progressive students extended this justification to even conventional conservatives and some civil liberties advocates, a more generalized intolerance took hold. In a 2022 survey of college students, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a civil liberties organization, found that liberal students were far more likely to say that preventing speech through protest was acceptable. Fifty-three percent of students who identified as “very liberal” said it was always or sometimes acceptable to shout down a speaker to block their appearance on campus. Only 13 percent of “very conservative” students did.

But as the article points out, Jews were always something of a special case for this CRT-based argument. On the one hand they were victims of centuries of persecution. On the other hand, the left saw Israel as the enemy.

Three and a half decades ago, when Matsuda first laid out her case for sanctioning hate speech, based on the identity of the speaker, one of the most challenging tests of her framework was Zionism. Were Zionists persecutors, as pro-Palestinian activists contended? Or, given the history of Jewish persecution and the Holocaust, were they victims? Matsuda’s answer, in effect, was: It depends. She rejected the charge that Zionism was, by definition, racism. Zionists would receive a “victim’s privilege,” she said, if they spoke in “reaction to historical persecution” but not if they allied themselves with a dominant group.

As with everything woke, the fundamental question is who is oppressed and who is the oppressor. The anti-Zionists see Israel as the oppressor and therefore there is nothing you can say about them that goes too far. On the other hand, the pro-Israel students see Israel as a victim of Hamas terrorists who are still holding people hostage even now. 

Making this more complicated is the fact that student protesters who create a "liberated zone" on campus often outnumber the individual Jewish students or counter-protesters who believe they have a right to access campus without being bullied or shouted at. On campus, it's the protesters who are displaying power. When they chant "from the river to the sea" they aren't punching up at Israel, they are punching down at pro-Israel students on campus.

Anyway, the whole thing is a good example of why this sort of CRT-based approach to speech doesn't work, because it's often difficult to get anyone to agree who has power and therefore shouldn't be able to speak. It's much better to have a uniform standard that allows speech for everyone but draws a line at actual violence, vandalism or other lawbreaking. Some of the commenters get it.

Speech should be supported and colleges should work to create a climate where ideas can be debated and every person feels free to voice their opinion. What colleges should crack down on is action. Students who disrupt the functioning of campus, engage in vandalism,  drown out speakers, or target other students should face consequence because you cannot have an environment with a free exchange of ideas if the loudest students are allowed to bully and silence everyone else.

From a faculty member who says the real problem here is the hypocrisy of the far left who can't abide by their own ruleset.

As someone who has been subjected to multiple sensitivity trainings, been to the faculty 'diversity salon,' and dealt with Title IX investigations in my Ivy League university department, I believe this article misses the relevant backdrop. It's not just about free speech and it's history since 1968. For me the crucial dilemma pertains to the previous insistence of university administrators and faculty that we were responsible for avoiding any sort of behavior that could make anyone possibly feel uncomfortable. Whether it was genuinely discriminatory, wasn't the issue. The perception of "harm" was. And then many of these same faculty and administrators suddenly discovered free speech, when it came to Israel-Palestine, because it fit with their oppressor-oppressed dichotomy. Count me among the faculty who don't believe for a second that most of these administrators and especially humanities faculty care about free speech. They just want the right to scream at the top of their lungs that they are on the right side of history and shut everyone else out.

One more. This person points out that free speech is just the tip of this particular iceberg. Wokeness has contempt for all liberal (in the classic sense) values.

A large part of the problem stems from the fact that too many universities have abandoned traditional liberal values; the dignity of the individual, merit, free speech, universal values.  We cannot look at the free speech debate in isolation. All of these traditional liberal values have been under attack for decades. Merit has been undermined through affirmative action.  The dignity of the individual weakened through the constant drive to label individuals and their value to society through their gender, sexual orientation, race, or other characteristics.  Western values of universality have been challenged simply because they are Western. Contempt rather than gratitude for one’s civilizational legacy cannot provide a foundation for a productive future. This does not mean avoiding self-criticism, a core positive trait of this tradition. But critique should not lead to absolute contempt. The hypocrisy around free speech is most obvious given the student and administration penchant for cancellation.  And then we have the weeding out of faculty hires through DEI loyalty oaths, making sure that traditional liberal faculty do not make it to campus in the first place. The problems go far beyond speech to the assault on all traditional liberal values. These values need to be renewed not only on campus, but throughout our broader society.

Hard to disagree. Hopefully more schools will abandon DEI statements and trim their DEI budgets.