BY JOHN K. WILSON

On October 17, about 300 Northwestern University students and supporters held a protest in Evanston as part of their ongoing efforts to abolish the campus police department and enact other reforms. During the protest, a campus banner was burned, various buildings and even murals in town were tagged with messages including “kill the pigs,” a window at Whole Foods was broken, and the protesters chanted “piggy Morty” in front of President Morton Schapiro’s home late at night.

On October 19, Schapiro responded with an angry letter condemning the protest “in the strongest possible terms” for “defacing property and violating laws and University standards.” Schapiro also asserted that the chant of “piggy Morty” comes “dangerously close to a longstanding trope against observant Jews like myself.”

It is ridiculous for Schapiro to claim that “piggy Morty” is some kind of anti-Semitic porcine reference. It is crystal clear that the protesters who keep calling cops “pigs” were talking about Schapiro’s support for a campus police department. Calling all cops “pigs” is obnoxious and offensive. We shouldn’t use dehumanizing language about anyone, especially about entire groups of people without any basis. But it’s obviously not anti-Semitism, and Schapiro owes these students an apology for making this false accusation.

A group of Black faculty at Northwestern responded to Schapiro:

You have made it clear that you will use the power of your office to “shame” and thereby control dissent, but we must speak truth to this misguided power. We therefore condemn your inability to imagine that injustice is something that is bigger than your own injured pride and hurt feelings. We condemn your absent presence at this university during the past 6 months of staff, faculty and student distress, dismay, exhaustion and struggle. We condemn your allowing sour, small and moribund leadership to flourish here while visionary innovators must dissemble, wither and fade, or simply escape. We condemn your failure to lead and imbue Northwestern with a grander and more humane vision for the present and the future.

It’s a powerful and courageous critique, and largely justified. It is good to see faculty who are willing to criticize the president of their university, particularly at an institution which has regularly abridged academic freedom under Schapiro’s rule, including the violation of campus policies in suspending and banning from campus one faculty critic of the administration, and banning to this day another professor from teaching a class in his expertise because it led to negative publicity for the university.

However, I disagree with one point in this faculty statement: “you will use the power of your office to ‘shame’ and thereby control dissent…” Trying to shame people is a legitimate use of free speech. Are these faculty guilty of wrongly trying to control people because they are shaming Schapiro? The real danger is that Northwestern might seek to punish students for merely protesting, as opposed to shaming them.

I am sympathetic to many of the protesters’ demands, and I support defunding the police and developing better institutions. I support their call to “Invest in life-giving institutions and divest from law enforcement.” I support their demand to “Create a policy that protects students that protest on campus.” But even if you support every demand being made by these protesters, these tactics are still wrong. Vandalism is wrong. Arson is wrong. Threats of violence are wrong. Having the right cause doesn’t change that.

In response to Schapiro, the protesters issued a lengthy statement. In this NU Community Not Cops press release, the protesters declared:

“we condemn his definition of free speech. Free speech includes, but is not limited to: engaging in symbolic speech such as burning the “We’re N This Together” banner (established by Texas v. Johnson, 1989) and the use of certain offensive words and phrases to convey political messages such as chanting “kill the pigs” (established by Cohen v. California, 1971).”

While I am happy to see leftist protesters calling for a very broad conception of free speech, the interpretation of the law given by these activists is wrong. Texas v. Johnson struck down laws banning flag desecration. You might have the right to burn your own banners, but you definitely don’t have the right to burn banners that don’t belong to you. Under Texas v. Johnson, you can’t be charged with flag desecration, but it’s not an invitation to vandalism. Destruction of someone else’s property is fundamentally different from, and contrary to, the right of free expression.

As for Cohen v. California, it protected the right to express “fuck the draft” on a jacket, not “kill the pigs.” Those are radically different forms of expression. Calling for murder is not protected speech.

Anytime you find yourself referring to a group of people with the verb “kill,” you ought to take a hard look at yourself and wonder if you’ve lost your way, or perhaps lost your mind. I suspect that the vast majority of the protesters do not in any way endorse killing police officers. If so, issuing a defense of “kill the pigs” might be the wrong approach.

All of this would be clear if we reverse the situation. Suppose counterprotesters decided to take the posters and banners of the protesters and burn them. Would these protesters defend that as protected speech? What if the counterprotesters vandalized local property by spraypainting “kill the protesters” on the walls? Would any of these protesters invoke Cohen v. California to defend death threats like that against them? I certainly wouldn’t.

The protesters concluded their press release on a very disturbing note with this sentence: “If violence is the only language Northwestern University responds to, we will no longer be silent.” That’s an ominous conclusion. The protesters seem to be saying that they will speak, and that violence is the only way they can speak to be understood by Northwestern.

I suppose it’s possible that these Northwestern students are terrible writers and they accidentally wrote the opposite of what they actually believed, and they meant to say that they will no longer be silent in condemning institutional violence.

But a much more reasonable interpretation of this line is that it literally means what it says, that violence is the language they will speak. This call for violence, and the justification of “kill the pigs,” is absolutely unacceptable and must be condemned.

There are smart and dumb ways to protest injustices. Vandalism, threats of violence, and obnoxious illegal behavior that alienates potential supporters is a terrible approach. Loudly calling for real solutions, on the other hand, is an effective mechanism for change. We shouldn’t accept Schapiro’s false attacks on protesters, but we also shouldn’t hesitate to denounce the very real mistakes that these protesters are making.