BY JOHN K. WILSON
Former AAUP President Cary Nelson’s latest book is Hate Speech and Academic Freedom: The Antisemitic Assault on Basic Principles (Academic Studies Press, 2024). John K. Wilson interviewed him by email about the book in Part I of this discussion. Here in Part II, Nelson examines issues raised since the manuscript was completed last year.
John Wilson: In the wake of the October 7 massacre by Hamas, many colleges have punished professors, banned student groups, and prohibited events, usually for anti-Israel speech and protests. Do you think colleges need to limit free speech more in order to fight antisemitism? And should the federal government investigate colleges for allowing speech deemed antisemitic?
Cary Nelson: Recognized student and faculty groups have the right to invite any speakers of their choice, including speakers who endorse racism or antisemitism. Indeed, sometimes exposure to extreme hate speech helps inoculate the campus against the persuasive power it can have in the abstract. I do not endorse the British policy that events promoting hatred or prejudice must include opposing positions within themselves. But the US practice of supporting a single future counter-event is often not a sufficient way of discouraging some campus groups from adopting discriminatory practices, such as banning Zionists from their organizations or requiring potential members to testify to their ideological conformity. Long-term campus educational projects that address racism, antisemitism, and other forms of hatred are necessary.
That said, the rapid dissemination of campus events on social media worldwide means that limiting our understanding of incitement to violence to US predictions is no longer adequate. If North American student or faculty groups endorse mass murder elsewhere their campuses should act to block the use of campus facilities or infrastructure to do so. A group celebrating the October 7, 2023, Hamas massacre can have its campus recognition withdrawn. Applauding the Holocaust is equally unacceptable for a campus group, even though that is not illegal in the US as it is in much of Europe. An individual student doing so could be required to take a course on antisemitism.
What I try to do in Hate Speech and Academic Freedom is to define this principle: academic freedom protects the right to indulge in hate speech, but it does not protect from professional consequences for doing so.
The US Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education is now investigating several well documented cases where campuses have allowed a continuing mix of speech and action to create hostile environments for Jewish students who consider Zionism to be a fundamental part of their identity. Government investigation of individual incidents would be repressive, but investigations of persistent campus discrimination and corrective practices are warranted for institutions that receive federal funds.
John Wilson: The December 5 testimony by three university presidents raised the question of whether students who say “From the river to the sea, Palestine should be free” are guilty of calling for the genocide of Jews and should be punished. Do you support penalties (including refusing to hire them) for students and faculty who utter these words?
Cary Nelson: As I have said repeatedly, I oppose efforts to block the future employment of undergraduate students based on their political expression, expression that is frequently ephemeral. But I think some actions by more mature students, like aggressively disrupting Berkeley law school dean Erwin Chermerinsky’s April 2024 dinner party at his home would merit urging nonemployment. Those were professional students expected to exhibit professional behavior.
As research has shown, many students who chant “From the river to the sea” cannot name the river or the sea, let alone find either on a map. The slogan has gained explicit genocidal connotations after the 10/7 assault, and many Jewish students and faculty will hear those connotations with unimpeded clarity. Mass chanting of the slogan will have that effect whether or not it is intended. What is needed is education so students understand the impact of their speech, not punishment. Such education is a campus responsibility.
The three university presidents should have said: “Yes, calling for the genocide of Jews is reprehensible and certainly violates our code of conduct. What action we take depends on the analysis of the individual incident.” It would have been easy, for example, to contrast broadcasting a genocidal demand at a public rally with making it in a private conversation.
John Wilson: We disagree about whether departments should be banned from making political statements. I’ve argued that policies on institutional (and departmental) neutrality should be established by the faculty. Do you think that legislators, trustees, and administrators should impose bans on departmental statements rather than the faculty deciding?
Cary Nelson: When academic units adopt and publicize official positions on controversial political issues members of the public can easily assume they have university approval. Posting them on college and university websites enhances that impression. The coercive effect on dissenting students, faculty, and staff is certainly a matter of broad concern, as it compromises their academic freedom. Disclaimers are useless as ways to eliminate those effects. Moreover, formal departmental political positions rapidly begin to shape student and faculty recruitment, teaching, research support, and a range of personnel decisions. I oppose academic unit support for political positions whether I agree or disagree with the positions taken. Students and faculty have the right to express their personal views or to create groups to state them collectively and advocate for them. Those rights are fundamental to academic freedom. Relying on majority faculty votes to govern official political statements merely institutionalizes the tyranny of the majority.
I do not trust legislators to adjudicate the appropriateness of political statements or to formulate academic regulations. The history of such efforts has proven destructive. But some academic disciplines are thoroughly convinced of the moral virtue of their political views. The local departments representing those disciplines follow suit and enthusiastically seek to suppress alternative opinion. So I am convinced university-wide prohibitions are necessary. Administrators, if they possess the requisite courage, should have a role in creating such policies. There are institutions where a faculty majority would endorse political conformity. If trustees have to intervene, that testifies to the failure of shared governance on the campus. Hate Speech and Academic Freedom offers a model policy designed both to protect faculty/student freedom of political expression and to prohibit political statements. I urge faculty senates to adopt it.
Cary Nelson is Jubilee Professor of Liberal Arts & Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the author or editor of thirty-six books. He served as national president of the AAUP from 2006 to 2012 and is currently chair of the Alliance for Academic Freedom.
John K. Wilson is the author of eight books, including Patriotic Correctness: Academic Freedom and Its Enemies and the forthcoming book The Attack on Academia.
Dear John and Carey,
I strongly believe that collective identities formed by fiat or acclaim tend to suppress individual identity. The task of a university conceived in the liberal tradition is to cultivate individualism. To that end, I would like to observe a distinction between free speech and action. Activism that expresses itself in shouting, occupying, interfering with an environment conducive to learning – all of which contain the germ of free speech – are nonetheless fundamentally actions. Petitions, student government, extra-parietal demonstrations, however, are all forms of free speech that do not impinge upon the freedom of others in the immediate university community and do not constitute intrusive behavior.
Banning this kind of action-based activism at private universities would guarantee not only an environment conducive to learning for all, but reopen the lines of nuanced, dispassionate discussion on difficult topics. Stephen Pinker has already pointed us along this path. We lack only the courage to act lest we be branded hypocritically – as we surely would – as fascists and opponents of democracy rather than as stewards of individual liberties.
Remember, the line between free speech and mob rule is gerrymandered by the majority to its own advantage, and always to the detriment of the minority. After WWII, the German Grundgesetz made the Holocaust lie illegal precisely because the Germans understood how free speech can be used to bullying effect as the stalking horse for totalitarianism. We in America who have never experienced fascism – until now – mock the “anti-democratic” insights of the Germans at our own peril. As Brecht warned, “Der Schoß its fruchtbar noch aus dem das kroch.” Columbia is Brecht’s Fehlgeburt, a shambles of free speech, the metastasis of democracy into the mob.