Good morning. We're covering the debate over speech and safety on college campuses — as well as the Texas Supreme Court, Jack Smith and NASA's logo.
Feeling welcomeThe Hamas-Israel war has caused so much turmoil on campuses partly because it has highlighted a tension that university administrators haven't fully acknowledged. Many colleges have embraced broad notions of safety in recent years, promising to make their students feel comfortable and welcome. The goal is in many ways understandable, especially for students who find campuses to be uneasy places because they are among the first in their families to attend college. One way to make students feel safe, schools have decided, is to restrict speech that upsets students. By now, you have no doubt heard about some of the examples, most of which involve sanctions on conservative expression. M.I.T., for instance, disinvited a geophysicist from giving a lecture because he criticized aspects of affirmative action. But there have also been restrictions on left-leaning expression: Late in the Covid pandemic, M.I.T. barred students from asking others to wear a mask. Expression is safetyEither way, a basic tension exists. Maximizing everybody's sense of safety and comfort is often impossible. On many of society's biggest political issues, the expression of certain views will make some students feel uncomfortable. Yet the restriction of those same views will make others feel uncomfortable — because the ability to speak honestly about important issues is a part of feeling welcome in a community. The Covid mask debate is a useful example. Being around unmasked classmates who might spread germs makes some students feel uncomfortable. And being pressured to cover your face with a mask for months on end makes others feel uncomfortable. Neither group is necessarily wrong. Each has different priorities. There are plenty of other examples. Debates over affirmative action are often struggles about whether colleges should enroll more or fewer students from different groups — Asian, Black, Hispanic and white. Strong opinions will make some students feel more or less welcome on a campus. These tensions have remained somewhat sublimated until recently, partly because the debates are often one-sided. Fewer than 20 percent of students at most selective colleges identify as conservative, according to surveys by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. The conservative share is below 10 percent at dozens of colleges, including Brown, Colgate, Emory, Grinnell, Johns Hopkins, Middlebury, Oberlin, Penn, Pomona, Williams and the University of Vermont. This war is different
The Hamas-Israel war has brought these tensions to the fore because both sides in the debate have large campus constituencies. Many Jewish students — and conservatives — believe that colleges have hypocritically allowed celebrations of Hamas's Oct. 7 massacre and antisemitic calls for future violence. (This belief underpinned the tough questioning of three university presidents last week by Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman, which led to apologies from two of the three and the resignation of one, as my colleague Nicholas Confessore has explained.) At the same time, many Palestinian students — and their allies, who tend to be on the political left — believe they are at risk of harassment, and the loss of future jobs, for making principled arguments about human suffering and democratic rights. The problem for universities is that they can't always make both sides feel safe. Pro-Palestinian students, for instance, may understandably feel unwelcome if they cannot criticize Israel as an occupying power that has seized Palestinian land in the West Bank and has killed thousands of people in Gaza since Oct. 7. These students may advocate a "free Palestine from the river to the sea" or a "right of return" as ways to express support for a single nation that incorporates all of Israel and its occupied territory. Pro-Israel students, for their part, may understandably hear these statements as calls for the elimination of the world's only Jewish nation, to be replaced by yet another Muslim-dominated one. They may point out that many college activists seem to care more about the human rights record of Israel than, say, China, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt or Hamas. In recent years, U.S. colleges have indeed focused more on restricting speech that upsets liberals than conservatives. That inconsistency — which Jewish students and their allies have highlighted — has put university leaders in an awkward position. Whatever their own politics, they are uncomfortable publicly defending one standard for one ideology and another for a different ideology. Many are now trying to figure out what to do. The answers are not easy. Some political speech does cross the line into harassment or even advocacy for violence. And universities, especially private ones, have the right to adopt a more restrictive standard than the First Amendment does. But university leaders do face a basic choice. Do they want to expand the list of restricted speech to include more statements that make conservatives, Jewish students and others feel unsafe? Or do they want to shrink the list and tell all students that they will need to feel uncomfortable at times? For more
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martes, 12 de diciembre de 2023
The Morning: Why campus speech is vexing
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