Out of respect for the rights of the members of our academic community, we have restrictions on the time, manner, and place for protest, just as we have rules for those who live in our dormitories. The board of trustees has now vested in me the emergency authority to issue not ‘interim suspensions,’ but full-year suspensions that will remain permanently on your records if you do not remove your tents from the South Quad within one hour and follow university guidance on where and when you can continue your protest. The consequence of repeated infractions or occupying a building is expulsion. My staff has videotaped the encampment over the course of several hours, and we have identified many of you through your social media posts. My office has already begun informing your parents of the emergency policy. As for persons in the encampment who are not registered students, you must leave immediately, or you will be subject to arrest. And this time we will press charges. I hope you will all make wise choices.

This brief speech has yet to be uttered, though it is hardly fantasy. The University of Florida has been proactive since October 7 in preserving both order and the free exchange of ideas. The Division of Student Life has informed students in writing that speech, signs, and expressing viewpoints are permissible. Amplifiers, indoor demonstrations, camping, disruption, threats, and violence are forbidden, and students who violate the rules face suspension and a ban from campus. 

Staff who violate these rules face termination and a ban from campus. A few other university presidents have at least distinguished themselves by enforcing order and existing policies. Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier stands out for expelling three students and answering the student demand for divestment from Israel by citing the school’s official procedures: “The university will not take policy positions unless they directly affect the operating of the university. . . . calling for BDS, for a boycott of Israel, is inconsistent with institutional neutrality. So from our values point, we’re not going to go there.”  

Colleges now reap the grim fruit of years of tolerating intolerable behavior. How many Middlebury College students were suspended for shouting down Charles Murray and violence that left a distinguished Middlebury professor seriously injured? Zero. How many Stanford Law School students were suspended for shouting down Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan? Zero again. Washington College students who shouted down invited speaker and Princeton University Professor Robert George? See above. 

Columbia University is the tragicomic illustration of inadequate measures. With the occupation of Hamilton Hall, Columbia had no choice but to call in the police. Now, they need to inform the students that they will never ever receive a degree from the university. If they fail to do that, Columbia can expect, and will deserve, a repeat of the situation.

We need a new campus playbook, now and for the future, and that can only originate in the boardroom. Boards have authority over and responsibility for everything that happens on campus. They must use that power. Those that do not are guilty of malfeasance and base cowardice. It is hardly reassuring that so far, with a few exceptions, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill Board of Trustees being one, they have left it to legislators to issue the statements that should be theirs.

Real consequences must be part of the equation for the students and faculty in the encampments. Getting arrested and released is simply a badge of honor. The career consequences of a year-long suspension or an expulsion that remains indelibly on the student’s record is something else. Blighting the chances for a prestigious law school admission or a high-value M.B.A. or a job at Goldman Sachs or Google should become part of the equation for those who think they stand above the rules of the community. Under no circumstance should institutions exempt students from regular academic deadlines and examination schedules.   

A petition from the University of Pennsylvania encampment pleading that there be no disciplinary action against the students shows the obvious. Whereas those who engaged in civil disobedience in the civil rights era were typically prepared to accept the consequences, the pro-Palestinian demonstrators of today expect a free pass. They should not receive it. 

Moving forward, rather than entrusting the student code of conduct to the student assembly under the gutless supervision of student life staff, a trustee committee, in consultation with those entities, must oversee the necessary revisions to maintain order. At orientation, administrative staff must then present the code of conduct to incoming students. Similarly, a trustee committee should oversee appropriate revisions to the faculty handbook, making clear the consequences for impermissible activities in protest. 

The 1967 Kalven Report, which articulates the principle of institutional neutrality, offers a powerful preventative to the blackmail tactics of the protests. Institutional neutrality, as Chancellor Diermeier explained, means that politics do not enter into decisions about the institution’s investments and portfolio. Divestment is off the table. Student and faculty demands regarding the portfolio must be, to use a favorite phrase of protesters, “non-negotiable.”  

With a commitment to the rule of law, the campus will enjoy robust debate and academic freedom, unfettered by the mob rule that now substitutes for freedom. This is a time for firmness, not demoralizing compromise that invites more such protests and signals that the adults are no longer in charge.

This article appeared on RealClearEducation on May 3, 2024.

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Yet warm feelings for Barnard, a women’s college affiliated with Columbia University, failed to dilute Gray’s outrage watching video of New York City police round up pro-Palestinian protesters, including Barnard students, on Columbia’s campus last month shortly after the protests began.

To read the full article, visit the Chronicle of Philanthropy here. (Registration may be required.)

The post The Donor Revolt Comes to Annual Giving: Israel, Gaza, and Campus Unrest appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

“Some colleges are banning free speech on college campuses. Well, no more because I’m about to sign a law that protects free speech on college campuses in Texas,” Abbott said in 2019.

And six months ago, during a celebration of Free Speech Week, University of Texas at Austin administrators touted the school’s expansive protections for free speech on campus — including speech that was anti-war or considered hate speech.

“Hate speech is not a category of speech the government can restrict,” Amanda Cochran-McCall, the university’s vice president for legal affairs, said at a school-affiliated Free Speech Week in October. “Imagine if the government at the whim of a political party could just decide at any time what constitutes hate speech, and then just start arresting people for engaging in it.”

But since last week, Abbott has deployed the Department of Public Safety to help crack down on separate protests at the University of Texas at Austin that he vociferously disagreed with. Campus leaders have defended their orders to students to disperse or face criminal trespassing charges.

As state troopers pushed students to the ground with black batons, Abbott cheered the arrests.

“Students joining in hate-filled, antisemitic protests at any public college or university in Texas should be expelled,” he said Wednesday on social media platform X.

In Texas and across the country, pro-Palestinian demonstrations in response to the Israel-Hamas war have put state and university leaders’ prior free speech commitments to the test. UT-Austin’s heavy-handed response to the protests — and the state GOP leaders’ support of the arrests — are a stark contrast to their vigorous celebration and defense of protected speech in previous years.

“The big irony here is that the political right has been for years and years and years criticizing campuses for not enabling enough free speech,” said Kevin McClure, a professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. “And now they are vociferously arguing in favor of repressing students’ free speech rights.”

UT-Austin officials have said they had reason to believe that protest organizers planned to take over school spaces, like pro-Palestinian demonstrators have done at other campuses across the country. But free speech advocates wonder whether those fears were enough to crack down on protesters, raising questions about when speech is protected in Texas universities — and who gets to enjoy those protections.

“What we’re seeing here is this hypocrisy of big double standards saying we love free speech, not this speech,” said Alex Morey, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

Tensions at the UT-Austin campus come five years after Texas Republicans banded together around a new law to boost free speech protections at Texas universities.

The law established all common outdoor areas at public universities as traditional public forums, allowing anyone — not just students — to exercise free speech there. It also prevented universities from considering “any anticipated controversy related to the event” when approving guest speakers on campus.

“Students might be surprised to know that free speech also includes other things, though, things like the right not to speak or the right to wear an item in protest of war or to use strong — even offensive words and phrases — to convey political messages,” Cochran-McCall said at last year’s Free Speech Week.

On the morning after last week’s campus arrests, UT-Austin staff taped “NOTICE” flyers in front of the school’s tower with a notably different tone. Instead of highlighting what was permitted, the flyers detailed the university’s litany of limitations for protests: no masks, no disguises, no encampments, no loud sounds that interfere with learning and no blocking entrances.

Texas universities have the right to create “reasonable time, place and manner” restrictions on free speech activities. When those rules are violated, universities can discipline students, said Steven McGuire, who specializes in campus freedoms at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Free speech also loses First Amendment protections when it amounts to discriminatory harassment or true threats that incite imminent violence or destruction of public property.

Last week’s protest showed no signs of violence before police got involved. Authorities interrupted the students’ march within an hour, forming a barricade at the front of the crowd with their bikes. The officers used loudspeakers to warn students to disperse or face criminal trespassing charges. In total, 57 protesters were arrested. The Travis County attorney’s office dropped all criminal trespass charges against Wednesday’s protesters because they did not find probable cause. DPS is pursuing felony assault charges against one journalist who was covering last week’s protest.

On Monday, law enforcement officers made dozens of arrests again, this time after about 60 protesters formed encampments. Officers used pepper spray and flash-bang explosives to dispel the crowd of demonstrators.

Free speech experts say the university is within its rights to order the arrests of protesters who set up encampments, but they question whether last week’s protest, where authorities got involved early and before any major disruptions, crossed any lines.

UT-Austin President Jay Hartzell’s explanation of the university’s response and the police crackdown last week seemed at odds with the protections the university has previously touted.

In his email to the community last week, Hartzell said he had “credible indications” that the organizers of Wednesday’s protest were “trying to follow the pattern we see elsewhere, using the apparatus of free speech and expression to severely disrupt a campus for a long period.”

Across the state and around the country, pro-Palestinian demonstrations have erupted on college campuses. At Columbia University, administrators called New York Police Department to empty a campus encampment of pro-Palestinian demonstrators, which resulted in the arrest of more than 100 people.

In an April 25 email obtained by The Texas Tribune — addressed to fundraising staff who would be getting questions from donors about the university’s response — administrators described the intel they had. They mentioned social media postings that used identical language compared to protest organizers at Columbia University and other schools, as well as a concern that a non-UT affiliated group known as the Students for Justice in Palestine had a role in organizing the walkout.

Ahead of last week’s demonstration, organizers never indicated in public communications that they intended to stay past the university’s 10 p.m. curfew, incite violence or start encampments. Instead, in an Instagram post, organizers spoke of teach-ins on the South Lawn, an art workshop and a pizza break, according to an Instagram post from the organizing group.

Though it’s standard for a few officers to be present to manage a sizable peaceful protest like the Wednesday walkout, free speech experts condemned the phalanx of law enforcement that descended on the campus when there was no indication of violence.

Preventing unlawful assembly, as DPS described the governor’s instructions, is a slippery slope that can lead to preventing assembly altogether, free speech experts said.

“Students that are demonstrating and doing so peacefully being arrested so quickly for trespassing does set up a dangerous precedent,” McClure said.

In explaining why law enforcement was called, UT-Austin spokesperson Brian Davis on Wednesday said student protesters had violated their “no masks” rule for demonstrations.

But Savannah Kumar, an attorney with ACLU of Texas, questioned whether a rule prohibiting face masks is enough to trump free speech protections. Immunocompromised students may have reasons to wear face masks. And rules should not dissuade or discourage people from exercising free speech, she said.

McClure said he expects legal challenges will follow the law enforcement response to Wednesday’s protest.

Abbott’s criticism of the protest came weeks after he issued an executive order requiring schools to revise their free speech policies to punish what he described as “the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses.” He singled out groups like Palestine Solidarity Committee, which organized last week’s protest, as potential violators. He did not give examples of how the group may have engaged in antisemitic speech.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators have faced similar accusations elsewhere. Earlier this month at Columbia University, protesters drew condemnation after some Jewish students reported feeling unsafe and harassed. Some protesters who appeared to be unaffiliated with the university verbally attacked Jewish students with antisemitic remarks, The New York Times reported. President Joe Biden denounced antisemitism on campuses amid the protests, calling it “reprehensible and dangerous.”

But while Texas’ political leaders have linked pro-Palestinian views with antisemitism, a peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstration shouldn’t be considered discriminatory harrassment, Morey said.

“Someone peacefully protesting and saying, ‘From the river to the sea,’ is not going to be severe, pervasive [or] objectively offensive, such that Jewish students who are offended by that speech are going to be unable to go to class,” Morey said. “It’s not going to hit discriminatory harassment, just because Governor Abbott calls it hate speech or calls it antisemitic. ”

“From the river to the sea” is a common chant at pro-Palestinian demonstrations, alluding to the stretch of land from the Jordan River on the eastern flank of Israel and the occupied West Bank to the Mediterranean sea to the west. Pro-Palestinian activists say it’s a call for peace and equality in the Middle East. The American Jewish Committee has described it as an antisemitic “call-to-arms.”

“There is of course nothing antisemitic about advocating for Palestinians to have their own state,” the AJC says on its website. “However, calling for the elimination of the Jewish state, praising Hamas or other entities who call for Israel’s destruction, or suggesting that the Jews alone do not have the right to self-determination, is antisemitic.”

Former U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, a Republican from Michigan, last week also commented on how Abbott’s comments about arresting students for hate speech violated their constitutional rights to freedom of speech.

“If he’s arresting them for other reasons, then he should say so,” Amash said. “If he’s arresting them for their speech, then he’s violating the law, and his actions threaten everyone in the state, including everyone he claims to be protecting.”

Morey, of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said Abbott had engaged in clear “viewpoint discrimination” on Wednesday when he ordered state troopers to get involved in the UT-Austin protest.

“This was shocking. We have never seen anything quite like this where a governor is saying I’m going to preempt protests based on these views,” Morey said. “It sure seems like he is taking real liberties with the letter of the law because he personally, and maybe other folks that are affiliated with him in Texas government, find that speech objectionable.”

This article appeared in The Texas Tribune on April 29, 2024.

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More than a week of round-the-clock sit-in protests at dozens of US colleges and universities produced close to 1,000 arrests, largely ordered by campus presidents accepting the demands of congressional Republicans for crackdowns on expressions of pro-Palestinian sentiment.

The politicians have argued that they are responding to an alarming rise in antisemitic expression, and the institutions contend they are setting reasonable limits on community disruptions.

“Nobody should ever be denied the right to protest or to counter-protest,” said Michael Poliakoff, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a conservative-leaning network of about 23,000 trustees at 1,500 public and private colleges and universities that cheers the Republican effort. “But an encampment is an intrusion on to the university” that deserves reasonable limits, especially given the sensitivities of Jewish students, Dr Poliakoff said in summarising the perspective that many campus leaders have decided they should embrace.

For many other experts, meanwhile, the basic logic of the lawmakers and the institutions doesn’t add up. Expressions of antisemitic sentiment in the US have undoubtedly been on an upswing since the October surge in violence between Israelis and Palestinians. But antisemitic voices have long found receptivity among leading US conservatives, while high levels of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim rhetoric and violence around US campuses and beyond have largely escaped sustained high-level attention – and continue to do so.

And while US university leaders have a genuine interest in keeping their operations open, many over past weeks have been inviting police to arrest their students while making few if any assertions that the protests have involved actual violence or meaningful disruptions to their campuses. Also, while some student protests in past eras have produced strict law enforcement responses, peaceful overnight sit-in demonstrations have routinely been tolerated – albeit begrudgingly and with moments of pushback – on topics such as wars and civil rights, sometimes even producing negotiated outcomes.

At least one institution is doing that now. Portland State University said that it encouraged student activism and would stop taking gifts or grants from Boeing until it could address concerns about the company’s work with Israel’s military. “The passion with which these demands are being repeatedly expressed by some in our community motivates me, as a scholar of academic ethics and a university leader responsible for the well-being of our campus constituents, to listen and ask additional questions,” Portland State’s president, Ann Cudd, said in announcing the decision.

That, however, stands largely as an exception among the responses around the country. The quick and widespread leap to law enforcement tactics followed almost immediately behind a pair of congressional hearings where Republicans repeatedly accused the new female presidents at four leading universities of being insensitive to the fears of Jewish students who encounter campus demonstrations against Israel’s killing of tens of thousands of Palestinian civilians.

After the first hearing, in December, the heads of Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania resigned, abandoned by their trustees and other wealthy donors who largely aligned with the Republican demands. At the second Capitol Hill hearing, earlier this month, Columbia University’s president, Baroness Shafik, largely accepted the lawmakers’ demands that she aggressively limit pro-Palestinian protests and punish those involved in them.

The Columbia president then called in New York City police to begin arresting more than 100 demonstrators. Yet almost immediately the protesters resumed their overnight encampments on Columbia’s main lawn, inspiring copycat versions around the country and earning the Columbia president demands for her resignation from both sides.

The situation appeared to be working out masterfully for Republicans on several levels, education and political experts said, given the party’s historic alignment with US religious conservatives who prefer that Israelis rather than Arabs maintain control of Christianity’s holy lands, and who regularly describe themselves as champions of law-and-order social perspectives.

In a close election year, it had basically become a modernised nationwide version of the demonise-the-students strategy pursued so successfully in the 1960s by Ronald Reagan, the future US president just then beginning his career as governor of California, said Jack Schneider, professor of education at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. As University of California students protested the Vietnam War, Mr Reagan described the University of California, Berkeley as beholden to counterculture activists, prompting the firing of the California system’s president, Clark Kerr, and the defunding of public higher education in California and beyond.

“It was politically brilliant, even if it was disastrous for California students,” Professor Schneider said. “I was just sort of surprised that it has taken so long for the Republican Party to nationalise that approach, but that’s definitely what we’re seeing here.”

Other advantages Republicans were realising from the strategy, said another expert, Larry Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia, included driving Jewish American voters from their traditional progressive allies. “In general, Jews in America vote 70 per cent to 75 per cent Democratic,” Professor Sabato said. “In a close election such as 2024, every vote matters.”

Examples of that split can be seen in students such as Avi Balsam, a sophomore computer science and maths major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mr Balsam said he knew full well that Palestinians as well as Jews were native to the land that now comprises the state of Israel, that Palestinian civilians were being killed in large numbers by the Israeli military, that antisemitism was just one among many flavours of discrimination fouling US society and US college campuses, and that Republican lawmakers weren’t necessarily seeking constructive solutions by heavily politicising the issue.

And yet Mr Balsam also acknowledged that Jewish identity left him and other students highly sensitive to the specific terms and the emotions that some protesting students were using to express their grief over the killings of so many Palestinians. “When you’re speaking about these things,” he insisted, “you have to be very careful what language you use and who you’re triggering, who you’re upsetting.

“If there are Israelis on your campus who have lost family members in the Second Intifada [between 2000 and 2005], maybe don’t call for intifada on our campus. And if there are people on your campus who have Jewish relatives living in Israel, maybe don’t say, ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine is Arab’, which implies that your family has no place to go, they should be expelled, they should be killed.”

In the end, therefore, as much as Mr Balsam opposed Republicans on most political issues, he welcomed their alliance over Israel.

Leading Democrats have broached the topic carefully. As the House education committee hosted its hearings with the university presidents, the panel’s leading Democrat, Bobby Scott, repeatedly acknowledged the hurt felt by Jewish students while pleading for equal consideration of Arab and Muslim students. And two of the committee’s Democratic members – both with Jewish backgrounds – joined their Republican colleagues in sharply challenging campus tolerance of pro-Palestinian student advocacy.

President Joe Biden, while avoiding any public advice on how universities should handle student protests, has also chosen to single out comments by individual Columbia students that he regards as antisemitic, saying through his media representatives that they should “serve as a wake-up call” for the attitudes among some activists.

US higher education’s national leaders also have trodden carefully. The main US higher education lobby group, the American Council on Education, has largely refrained from criticising either its own members – the nation’s university presidents – or the lawmakers they cultivate for financial and policy support.

“What’s happening on campuses involves really complicated tensions between free speech and safeguarding student safety,” the ACE’s president, Ted Mitchell, said. “It’s certainly not always easy, but college administrators need to be very clear about what their policies are and be consistent about how they enforce those policies.”

The convergence of Republican political interests with the protests over renewed Middle East violence, experts said, dealt US higher education a tough political hand at a time when it was already struggling with fundamental and widespread public concerns about its overall cost and value.

Republicans aligned with Donald Trump might deserve to have questions asked about their sincerity in battling antisemitism, said Christopher Brown, professor of history at Columbia University. But regardless of any actual hypocrisies, Professor Brown said, “the main issue for me is the threat they pose to what is one of the greatest assets this nation has – which is its massive, broad, diverse, varied institutions of higher education across the country”.

And on that measure, he said, despite all the political and emotional baggage of Israeli politics in the US, Columbia’s president had a real chance during her congressional hearing, and immediately afterwards, to have pushed things in a markedly different direction for the entire country. That’s because the executive committee of Columbia’s University Senate unanimously told the president and her team, as she was contemplating using police against the student protesters, “that is a really bad idea”, Professor Brown said. “And they went and did it anyway.

“For higher education, generally, it was a disastrous mistake,” Professor Brown said. “And I think it was a fully predictable outcome – that rather than quieting things down, it would simply inflame them.”

The Columbia leadership has tried since then to work much harder at negotiating with the students, he said. But in the meantime, the spark has been lit well beyond Columbia. Each day since the congressional hearing with the Columbia president and the accompanying arrests, the nation watched the situation spiral, with classes moved online, commencement ceremonies cancelled and students on both sides saying they don’t feel safe and don’t feel heard.

“They took a very difficult, bad situation and made it so much worse,” Professor Brown said. “All of the campus protests that have emerged have arisen after the police were called in.”

Perhaps most dangerously, Professor Schneider said, the raft of negative public attention had created a big new opportunity for Republicans to expand their ongoing work to withdraw public funding for education.

That pursuit had been hitting roadblocks at the school level in the US, he said, as conservatives showed ideological interest in the ideals of privatisation but generally recognised – especially in the small rural communities where Republicans tend to thrive – that their children were well served by local public schools.

Higher education, however, seemed much more vulnerable to a sophisticated new round of attack on its already weakened levels of public investment, Professor Schneider said, because universities often did not have the same level of close emotional attachment to their local communities. “You don’t have a ton of folks in the middle of Kansas whose kids are currently enrolled at Harvard,” he said. “So that’s an easier potshot to take.”

Given that dynamic, Professor Schneider said, campus leaders should expect the fundamental conflict to persist – if not with students, then with lawmakers. “It’s not going to pass any time soon,” he said, “because the right has figured out that this is good for business.”

This post appeared on Times Higher Education on April 30, 2024.

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Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of ACTA.

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The Fraternity and Sorority Action Fund will host the panel, entitled “Innocent Until Proven Greek: How Academic Bureaucracies Threaten Student Civil Liberties” at 9 a.m., Thursday, April 25, 2024, at the National Press Club, 529 14th Street NW, Washington, D.C.

Registration, found at this link, is required for both the media and the public and is non-transferable. A complimentary hot breakfast is included for all registrants.

The event will be live-streamed on ACTA’s YouTube Channel.

About the Panelists

Dr. Dawn Watkins Wiese is the Chief Operating Officer of FRMT, Ltd., which provides insurance for men’s fraternal organizations. She is the founder of Plaid, an organizational and leadership consultancy. Prior to consulting, Dr. Wiese was the Vice President of Student Affairs, Dean of Students and Dean of Freshmen at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va. She also served as Associate Dean of Students and Director of Student Events and Events Planning at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC.

Dr. Steve McGuire is the Paul & Karen Levy Fellow in Campus Freedom at the American Council of Trustees and Alumni ACTA). Prior to joining ACTA, Dr. McGuire was director of the Matthew J. Ryan Center for the Study of Free Institutions and the Public Good and associate teaching professor in the Augustine and Culture Seminar Program at Villanova University. He holds a bachelor’s degree from the University of Lethbridge, a master’s degree from the University of Saskatchewan and a PhD from The Catholic University of America, where he was a Bradley Fellow and an ISI Richard M. Weaver Fellow. He was a 2021 Claremont Institute Lincoln Fellow.

Micah Kamrass is an attorney specializing in higher education at Manley Burke, where he represents both the men’s and women’s groups suiting the University of Maryland for civil rights violations. He attended The Ohio State University for undergraduate, graduate and law school. Here, he served as the student body president representing more than 40,000 of his fellow students, as well as president of Alpha Epsilon Pi and on the group’s International Supreme Board of Governors. He earned a PhD in Higher Education Leadership and Policy from Vanderbilt University. He is also an adjunct professor teaching higher education law at the University of Louisville.

Farah Aliabadi is a sophomore at the University of Maryland studying psychology. She is the president of Zeta Tau Alpha Sorority.

Garrett Bruce is a sophomore at the University of Maryland studying finance and management. He is the president of Kappa Alpha Order and the former Chief Justice of the UMD Interfraternity Council Judiciary Board.

Follow this link to register for the event. It will be live-streamed on ACTA’s YouTube Channel if you are interested but cannot attend.

MEDIA CONTACT: Gabrielle Anglin
EMAIL: ganglin@goacta.org

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Mr. Bernard-Henri Lévy is a French philosopher, novelist, filmmaker, and playwright. For 50 years, he has covered the world’s “forgotten wars,” both independently and on behalf of the French government. He is the creator of many renowned documentaries, including three films on the war in Ukraine: Why Ukraine, Slava Ukraini, and Glory to the Heroes, the last of which will be released in December. In November 2023, he is on the front lines in Gaza and has rallied the West to support Israel’s struggle against terrorism.

The post The Wars Against Ukraine and Israel and the Duty of the Jewish People by Bernard-Henri Lévy appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Download a transcript of the podcast HERE.
Note: Please check any quotations against the audio recording. The views expressed by guests on this podcast are their own and may not necessarily reflect those of ACTA.

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UT already has existing protections in place to guard students from harassment. According to the executive order, Texas universities must “review and update free speech policies to address the sharp rise in antisemitic speech and acts on university campuses.” However, it fails to provide clear guidelines as to how universities may do that without infringing on students’ rights to free speech. 

Tyler Coward, the lead counsel for government affairs for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, is concerned about the potential legal ramifications of the order.

“Institutions should be on notice that if they adopt an unconstitutional policy, and enforce that unconstitutional policy against students, based on their constitutionally protected political speech on this very important matter today, they risk a First Amendment lawsuit that they will likely lose,” Coward said. “When institutions are weighing whether or not to follow an executive order, or the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, they should always choose the Constitution.”

Because of its broad scope, potential First Amendment issues will rely largely on each individual university’s implementation of the order, according to Steven Collis, Texas law professor and director of the Bech-Loughlin First Amendment Center.

“If you define antisemitism narrowly to be consistent with free speech law, so for example, you might say, ‘We will not allow direct threats of physical violence to anyone. We will not allow trying to incite imminent lawlessness’ … then you’re consistent with the Constitution,” Collis said. “But if you say we’re not going to allow anyone who is protesting the current actions of the nation of Israel to share their comments, I can almost guarantee you’re going to be violating the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment.”

However, Michael Poliakoff, American Council of Trustees and Alumni president, believes that this order is both legal and imperative to protect Jewish students. 

Poliakoff said in an email statement, “The Governor’s strong support for freedom of speech and firm prohibition of antisemitism are fully compatible. Speech that threatens imminent racial violence or creates an environment so hostile that students of color cannot pursue their educational goals is both illegal and despicable: the same is manifestly true for antisemitism.”

Poliakoff believes the order is a standard, constitutionally protected measure.

“It is customary for university speech policies to include time, manner and place restrictions in addition to prohibitions on speech that is constitutionally unprotected because it amounts to, for example, discrimination or harassment. It is quite proper that the Governor would require the state’s universities to review their policies, and his order is particularly urgent in the wake of the rise in antisemitic acts on campuses following the October 7 Hamas massacre,” said Poliakoff.

However, the constitutional issue with Abbott’s order lies within its attempted prohibition of dissenting speech, not its protections for Jewish students. The order’s vague wording could allow universities to expand policies to include political speech and criticism of the state of Israel as antisemitism. These broader definitions not only limit the expression of students, but also shifts the focus from student safety to political agendas.

FIRE said in an online statement regarding Abbott’s order, “Anti-Semitism on campus is a real problem. When anti-Semitic speech crosses beyond the First Amendment’s protection, Texas institutions have a moral and legal obligation to take action. But today’s executive order relies on a definition of anti-Semitism that reaches core political speech, including criticism of Israel.”

Coward said Abbott’s order requires institutions to adopt the speech code of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which prohibits certain criticisms of Israel. 

“When the government says, ‘This is the one entity you cannot criticize, but you’re free to criticize whoever else,’ that’s blatant viewpoint discrimination and the Constitution prohibits that viewpoint discrimination,” Coward said. “And that’s why this executive order, if the institutions abide by it, will be adopting unconstitutional policies that will restrict their students’ free speech rights.”

The order specifically called out two student organizations by name, the Palestinian Solidarity Committee and Students for Justice in Palestine. However, Abbott provided no evidence to support the claim that these organizations have participated in or condoned antisemitic behavior on campus. Singling out these groups without substantial evidence could lead to the suppression of certain opinions among students.

“Our activism has never called for harm to be committed against other groups of people. Never. We’ve never called for harm against Jewish people,” said Ammer Qaddumi, a member of the Palestinian Solidarity Committee. “A lot of Jewish activists here in Austin are actually some of our closest allies and very close friends. This executive order, it mischaracterizes our activism as being antisemitic.”

By enforcing this order, universities risk limiting discussions on important political issues related to Israel and Palestine, which inhibits students’ First Amendment rights and fails to foster freedom of expression in academic environments.

This post appeared on The Daily Texan on April 8, 2024.

The post Abbott’s executive order is unconstitutional appeared first on American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

Provost Kotlikoff, in a statement explaining his actions, preemptively distanced himself from the always-controversial Ms. Coulter, but the rest of his explanation for inviting her back admirably sums up the reasons why Cornell needed to invite Ms. Coulter back.

“Having been deeply troubled by an invited speaker at Cornell (any speaker) being shouted down and unable to present their views, I agreed that there could be few more powerful demonstrations of Cornell’s commitment to free expression than to have Ms. Coulter return to campus and present her views,” the provost wrote in a letter to the editor of the Cornell Daily Sun. “This is certainly not because I agree with what she has to say, or because I feel that the content of her presentation is important for our community to hear, but because I believe that Cornell must be a place where the presentation of ideas is protected and inviolable. Shielding students or others in our community from viewpoints with which they disagree, or filtering campus speakers based on the content of their presentation, undermines the fundamental role of a university.”

Carve that statement into bronze and hang it in the faculty lounges and administrative offices of every college in America. Freedom of speech should be a defining value of American higher education, and we applaud Provost Kotlikoff for taking a stand for it. Good on Ms. Coulter for accepting the invitation, too.

Our inner optimist wonders whether this attempt at détente between Ms. Coulter and Cornell could set a lasting precedent with wider implications for higher education. Too often on American campuses, speakers are disinvited or shouted down, never to return. The proper response should be to invite them back and ensure they have their say without interruption. Do any other administrators have the courage to follow Cornell’s lead?

We are thinking here about University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot, whose October 21, 2021, John Carlson Lecture at MIT on the topic of the habitability of planets outside our solar system was canceled. This was precipitated by online Twitter outrage, ginned up by a sorry rump group of academics worked up over positions he had taken on matters unrelated to his lecture topic.

Then there was U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stuart Kyle Duncan, who was shouted down on March 9, 2023, by Stanford Law School students, egged on by the school’s associate dean for diversity, equity, and inclusion. The now-former dean lectured Judge Duncan about why he had it coming and infamously asked him, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”

Legal expert Ilya Shapiro ought to be invited back to the University of California–Hastings to give the talk he was scheduled to deliver on March 1, 2022. Yale Law School should reinvite its guests to finish the moderated debate they began on January 24, 2023.

If this commonsense trend gathers enough momentum, perhaps even the campuses that crossed the line into violence could try to make amends. Middlebury College could reinvite Charles Murray, while San Francisco State University could beg Riley Gaines to come back. Of course, they would have to guarantee the safety of their guests.

In each of these cases, top university officials should be the ones to extend the invitations, and they should offer to introduce their guests and participate in the full event. It is often students and sometimes faculty and staff who demand cancelations, shout down speakers, and, in some cases, assault guests. But it is school administrators who disgrace themselves and abdicate their duties to stand athwart the mobs and stop the violence, who refuse to impose appropriate sanctions on the perpetrators, and who bloviate about the institutions’ values, rather than showing the moral courage to model those values themselves.

Only when the re-invitations have been issued and the disrespected speakers have delivered their remarks and been allowed to leave the campuses unharmed will we have a sense that university administrators have, at long last, decided to reject the dark, illiberal forces on their campuses and defend the fundamental purpose of the institutions they supposedly lead: the free pursuit of truth.

This post appeared in Real Clear Education on March 19, 2024.

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