Commencements may bring an end to the chaotic scenes on campuses. If they do, boy, have these agitators gotten their money’s worth, still disrupting graduations and behaving like grotesque halfwits.
Along the way, the encampments, building take-overs, and overall purposeful disarray have brought to light the question of free speech.
How can those who have – to paint broadly – advocated for unfettered free speech in this day and age of cancelling now so strongly support the dismantling of anti-Israel protest zones on campus. Whither your First Amendment hugging, the opposition taunts.
Of course, hypocrisy is often a two-way street. Many of the same folk – students and administrations alike – who have found new admiration for free speech in protecting their remonstrations against Zionists were the ones – to again paint broadly – who found violence in words and demanded that those who said racist things or misgendered others or who merely supported Trump be academically punished (or worse).
But I’m not here to re-hash these arguments. Instead, I want to note that the idea that those who have set up encampments and their accompanying protests are merely students exercising their right to free speech is nonsense.
Time and again, with dozens of videos as evidence, these campus encampments have not merely been places to advocate for a cause but to limit the advocacy of anyone else’s cause.
They have not allowed Zionists, and often anyone who is simply Jewish and deemed to be unfriendly, into these spaces to also protest – in favor of the state of Israel. (Especially noteworthy are the videos of Jewish students who need the accompaniment of campus security or police officers to merely walk through the encampments, and who are specifically advised by their protectors to not say anything while doing so.) Throughout campuses they have chased out and chased down Jewish students, harassed those with Israeli flags, and have shouted down dialogue between Israelis / Zionists and others. And essentially every campus encampment has cordoned off the space, set up perimeters, and stationed guards to decide who may enter or even merely pass through to, say, the only entrance into a university library (you know, one of the most sacred “shared” spaces in the minds of progressives, ostensibly a place with knowledge available to all who wish to avail themselves – further hammering in the stake of these hypocritical encampments.)
In short, if you indefinitely set up spaces on university campuses where only your favored kind of speech can be aired and all others will be forcibly shut down – well, guess what? You’re now engaging in the opposite of free speech. We call that speech suppression.
This is true at private universities, where all students should have equal access to spaces for the purposes of raising objections, soapboxing, or merely singing songs.
And it’s true at public universities which are legally required to allow access to public spaces.
None of this is new. The anti-Zionist encampment crowds have taken a familiar route among intersectionalists – one that decides which views can be tolerated and which cannot. That’s well and good if you’ve merely decided on, say, your Twitter feed which views you’ll follow and which you’ll block (though don’t then turn around and boast how open-minded you are). But it’s morally repugnant to do so in shared and public spaces.
The whole purpose of free speech is to air multiple perspectives so that everyone can assess them and freely make up their own mind. It’s abhorrent when the government decides which speech passes muster and may be allowed to air. And it’s equally morally wrong when the mob does it.
(As for whether it’s against the law, we’ll see how the already-filed and coming lawsuits by Jewish students play out.)
Let me add what should be obvious: that even if you disagree with the premise and believe that protesters are engaging in free speech, it should be viewed as morally reprehensible when protesters block select fellow students from access to common grounds. A tactic that bears zero similarity to the oft-mentioned anti-Vietnam War protest in the ‘60s.
It would be lovely if next year we can return to the pre-encampment halcyon days where college students could lie down on a quad of their choosing without concern of receiving a flagpole in the eye.
