Tension points over free speech and the Hamas war

Thanks for tuning in this Saturday morning. Today we’re going to contemplate a seemingly intractable tension point.
 
Before we dive into it, we’ll paraphrase a philosophy championed by a North Carolina leader we deeply admire: Good leadership requires honest assessments of reality. Without sober acknowledgment of the situation at hand, it’s impossible to make good decisions.
 
We offer below an assessment of the flashpoints dominating college campuses today. Some business leaders are refusing to hire students from certain universities. Others are resigning from university boards and withholding future contributions.
 
What does all of this say about the state of higher education? We offer analysis of a few different ways to view the landscape, without labeling any better than the other.
 
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On May 25, 2020, a Minneapolis police officer killed George Floyd. Shortly thereafter, protests (and some riots) broke out across the country. Activists and student groups demanded institutional responses to what they viewed as institutional racism.
 
Universities and employers responded.
 
They created or expanded DEI (“diversity, equity, and inclusion”) committees. They tacked DEI pledges onto admissions and job applications. Some universities required prospective faculty to write essays about their commitment to “antiracism,” a controversial political doctrine. They committed to doing their part to advance equity and combat racism. Some university departments openly questioned the value of “diversity of thought” because it hampered equity initiatives.
 
There were excesses, and many of them. Myopic worldviews proliferated. Those who opposed those worldviews were sometimes labeled obstacles to racial justice. Some of them lost their jobs, their friends, and their reputations because of it.
 
Nevertheless, a backlash mounted. The arguments against such excesses usually centered on free speech and the need for institutions to accommodate multiple worldviews. The answer to ideas you don’t like is to offer better ones, not silence dissent, the argument went. An outgrowth of that logic is that universities and businesses should try to refrain from inserting themselves into political debates, especially those outside of their core competencies.
 
On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists murdered 1,200 Israeli civilians, including at least 32 Americans, in the worst attack on Jews since the Holocaust. Shortly thereafter, some student groups and professors began blaming the dead Israelis for their own murder.
 
The reaction was swift.
 
Billboard trucks began driving around campuses with the names of students who signed on to pro-Hamas statements. Prominent law firms rescinded job offers and threatened elite law schools with hiring consequences if they didn’t crack down on antisemitism. Major donors withdrew their contributions, resigned from boards, and called on chancellors to step down for failing to adequately condemn the atrocities and the student groups celebrating them.
 
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These two events, and their aftermaths, are related, at least when contemplating the confused seas that define college campuses at this moment.
 
Here are the friction points.
 
Institutional Neutrality: Where’s the Line?
 
One school of thought sees institutions – particularly universities – as facilitating different worldviews, not deciding which ones are right. Advocates of this school forcefully argued their convictions when universities began imposing what some called political litmus tests on faculty hiring and tenure decisions in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Some saw the litmus tests as attempts to eliminate dissent against what they saw as a radical way to explain the world, grounded in critical theory.
 
The institutional neutrality camp won some major victories in North Carolina in just the past year. The UNC System adopted a policy prohibiting compelled speech, the effect of which is to prohibit public universities from requiring political statements from prospective faculty or students. And the General Assembly passed into law a requirement that UNC System schools “remain neutral, as an institution, on the political controversies of the day.”
 
But adherents to that school face a challenging question: Should institutional neutrality, which they’ve championed, apply to Hamas’s attack and the student/faculty response to it? A blunter way to put it is, We told you for the past three years to keep out of controversies and instead champion diversity of thought, but why won’t you now condemn your campus’s reaction to a terror attack?
 
Implicit in the question is where, if anywhere, should universities draw the line between acceptable ideas and unacceptable ideas. Surely a line must exist: No reasonable person would suggest that, say, a white supremacist should teach an African American studies class.
 
But should a Hamas sympathizer – someone students may credibly view as antisemitic – teach a class on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? Probably not, but how does a university police that – by checking Twitter statements? Sending out a faculty survey?
 
This narrow question alone presents two extraordinarily challenging issues – where to draw the line, and then how to operationalize that line.
 
Perceived Double Standards
 
The next friction point is a natural outgrowth of what’s happened between May 25, 2020, and October 7, 2023.
 
Universities were quick to speak out after George Floyd’s death and on other related controversies, and again after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. But after the October 7 attack, university responses were fewer and more equivocal.
 
Some university leaders may argue – credibly – that the difference stems from the push for institutional neutrality and diversity of thought that’s played out in recent years.
 
Regardless of those facts, though, some look at the different reactions and accuse universities of a double standard. You’ll come out forcefully after one tragedy, but not after this one, which happens to involve the massacre of Jews?
 
Whether one views that reaction as fair or not doesn’t really matter – it’s a reaction that exists and has been communicated forcefully in some corners.
 
The only real options for universities facing such pushback is to issue statements in line with what was said after George Floyd’s death and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, or to withhold such statements and point to a new commitment to neutrality.
 
The first option continues the precedent of commenting on major international events that may not have a direct tie to the university – the very practice that invited consternation in the first place. The second option invites accusations of a double standard.
 
Either option will anger people.
 
As we said at the beginning, these are seemingly intractable tension points. Just because a solution doesn’t readily present itself, though, doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk about it. In fact, a sober analysis of the landscape is the first step in forming an opinion on the best path forward.