by FIRE
Tonight, University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill signaled that one of our nation’s most prestigious institutions is willing to abandon its commitment to freedom of expression.
“For decades, under multiple Penn presidents and consistent with most universities, Penn’s policies have been guided by the Constitution and the law,” explained Magill in a video posted to X. But now, she continued, the university “must initiate a serious and careful look at our policies,” a process to start “immediately.”
This is a deeply troubling, profoundly counterproductive response to yesterday’s congressional hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Were Penn to retreat from the robust protection of expressive rights, university administrators would make inevitably political decisions about who may speak and what may be said on campus. Such a result would undoubtedly compromise the knowledge-generating process free expression enables and for which universities exist.
To be clear: Universities will not enforce a rule against “calls for genocide” in the way elected officials calling for President Magill’s resignation think they will. Dissenting and unpopular speech — whether pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian, conservative or liberal — will be silenced.
President Magill suggests an institutional willingness to abandon free expression altogether. This will not end well.
Conservatives like Rep. Elise Stefanik should ask themselves: Do you honestly believe this rule won’t be weaponized to ban an Israeli cabinet official from speaking at Penn? An Israeli Defense Force soldier?
The power to censor always invites abuse and never stays cabined.
FIRE was founded in the wake of the infamous 1993 “Water Buffalo” incident at Penn. In that case, Israeli-born Jewish student Eden Jacobowitz was charged with harassment for shouting “Shut up, you water buffalo” at a group of rowdy sorority students outside his dorm room window. The sorority students were black, and the argument was that “water buffalo” was a racial epithet.
But it was not. Jacobowitz, who speaks Hebrew, explained that water buffalo is a rough English translation of “behema,” a Hebrew slang term for a loud, rowdy person. The story captured headlines, and Penn was widely condemned for its persecution of Jacobowitz.
FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors, a history professor at Penn, helped advise Jacobowitz. The charges were eventually dropped and the story would go on to serve as the opening chapter of “The Shadow University: The Betrayal Of Liberty On America’s Campuses” — the book that launched FIRE.
Over the years, Kors and FIRE helped Penn get past the water buffalo debacle. The school reformed all of its speech codes and was one of the first universities to earn FIRE’s highest, “green light” rating for speech-protective policies.
But in recent years, Penn has backtracked. It’s no longer a green light school. It adopted new harassment policies that are ripe for abuse. And what free speech and academic freedom protections remain, it doesn’t consistently follow.
Now President Magill suggests an institutional willingness to abandon free expression altogether.
This will not end well. Vesting administrators like Magill with more power to police speech will result in more Jacobowitzes. The intended targets for these codes will not be the actual casualties — and Penn students, faculty, alumni, and donors will come to regret the day they ever entrusted campus bureaucrats with the power to police speech on campus.
For FIRE’s statement on testimony by Magill and the presidents of Harvard and MIT before the House Committee on Education & the Workforce, see: “FIRE to Congress, university presidents: Don’t expand censorship. End it.”
Discover more from Vermont Daily Chronicle
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
Categories: Education, Media, National/International News, Society & Culture
Sorry but I don’t get it. Calls for the genocide of Jews and Israel and support for Nazi era tactics to achieve this isn’t the exercise of free speech. To insist that Jewish students or staff need to accept being subjected to this isn’t the support of free speech; it’s the support of overt antisemitism. If it wouldn’t be ok to call for the genocide of other groups such as blacks or gays, to accept this when only Jews are targeted in the name of “free speech “ is disingenuous.
Good argument. Thank you. Maybe in woke terms, Israelis and Jews are viewed as oppressors which allows calls for resistance, even genocide. This ends up repeating all the detestable assertions supporting antisemitism.
Ed, it is, literally, Bolshevic tactics. If any other ethnic group was referred to in such terms, there would be awful trouble over it.
Scott, so true. Reading about how Jews in certain cities have adapted to this new danger by avoiding certain places, certain ways of speaking and clothing, it is also like 1933 Germany all over again.
What is really the problem is the complete inability to differentiate between good behavior, rhetoric, bad behavior and illegal. I think, as heinous as this sounds, that I am glad to know just exactly how many people are antisemitic by their speech and protests. They have the Constitutional right to say what they like, within some limits… which have been well defined and argued… and should be “allowed: to say it, heck they have the right to say it. Because now I know how they think. And sadly, when you confront some of these folks with facts, they realize what they have been saying was not well informed or thought out and many display the classic signs of regret-facial expressions being the most obvious.
Folks, they have the right to say what they like… either you understand that sometimes this is very difficult to hear and tolerate and you are offended, or you suppress their rights and now you have an oppressive tyrannical situation.
I have publicly said this many times, but I served 13 years in the US Army and I will still defend your right to say things that I find personally reprehensible. We must have a standard that follows our Constitution.
Our civility is a very thin veneer and never more fragile than right now. We are so close to the flashpoint that we need to be reminded of the rules. Should people call for the destruction of an entity/state/race in its entirety? Of course not. Should we call upon their better nature and judgement to change their behavior and words? Of course we should. Should we gag them, remove them and cancel them because we don’t like what they say, of course we should NOT. We should be monitoring them closely. We should engage in civil discourse. Sometimes that doesn’t end well. And then their behavior should be held accountable. But if all we do is surround them with law enforcement so that while they are on the street with their placards and chanting their slogans, they are confined “for their safety” by law enforcement. (see Triggernometry’s recent interviews of UK protests). Yes, it kept everyone “safe” but if violates their free speech. In effect, they were temporarily incarcerated by the ring of law enforcement officers. Indeed, no violence occurred. But neither did free speech.
I don’t have all the answers and neither do a lot of folks but we need to be careful of not falling into the trap of safety vs freedom.
This is just my own opinion, and you are free to disagree and engage in discourse should you choose.