To fight antisemitism on campuses, we must restrict speech

By Claire O. Finkelstein,

The testimony of three university presidents before a House committee last week provoked outrage after they suggested that calls on their campuses for Jewish genocide might not have violated their schools’ free speech policies. One of them, Liz Magill, was forced to step down on Saturday as president of the University of Pennsylvania, where I am a faculty member.

But their statements shouldn’t have come as a surprise. Congress could have assembled two dozen university presidents and likely would have received the same answer from each of them.

This is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses. As a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech — even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities. With the dramatic rise in antisemitism, we are discovering that this is a mistake: Antisemitism — and other forms of hate — cannot be fought on university campuses without restricting poisonous speech that targets Jews and other minorities.

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