In 2016, during a visit to the University of Virginia, novelist Salman Rushdie was asked whether colleges should restrict racist or discriminatory speech. Rushdie didn’t waver in his answer: no.
“It’s a very dangerous path for people to take to use censorship as a way of defending minorities, because it will backfire,” Rushdie warned. “It always has.”
That’s what happened last week at my alma mater, Columbia University, which called in police officers to clear protesters from a pro-Palestinian encampment; more than 100 Columbia and Barnard students were arrested and suspended by their schools, which evicted them from their dormitories.
The previous day, Columbia President Minouche Shafik told a congressional hearing that several commonly heard protest chants — including “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — threatened the safety of Jews and might warrant disciplinary action.
Vowing to continue their campaign, the student protesters condemned Shafik for censoring their statements. But they’re the same demographic that has demanded restrictions on campus speech, on the grounds that — yes — it threatens the safety of minorities and other vulnerable populations.
And our universities are listening. At Northwestern, officials charged that a communication professor who questioned Title IX rules around sexual assault was endangering women. An art historian at Hamline University who showed images of the Prophet Muhammad in class was denounced by her bosses for supposedly injuring Muslims. And a Harvard biologist who insisted that sex is a binary was pushed out of her job because her views were deemed “transphobic and harmful.”
Got it? When speech offends vulnerable populations, the argument goes, we need to penalize it. Over the past decade, that has become a political mantra for many members of the student Left. And now, just as Salman Rushdie predicted, it has been turned against them.
“Students and faculty must feel safe,” right-wing Congresswoman Virginia Foxx, the committee chairwoman, told Shafik, sounding for all the world like a left-leaning campus demonstrator. “This is all about the role of the university in . . . allowing the students to get a good education, and they’re not going to be able to do that if they’re distracted for fear of their lives.”
Let’s be clear: universities must prevent intimidation, harassment, and any direct threat of physical violence. But many campus activists have imagined speech as violence. And our students will not get a good education if we try to insulate them from it, all in the guise of guarding their safety.
Writing in the Wall Street Journal before her congressional appearance, Shafik correctly declared that “students and faculty should feel unconstrained in developing their opinions.” But the next day, on Capitol Hill, she said that some opinions were so dangerous — and made people feel so unsafe — that the university needed to constrain them.
You can’t have a real university — or a real democracy — on those terms. None of us are wise enough to know which protest chants are so harmful that we need to censor them. And once we grab hold of that weapon, it will eventually be weaponized against us.
I take no pleasure in the fact student protesters are now being hoisted on their own censorship petards. But I’m proud that the Columbia Daily Spectator — where I served as editor-in-chief four decades ago — editorialized against the police arrests on campus and in favor of free speech. The allegedly antisemitic rhetoric that Shafik targeted “is not making anyone feel unsafe — feeling uncomfortable is not the same as being unsafe,” the Spectator asserted.
That’s exactly right. I only hope that our students — and our university leaders — will remember it the next time a voice on campus is accused of making a comment that offends one group or another. Of course, we should all raise our own voices against speech we see as racist or antisemitic. But if we imagine it as a violent threat to somebody’s life — and if we try to eliminate it for that reason — free speech will become a dead letter.
And if you need any more reminders of that, listen to Salman Rushdie. He was nearly killed in 2022 by a knife-wielding attacker who was inspired by hateful Islamist rhetoric. But Rushdie continues to insist that speech must be protected, especially from “progressive voices” who seek to restrict it.
“To support censorship in theory on behalf of vulnerable groups is a very slippery slope,” Rushdie told “60 Minutes” last week. “It can lead to the opposite of what you want.” At Columbia, it just did.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania.
At Columbia, the censors get censored
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22.04.2024
In 2016, during a visit to the University of Virginia, novelist Salman Rushdie was asked whether colleges should restrict racist or discriminatory speech. Rushdie didn’t waver in his answer: no.
“It’s a very dangerous path for people to take to use censorship as a way of defending minorities, because it will backfire,” Rushdie warned. “It always has.”
That’s what happened last week at my alma mater, Columbia University, which called in police officers to clear protesters from a pro-Palestinian encampment; more than 100 Columbia and Barnard students were arrested and suspended by their schools, which evicted them from their dormitories.
The previous day, Columbia President Minouche Shafik told a congressional hearing that several commonly heard protest chants — including “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — threatened the safety of Jews and might warrant disciplinary action.
Vowing to continue their campaign, the student protesters condemned Shafik for censoring their statements. But they’re the same demographic that has demanded restrictions on campus speech, on the grounds that — yes — it threatens the........
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