‘Hypocrisy projection,’ civil disobedience at Columbia and beyond, and how Texas got it wrong

Eight key things to understand about the cacophony on campus

University of Texas at Austin student arrested during campus protests

Hypocrisy projection: When someone who generally only cares about the free speech rights of people they agree with asserts that everybody ELSE is a hypocrite, usually without actually bothering to check if their opponent has, in fact, been consistent.

In my book with Rikki Schlott, “The Canceling of the American Mind,” we coined the term “hypocrisy projection” to describe the tactic of critics who look to dismiss people or organizations (like FIRE) by accusing them of being inconsistent in their principles. The irony, of course, is that the accusers themselves tend to lack consistency, and they use this tactic to divert attention away from their own unprincipled behavior.

As campuses continue to be plagued with protests and unrest in response to the October 7 attacks on Israel and the war in Gaza that followed, there’s a ton of hypocrisy projection going on. We’ll get into that in a moment, but first we want to make a few other important points very clear.

1. The situation on campus for free speech has been bad for a long time. 

If you’re tired of hearing it, believe me, I’m tired of saying it — but it needs to be said, over and over, until people finally get it and start doing something to fix it.

I’ve been fighting for free speech on campus since I started at FIRE in 2001. Indeed, FIRE was founded in response to a growing free speech crisis in higher education, and that was in 1999! The situation was worse than I thought back when I started, and it has reached crisis level over the past decade.

Remember:

• The data consistently shows campus free speech was in peril in 2018, and it has only gotten worse since then.

• 2023 was the worst year on record for campus deplatforming — and 2024 is on track to beat it.

• Event disruptions and deplatforming attempts have primarily and increasingly come from the left since 2018.

• Since 2020, there have been 650 attempts to professionally sanction scholars for speech that is — or at public colleges and universities would be — protected by the First Amendment. 

• 1 in 6 professors report having been disciplined or threatened with discipline for their speech, and a third report having been pressured by colleagues to avoid researching controversial topics.

• A nearly insurmountable series of political and ideological hurdles prevent dissenting students and academics from entering or succeeding in academia — a phenomenon Rikki and I call “The Conformity Gauntlet.”

But these facts are often ignored by the people who seem to think the free speech crisis only began with October 7. I wrote a little about this for The Atlantic and in a piece for ERI called “The selective memory of the 'New McCarthyism' crowd.”

2. The situation for free speech has been particularly bad since October 7.

FIRE has recorded almost 90 deplatforming attempts involving controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict since October 7 — 40 in the last three months of 2023 and already another 49 this year. Prior to this date, FIRE recorded 15 deplatforming attempts involving a controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2023, and 12 of these attempts (75%) targeted a Palestinian Literary Festival at the University of Pennsylvania that had invited a number of speakers to campus.

We’ve also witnessed nearly 70 attempts to professionally sanction scholars for expressing controversial views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The targeted scholars range from Shai Davidai, who referred to pro-Palestinian student groups as “pro-terror" and who Columbia University barred from speaking, citing safety concerns, to Jodi Dean, who was removed from the classroom by Hobart and William Smith Colleges after writing an article claiming Israel was waging a “genocidal war on Palestine.”

More than 100 students and student groups since October 7 have faced sanction attempts for expression related to the conflict. Students for Justice in Palestine has been the target of a number of these incidents, including at Brandeis University, where it was derecognized for comments made by the national organization. These comments also led Florida Governor Ron DeSantis along with State University System of Florida chancellor Ray Rodrigues to order the presidents of each state university to do the same at their campuses.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott specifically named Students for Justice in Palestine in a March 27 executive order requiring Texas colleges to revise speech policies to combat antisemitism — using a state-provided definition of anti-Semitism. This order creates two problems, both of which we called out. First, naming specific groups creates a chilling effect on their members and creates the perception that they will be subjected to unusual scrutiny. Two, the definition of anti-Semitism Texas is using is exceptionally broad and would include protected political speech, including criticism of Israeli policy.

3. We’ve defended pro-Palestinian students throughout this whole mess — and long beforehand.

Anyone claiming FIRE has only focused on one side of this issue is being willfully blind.

• At Rockland Community College, we defended a student who was suspended for shouting “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” at a pro-Israel gathering.

• We defended a group at the University of Rochester who wanted to use the same slogan. 

• We defended a Brooklyn College student forced to remove signs from her studio door  that said “Zionism is Fascism” and “Free Palestine.”

• We defended a Ramapo College professor who was investigated by her administration for pro-Palestinian social media posts.

• We defended a Muslim student group at Queens College after the group’s Instagram posts questioning reports related to Hamas’ October 7 attack on Israel led the university to say it would cooperate with the NYPD in an investigation.

• We defended Students for Justice in Palestine groups in Florida after the governor threatened to de-recognize them statewide.

• We investigated the University of Vermont’s excuses for forcing a pro-Palestinian event online, and then we criticized the school when the evidence didn’t justify its actions. 

• We wrote to Rutgers University twice — once asking it to reject calls to cancel an event discussing Gaza and settler colonialism, and again to support the rights of pro-Palestinian speakers and faculty. 

• We wrote to New York University’s law school to criticize its investigation of a student who said Israel was to blame for the October 7 attacks.

• We questioned the cancellation of a pro-Palestinian art exhibit at Indiana University. 

There are many more cases we could talk about, and even more cases we can’t talk about because we have promised the students or faculty confidentiality. None of this is new, either. We have consistently defended pro-Palestinian voices for our entire existence.

4. Pro-Palestinian students have been responsible for an overwhelming amount of shoutdowns and violence since October 7.

In 2023, FIRE recorded 53 attempted event disruptions on campus — 22 of which failed, and 31 that resulted in substantial event disruptions, where a speaker was successfully shouted down or forced to relocate to finish their remarks. Thirteen of these disruptions involved a controversy over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and most of them occurred after October 7.

As of April 12, FIRE has already recorded 30 event disruptions in 2024 — 19 attempted, 11 successful. Twenty-seven of them involved controversies regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That’s already more than double the total number of disruptions in all of 2023.

Moreover, pro-Palestinian protesters are responsible for every single attempted and successful disruption we have seen related to the Israel-Palestinian conflict in 2024.

The successful event disruptions include the following incidents, all of which required campus police or security to escort speakers off-campus:

• Ian Haworth, a staunch supporter of Israel, at the University of Kentucky was heckled and shouted down by student protestors to the point that his speech was suspended so that campus police could remove the protesters from the venue. The protesters then pulled a fire alarm once Haworth resumed his remarks. Haworth was then escorted off campus.

• Asaf Peer, a physics professor at Bar Ilan University in Israel, was rushed off the campus of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, by campus police after his invited talk on black holes was disrupted by pro-Palestinian student protesters. Protesters entered the room with banners and flags and began shouting him down, during which campus police told Peer that they could not remove the protesters from the venue because doing so would infringe the protesters’ free speech rights. (It should go without saying that the police are mistaken about the law.)

• A Presidential Town Hall at Rutgers was disrupted before it could even begin after pro-Palestinian student protesters began shouting over the university president and the other students in attendance. University police escorted the president and all Jewish students in attendance out.

And then there are incidents of violence, unrest, and other violations of campus conduct. Just this past week we’ve seen:

• Reports of Jewish students at Columbia being harassed and attacked.

• A Yale University student reportedly suffered an eye injury during a protest. It is unclear whether the injury was intentional, but it is a direct result of the chaos and unrest.

• At the same Yale protest, protesters formed a human chain to block students’ movement. Remember: obstructing people’s movement implies a threat of assault if those people try to break through it.

• Faculty members at Columbia formed a human chain to keep journalists out of the encampment — which, again, implies a threat.

• Incidents at NYU where students and faculty formed a human barrier to block police from arresting protestors, and bottles and a chair were thrown at police who were trying to disburse them. 

• Protesters at Columbia linked arms and began shouting, “There is a Zionist in the camp,” when a Jewish student entered the encampment, forcing the student out.

• Protestors at Emory University began pushing police officers against the entryway of a campus building.*

• Protestors stormed a building at the Fashion Institute of Technology campus in New York City.*

Columbia faculty members formed a chain to keep journalists out of the encampment. Image by Zach Kessel.

The situation at Columbia has become so bad that classes were moved online for the rest of the semester.

This turmoil has been happening a lot since October 7, too:

• An Israeli student at Columbia was beaten with a stick back in October. 

• A Cornell University student posted online threats to kill Jewish students and “shoot up” the university’s predominantly kosher dining hall. 

• During a rally near Tulane University’s campus in October, pro-Palestinian students attempted to burn the Israeli flag. When a pro-Israeli student attempted to pull the flag away, he was hit by another student.

• Protesters took over a university building at California State Polytechnic University, with a conflict resulting in riot police being called to the scene.

• Students, like Matan Goldstein at the University of Virginia, have allegedly been subjected to discriminatory harassment based on their Jewish identity in schools across the country. 

• An Israeli professor at University of North Carolina was assaulted by pro-Palestinian students when trying to hold an Israeli flag in front of them.

• At the University of California, Berkeley, pro-Palestinian protesters disrupted an event featuring former Israeli Defense Force member Ran Bar-Yoshafat, smashing two windows and a door, causing the police to cancel it. Four event attendees allege that the protesters physically attacked them.

This is all occurring amid a disturbing trend of intolerance of dissenting speech and tolerance for violence among college students. At Columbia, 30% of students believe violence is always, sometimes or in rare circumstances acceptable in response to disfavored speech. At Yale, it’s 29%. At NYU it’s 36%.

FIRE’s recent survey at Stanford shows that three-quarters of Stanford students believe shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is acceptable, three-fifths believe blocking other students from attending a campus speech is acceptable, and more than a third believe using physical violence to stop a campus speech is acceptable to at least some degree.

5. A lot of what we are seeing on campus right now, including tent cities, is civil disobedience.

As FIRE’s Apr. 22 statement on campus violence and arrests rightly notes, “engaging in civil disobedience may result in punishment, including arrest.” You know you’re breaking the rules, and you’re willing to suffer the consequences of that for the sake of your cause. FIRE’s statement continues:

Students occupying campus spaces in violation of reasonable, content-neutral rules risk punishment. When that punishment is viewpoint-neutral, proportional, and in keeping with past practice, it does not violate expressive rights.

Students currently camped out on school grounds should expect to face punishment, given the fact that extended campouts are almost certainly not permitted in practically any school in the country. Moreover, the same students claiming to have a right to camp out like this would likely not feel the same way if it were students with “the wrong opinions” doing so. As FIRE board member (and William Nelson Cromwell professor of politics at Princeton) Keith Whittington wrote earlier this week:

If campus officials imagine that they can accept dozens, scores, or hundreds of chanting pro-Palestinian protesters setting up tents on a campus quad, would they show the same grace toward students wearing MAGA hats engaged in the same behavior? If students in their tents were being visited and encouraged by Steve Bannon rather than Susan Sarandon, would campus officials be prepared to treat the students the same way?

And of course, to the extent that the behavior of students in the encampment violates school policies, there are even more reasons to expect disciplinary action on the part of the university.

6. Hypocrisy and hypocrisy projection are rampant on this issue.

After the October 7 attacks, schools like Stanford, Harvard, and the University of Florida released statements singing the praises of free expression and emphasizing the value of free speech on campus. I suspected this was about political convenience, and I think that’s unfortunately been borne out — as many people, including Bari Weiss and Tyler Austin Harper, have recently been commenting.

It’s also been a trip to watch people who never gave a damn about free speech before suddenly come out of the woodwork to claim that what’s happening now is actually the real free speech problem on campus. In reality, what’s going on is complicated and involves a lot of unprotected speech — harassment, true threats, and violence. 

People refusing to see that and pointing the finger at others is the gold standard of hypocrisy projection, and we’ve been seeing it for almost as long as FIRE has been around. Perhaps the crowning achievement of hypocrisy projection is in Lorraine Ali’s piece in the Los Angeles Times last year, where she describes FIRE as “​​a group that claims to advocate for free speech on college campuses — except when the speakers don’t share its political views.” As FIRE’s Nico Perrino put it on X, “Tell me you aren't familiar with [FIRE]’s work without telling me you aren't familiar with FIRE's work.”

Just take a look at the links and information provided in this very article. How is it possible we could actually agree with both sides of the Israel-Palestine conflict — not to mention the countless number of cases on all sides of every hot button issue in the U.S., which others often don’t even bother to cover?

And as could be expected, the recent chaos on campus has sent more hypocrisy projection our way. For example, Jeet Heer recently called out the “striking silence” on the matter of USC canceling its valedictorian’s commencement speech due to unspecified “safety concerns,” and on the larger pro-Palestinian cause. His implication, of course, is that free speech advocates and organizations like FIRE don’t care about a presumably pro-Palestinian activist’s speech being suppressed and, as a result, won’t comment on it. This is clearly false — as X’s Community Notes feature extensively pointed out and Jeet himself was forced to acknowledge afterward.

There’s also someone going by the handle “Law Boy,” who recently asked why there has been no commentary from FIRE on Columbia’s suspensions and arrests of protesters on their campus. Of course, people at FIRE have commented on this, in an official capacity, making the same arguments made above about content-neutral rules and civil disobedience. And of course, the goal posts were, to quote someone in the replies, “packed up and moved to Sudan” the moment this was pointed out.

In every relevant case of free speech violations, FIRE has responded — or will respond, because organizations trying to make measured, thoughtful, and informed comments on difficult issues are going to take longer than a random individual firing off a (quite often uninformed) tweet. And in many of these cases, the accusers simply duck, dive, and dodge their way out of acknowledging it.

This dynamic has gone on for years, but as our collective willingness to hear each other narrows, the frequency of hypocrisy projection increases.

7. But Texas handled this all wrong.

Texas, meanwhile, has been on the wrong track for some time, given Gov. Abbott’s executive order targeting First Amendment protected  “antisemitic phrases such as ‘from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.’”

Yesterday, that train jumped the tracks. Just as we were getting ready to publish this post, news came in about an outrageous situation coming out of the University of Texas at Austin.

A day before a protest promoted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee (one of the two groups singled out by Gov. Abbott’s order), UT Austin sent a “Notice Cancelling Planned Event,” citing the group’s statement that “we will take back our university.” 

That’s hard to square with the First Amendment or Texas law, which recognizes that the outdoor spaces of campus are traditional public forums open to protest. It’s one thing to enforce an existing time, place, or manner rule to clear out an encampment, but this was a pledge to prevent protest altogether — in a space intended for protest.

Student demonstrators were met by a phalanx of university and state police, dispatched at the direction of Gov. Abbott, who shortly made clear that he was targeting speech by saying that any student "joining in hate-filled, anti-semitic protests . . . should be expelled.”:

This led to more than 50 arrests, many for trespassing — in a public forum, mind you — including the arrest of this photojournalist who was thrown to the ground and ultimately carted off to jail:

The journalist had been livestreaming the protest and was charged with trespassing:

FIRE sent a letter to UT Austin on April 25 demanding that all remaining charges against peaceful protesters are dropped, and that the university cease any further pursuit of disciplinary sanctions against them.

And at the University of Texas, San Antonio, peaceful demonstrators report that they were told not to chant in Arabic or use phrases like “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — one of the phrases Gov. Abbott singled out in his executive order. The university “disputed” those claims, but said “the university will not tolerate antisemitic expression.” If accurate, prohibiting students from chanting — in any language — something based on its content violates the First Amendment.

8. We need to dismantle certainty culture on campus.

Universities need to take a long hard look at the “anti-debate” certainty culture they’ve created, in which issues are dealt with by students locking arms, shouting others down, and sometimes even resorting to violence rather than talking to one another.

That’s a terrible sign for the search for truth and cultivating habits people need in a democratic society. It’s also a terrible look for an institution whose primary purpose is cultivating precisely those values and habits in its student body.

And lest anyone accuse me or FIRE of doing nothing but complaining and pointing fingers, we’ve made a lot of suggestions for how colleges and universities can change course, beginning with “FIRE’s 10 common-sense reforms for colleges and universities,” and more:

• Adopting institutional neutrality.

• Eliminating political litmus tests.

• Cutting administrative bloat.

• “Five ways university presidents can prove their commitment to free speech.”

• “How Donors Can Help Fix Our Broken Campuses.”

• “More big ideas for reforming higher ed.”

The solutions are right there. The only thing that’s missing is the collective will to act on the problem.

In the meantime, if you are a student or faculty member punished for protected speech, contact FIRE.

*UPDATE, Apr. 26: New examples have been added to the section on the turmoil on campus since Oct. 7. More may be added as they occur.

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

I know I point out problems a lot, but don’t say I’m all doom and gloom! This week I’m thrilled to announce an important free speech victory for FIRE’s litigation team:

After their mayor silenced them for criticizing her during city council meetings, four Eastpointe, Michigan residents sued their city with FIRE’s help — and won.