President Magill: Giving admins even more power over free speech at Penn is a terrible idea

For 50 years a segment of the higher ed community has wanted colleges to ditch free speech. Don’t let them win

University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill testifies at congressional hearing on campus antisemitism

So, slow news week for free speech on campus this week, huh?

On Tuesday, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing titled, “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Three university presidents testified: Harvard’s Claudine Gay, MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, and Penn’s Liz Magill.

The university leaders were grilled by committee members about their responses to antisemitism on campus, a long-running problem given particular urgency after October 7. 

At the hearing, Rep. Elise Stefanik asked, among other pointed questions, whether students are disciplined for calling for the murder of Jews (raising specifically the phrase “from the river to the sea” and chants referencing “intifada”). 

In a nutshell, the presidents gave answers that were broadly unsatisfying to a wide range of political stakeholders.

This is in part because, with only a few exceptions, elite universities' free speech principles and policies have been abysmal for a long time now. In fact, those policies have been so weak that when the presidents tried to use free speech as a bulwark during that hearing, all they had to protect them was a crochet washcloth: Small, flimsy, and full of holes. 

Indeed, it was quite rich to see the presidents of Harvard and Penn — the two schools that very much earned their DEAD LAST place in FIRE’s 2024 Campus Free Speech Rankings  — now present themselves as consistent champions of free speech. As Greg predicted in October: 

While I appreciate and encourage [Harvard and other presidents’] newfound emphasis on freedom of speech, it will take years for universities to demonstrate a genuine change, given their history of inconsistency. Given what I’ve seen in my two decades doing this work, I suspect that they might contradict themselves again in just a few months. I truly hope to be proven wrong.

The responses during the hearing were also unsatisfying because these university presidents were shockingly incapable of explaining the deeper ideas behind a principled defense of free speech, and articulating why censorship makes so many things so much worse for minority viewpoints.

President Magill then posted a video to X suggesting that Penn will rethink its commitment to free expression, justified by antisemitism proliferating in a way “not seen in years.” (The sad truth is that antisemitism is not new, and restraining freedom will not reduce it. Indeed, censorship tends to increase radicalization. See the excerpt from Greg and Rikki Schlott’s new book “The Canceling of the American Mind” published in Persuasion, “The Radicalization of the American Mind.” American Jews largely exist because they fled antisemitism elsewhere, drawn by the promises of freedom that Penn President Magill proposes eroding.)

One important point Greg and Rikki tried to make in “Canceling” is that changing university policies to deviate further from First Amendment norms is exactly what the “anti-free speech movement” has wanted for decades. The goal has been to establish and enforce a double standard whereby speech favored by the political and ideological majority is protected, and dissenting or subversive speech is met with censorship. And as you can see from FIRE’s work, the plan so far has been depressingly successful! We need to take that power away from administrators, not increase it — and dissenters of all stripes should fight this power grab.

Here are some important resources and statements to check out about this fast-moving story, from FIRE and elsewhere:

• FIRE Legal Director Will Creeley offers one of our best resources to explain what speech is protected on campus in As campuses reel, a reminder of the First Amendment’s boundaries (Nov. 3)

• Ilya Shaprio’s Where Free Speech Ends and Lawbreaking Begins in the Free Press (Greg disagrees with Ilya on what cancel culture is, but probably a bit less than Ilya thinks) (Nov. 27)

• Also in the Free Press, Even Antisemites Deserve Free Speech, from FIRE senior fellow Nadine Strossen and former FIRE fellow Pamela Paresky (Oct. 18)

• In New York magazine, Jonathan Chait writes The College Presidents Were Right About Campus Antisemitism: Schools should regulate conduct, not speech (Dec. 7)

• FIRE’s statement on President Magill’s video, Penn President Liz Magill signals profoundly misguided willingness to abandon free expression (Dec. 6)

• From FIRE’s Executive Vice President Nico Perrino, FIRE to Congress, university presidents: Don’t expand censorship. End it. (Dec. 6)

Ask yourself, what would we gain by stifling the speech that is undeniably and often genuinely offensive and antisemitic? One might argue we’d stifle a hostile environment for Jewish students by cutting down on threats, intimidation, vandalism, or stalking — but that misses the point that none of that behavior is protected, nor should it be. We can punish that conduct without restricting speech.

Banning expression that we find offensive will only leave us with a false sense that things are better and healthier on campus than they actually are. As Greg has written many times, forcing hate speech underground by banning it is like taking Xanax for syphilis: You may briefly feel better about your horrible disease, but your sickness will only get worse.

Censoring biased speech would create a false sense of everything being fine on campus rather than an illiberal, sometimes unhinged mess. You are generally NOT safer for knowing LESS about what people really think — especially if what people really think is scary, misinformed, or even potentially dangerous. 

And the absolute worst thing that could come out of this crisis is an excuse to give administrators EVEN MORE power over free speech than they already have. 

Conservatives clamoring for greater speech restrictions on campus should remind themselves what administrators have done with that power over the past several decades. Supporters of Israel should consider what would happen to that support on campus if we normalize and codify students getting in trouble for pro-Palestinian speech. And in an environment where antisemitism is a problem, introducing the ability to suppress ideas will inevitably be turned against Jews, either directly or indirectly, as has happened in the past. Minority group rights are always defended by respecting the rights of individuals, not by giving further power to the already powerful (in this case, campus administrators).

True liberals should speak up for free speech now or risk having to forever hold their peace. And progressives who are now being reminded that their ox can be gored for speech as well (perhaps by Greg’s recent article in The Atlantic, “The Latest Victims of the Free-Speech Crisis”) should finally understand that the power to censor will not always be granted to people who agree with them.

Of course, there are far more principled reasons to believe in free speech than self interest, but in a time of genuine threat to free speech, it’ll do.

SHOTS FOR THE ROAD

After the week we’ve had, I think we’ve earned two shots — don’t you?

Shot One: The Wall Street Journal just named “The Canceling of the American Mind” one of the best politics books of 2023! 

Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s “The Canceling of the American Mind” catalogs the rise of cancel culture from 2014 to the present. Like political correctness before it, the authors show, cancel culture can look comical or absurd but is in fact a menacing form of groupthink that maligns the innocent. Among the most bracing of the authors’ conclusions: McCarthyism—the fear-based mania for rooting out real and imagined Communists in the late 1940s and ’50s—destroyed about half as many careers as present-day cancel culture has claimed over the past nine years. 

(The brief review is critical of my and Rikki Schlott’s take on book banning, but for more on that topic, definitely check out FIRE’s FAQ on libraries, bookstores, and free speech. I think you'll find our take more reasonable than the review implies.)

If you haven’t picked up a copy of “Canceling” for yourself or your loved ones yet, ‘tis the season! In the immortal words of David Lee Roth, “If you like it, tell a friend. If you hate it, tell an enemy!”

Shot Two: I will be the first interview guest on this week’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher! Be sure to tune in to HBO Friday, December 8 at 10 pm Eastern/7 pm Pacific. Not sure what we might end up discussing… but we’ll think of something!