The Irony of Conservatives Attacking Universities for Policies Conservatives Pushed on Them

[Image courtesy wayhomestudio on Freepik]

Recently the news has been full of stories about politicians being outraged on behalf of Jews over the way universities are tolerating antisemitism. The top headline in the New York Times on the day I am writing this is, "As Fury Erupts Over Campus Antisemitism, Conservatives Sieze the Moment." Subtitle? "Republicans have been attacking elite universities for years. After a tense Congressional hearing last week, many on the left are joining them."

This framing is extremely misleading. As someone who teaches at a large state university, let me explain.

With war raging between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, many people have been protesting on behalf of Israelis and Jews, and Palestinians and Muslims, which is fine. There's also been a huge rise in hate speech directed at people on both sides, which is not. Some of this is taking place on college campuses--and college administrations have been doing little if anything to stop it, this is true. Do you want to know why?

The answer is MAGA. 

It's time for a little history! Do you remember Milo Yiannopoulos? Those of us who were at universities in 2015-17 surely do. Yiannopoulos is a rightwing provocateur, who first became famous as an internet troll encouraging harassment of feminist gamers in the hatefest known as Gamergate. Then, in 2015, he started a whirlwind tour of college campuses which he titled The Dangerous Faggot Tour. He visited campuses to hold hate rallies, attacking trans people, Muslims, feminists, antiracists, and all "social justice warriors." He'd mock individuals and groups, cracking jokes, and using slur after slur, while the paying audience of area fans howled. The tour was half Nuremberg rally, half standup comedy, and all evil. And it was heralded as the new wave of youthful conservatism: the "alt-right."

Yiannopoulos coordinated the whole thing with national conservative organizations. They astroturfed, recruiting students on campuses and filing the paperwork for them to register as campus organizations, then giving them piles of money to pay Yiannopoulos to come talk. And they made sure everyone knew Yiananopoulos was coming to town. Their aim was classic trolling: to provoke a response, then present that response as their opponents being totally unreasonable, an outrage demanding correction. So students on a given campus would hear that Yiannopoulos was coming, and read about the slur-filled, hateful things he'd said elsewhere, and try to stop the campus from hosting a terrible person to come say terrible things. Then the alt-right networks affiliated with Yiannopoulos would flood Republican state legislative representatives with emails and calls about how thought-policing liberal campuses were trying to cancel conservative speakers, and those representatives would start holding hearings and drafting legislation and threatening campus administrators.

In fact, few campus administrations are willing to ban speakers. Yiannopoulos was usually allowed to come speak. So students who thought hate speech was terrible would come protest. And the alt-right network would spring into action again, saying that the brainwashed socialist student bodies full of fragile snowflakes couldn't bear to hear ideas they had been trained to reject, and were drowning out free speech. And the legislatures would be given more ammunition to frame universities as intolerant leftist indoctrination factories that must be reined in. 

Here is how that played out at my own university. A campus chapter of Turning Point USA was started by outside organizers who got a small handful of students to agree to submit the paperwork handed to them and invite Yiannopoulos to campus. A modest number of students on the left marched to the chancellor's office and demanded Yiannopoulos not be allowed to come, providing lots of evidence of his hate speech. The chancellor told them he was sympathetic, but (as Republican legislators were growling) that the paramount value of a college campus had to be free speech. Yiannopoulos showed up in December 2016. A huge crowd of fans from all over the state paid for tickets and flooded onto campus. A small number of protesting students attended the talk, carrying signs. One of them was a young trans woman, a first-year student. Yiannopoulos had done his oppo research, and knew who she was. He proceeded to attack her using her deadname, misgendering her, mocking her appearance, and presenting her as a predator, while the crowd of transphobic fans stared, jostled, and jeered her. He called her a "tr**y." And then he said the proof that she had failed in her transition and was obviously a man was that as a faggot, he'd still bang her. 

It was awful. It was not just hate speech--it was incitement that threatened her safety, and it was sexual harassment. The student left that night and never returned to campus. 

So, what happened in the aftermath? Was it the drafting of prohibitions on hate speech? No--quite the opposite. The gerrymandered, Republican-controlled state legislature framed Yiannopoulos as the victim, passed a bill framing state university campuses as failing to protect free speech adequately, and made it against state law for people to bring protest signs to state university talks, or to boo or interrupt a speaker. Students who do so are to be punished, and students who do so three times expelled. And that is the current state law.

The alt-right trolls and MAGA crowd were sizzling with energy as Yiannopoulos toured the nation. They were going to punish the universities and they were thrilled. And Yiannopoulos was just one example of the hate-trolling phenomenon in action. Personally, from 2015 until the pandemic hit, I had to deal with not just actual college students hate-taking my classes, but more often, with people who weren't even students just showing up in my large sociology lecture class, raising their hands to ask provocative questions barely related to course content, and bringing a posse of friends with cellphones to videorecord the encounters. Their apparent hope was to get me to lecture them angrily or tell them to leave, so they could have videoed "proof of campus indoctrination" to use as propaganda (and to try to get me and professors like me fired for violating students' rights by censoring free speech). I managed to handle these situations, but it was always stressful, because I really wanted these incidents not to poison the class atmosphere and stifle the actual enrolled students' class discussions. 

Meanwhile, campus administration was not unconcerned with students' feelings of safety and morale--but it was my impression they were more concerned with the legislature's cutting the university budget year after year, and castigating the university for failing to do enough to protect free speech. So my university administration responded by launching a big campaign to encourage students to value free speech--as if they didn't already do that! They did. It's just that there are always limits to free speech. You don't have a right to incite violence, for example, or to defame people. And in much of the world, you don't have a right to spew hate speech.

But my university is a state university, meaning it is a government entity. And as such, it has been prohibited from enacting a ban on hate speech by the state supreme court, as this was held to violate free speech rights. Only if the speech targets a particular person and seems likely to incite violence is it not protected. 

Does this sound familiar to you? If you followed the news about the Congressional grilling of Ivy League college leaders, it should. Because it is exactly what those administrators said.

At the Congressional hearing, the administrators were interrogated by Republicans including "MAGA firebrand Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY)" about what they would do if a student on campus said that they supported the genocide of Jews. And the university leaders told those politicians exactly what, in recent years, conservative politicians have demanded. They said it depended on the context. If it was targeted at an individual and rose to the level of severe harassment, it would be banned. But if it wasn't targeted in this way, it was abhorrent, but protected as free speech. 

MAGA politicians had a field day. They demanded that the Ivy League leaders stop equivocating and declare, yes or no, did they tolerate a person calling for the genocide of Jews. And instead of berating supposedly liberal college presidents for censoring free speech, they attacked them as tolerating hate due to "wokeness". “What I’m describing is a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left,” said Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), adding, “Institutional antisemitism and hate are among the poison fruits of your institution’s cultures.”

This is a fine example of MAGA trolling. Spend years attacking universities for supposed censorship because university administrators are queasy about (but largely permit) hate speech directed at marginalized groups. Then attack them as hateful for doing exactly what you told them to do. The left is terrible because it cancels speech it doesn't like! Oh wait, no, the left is terrible because it tolerates hate speech!

And the reporting saying that the left is just now waking up to the dangers of campuses tolerating hate speech? It's ridiculous. Campuses have endured many years of students being portrayed by cultural conservatives as oversensitive socialist hothouse flowers who demand safe spaces and censor free speech. The left has not been tolerant of or complacent about the dangers of hate speech, until it was just now made to see the problem by rightwing politicians. That is a really bizarre claim. 

The American right has spent the years since 2016 trying to make college campuses like today's X/Twitter: places where hate speech is allowed to run wild, cherished as the very emblem of American freedom. And they've been very successful. Universities like Harvard and MIT are not state institutions, unlike my university. They can make their own rules for civility in speech by campus members. But you heard their heads give testimony to Congress: they allow hate speech unless it is targeted at a particular individual and is considered likely to incite violence. Colleges allow people to say, "I believe the genocide of Jews is a good thing" all they like, so long as they don't follow some individual student around with their fists raised, repeating it over and over.

Now, if this sudden interest in antisemitism and stated revulsion at hate speech by MAGA politicians awakens people on the right to how negative it is for hate speech to be protected on college campuses. . . well, I'm all for it. Because it is not the left that is waking up to the reality that this is a negative situation.

Let me give you one example of what tolerating hate speech looks like from my campus, this time related to antisemitism instead of transphobia. In 2019, an incident took place involving a student. He wasn't actually a student of mine, but he had attended my large lecture class for a few weeks, until he raised his hand and made a provocative statement about Black men being morally deficient in failing to be responsible fathers to their children, and challenged me for not stating so myself in my lecture. After that, I did some detective work with my TA and found he wasn't actually enrolled in my class, so I spoke with him at a later time and told him that as he had not applied to audit the class, he should not be attending. But this background makes it clear that trolling was his leisure activity. 

A month later, there was a student group tabling outside the library, handing out information about tours of Israel. The student who made the comment about Black fathers showed up, carrying a homemade sign featuring a large swastika, and stood in front of the table of Jewish students. One of them called campus police. The police asked the student with the swastika sign if he would like to leave, and he said no, so the police informed him that he should stay 20 feet away from the Jewish student's table, and went to the table and said the student had a free speech right to hold up his swastika sign. The Jewish students were understandably upset, as the swastika is a symbol under which genocide was committed against Jews. After a while, one of the students at the table ran over, grabbed the swastika sign, and ran away tearing it up. The police chased her, caught her, and handcuffed her. She was arrested and charged with destroying the property of the antisemitic student, and fined $300 by my university. 

Did Republicans in the state legislature protest this when it made the news? Not in the least. 

And, after a break for the pandemic, this pattern of trolling hate-provocation has continued. For many weeks this semester, provocateurs have come to my university campus to stand around holding up homophobic and transphobic signs, shouting at students who voiced disapproval as they passed by, using slurs and calling them groomers. They came with small bands of fellow haters who had their phones out, videoing any student who responded to the provocation, hoping to capture footage they could use to make social media content framing the students as intolerant, dangerous, hysterical, etc. etc. Students called campus police, who did nothing but stand there, protecting the trolls' sacred right to hate speech. 

Being called slurs and being videoed really upset some students and made them feel unsafe. But what was especially upsetting, some told me, was receiving the impression that the university protected the bigots, rather than protecting the students. A number of students turned around and went home, skipping whatever class or test they had been heading towards. Others went to the campus LGBTQ+ Resource Center, asking staff to do something to stop these verbal attacks and threats of online student doxxing. But staff have been strictly instructed that they were forbidden from protesting (having no free speech rights as employees), and told to just express sympathy, remind students of the importance of free speech, and give students the contact information for university counseling if they said they were upset. 

I can tell you that to students, this sounds like they are being told, "We will do nothing to stop you from being beaten up, but if you do get injured, you are welcome to use campus medical services. Please believe that your being beaten up is against our university values, though! Oh, yes, that's abhorrent. But we must value free expression of all kinds, of course--there's nothing more sacred."

This is the problem with tolerating hate speech. You cannot do it without community members experiencing that as your being ok with people hating and harming them. It communicates that protecting hate is more valuable than preserving love. At least at my public university, it was forced on the institution by the legislature. I imagine it would feel worse at a private university that adopted this policy of its own free will.

Forcing universities under threat to define hate speech as free speech turns them into the dystopia other folks mostly encounter in spaces like X/Twitter. The thing is, most of us can just delete a toxic social media app, and go about our lives feeling better. People have to live, learn, and work on college campuses.

So: I agree that universities and society as a whole should not be in the business of protecting hate speech. Accepting people calling for genocide is a moral wrong. But it is a moral wrong that has been pushed onto universities by rightwing activists and politicians, over the cries of the left. Blaming progressive "wokism" for the toleration of hate speech is classic gaslighting, and it's ludicrous.