The U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce held a hearing on “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism.” Congressional members grilled the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on their responses to anti-Semitism on campus following a recent attack on Israel by Hamas. The leaders of these institutions, which have checkered records on free expression, claimed that their institutional commitments to free speech prevented them from curbing anti-Semitic speech. Critics noted their hypocrisy for reaching for speech codes when certain views are expressed, yet claiming to advocate for free speech when they are more sympathetic to the speech at issue.
FIRE has been challenging vague and broad college harassment policies since its founding in 1999, having defeated hundreds of unconstitutional harassment policies nationwide. Harvard, Penn, and MIT all have harassment policies that are ripe for abuse. These institutions should reform their policies to ensure students’ rights to free expression along with the right to learn free of discriminatory harassment. The Supreme Court defines peer-on-peer harassment as targeted, unwelcome, and “so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit.”
Student conduct that disrupts events, blocks building egress, engages in violence, or issues true threats to others is not protected by the First Amendment. Context matters when determining if speech crosses the line into an unprotected category such as harassment, true threats, or incitement. Speech codes for calls to genocide are arbitrary and viewpoint-discriminatory, and restricting such political expression is ultimately unhelpful. Censorship limits the ability to identify and understand anti-Semitic sentiments, and it should be addressed by consistently protecting free speech.