Where the Harvard, Penn and MIT presidents dropped the ball on hate speech

During their testimony last Tuesday before a House committee addressing the increase of antisemitism on college campuses, three prominent university presidents were asked if calls for the genocide of Jews were permissible. They could not give a convincing or decisive answer and instead resorted to legal rationalizations of what was “allowable” depending on the context.

The national uproar has since been deafening, already leading to the resignation of both the president and chair of the board of the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

In delineating the complex and often controversial boundaries of free speech, calls for genocide are theoretically protected by the First Amendment. The presidents’ attempts to focus on “context” were intended to differentiate between hate speech that is spewed broadly and hate speech that is targeted at specific individuals.

Both are repugnant, but there is a crucial difference. While the First Amendment protects broad offensive and hateful speech, it does not protect threats against individuals or incitements to violence.

In their remarks, the presidents of Harvard, Penn and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) personally disavowed antisemitism and Islamophobia. What the three presidents did not clearly do during the five-hour hearing, “Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism,” was demonstrate that they had condemned antisemitic hate speech and antisemitic behavior on their campuses.

What made them particularly vulnerable to this criticism is that they had a history of readily denouncing or punishing other forms of hate speech in the past.   

Rep. Elise Stefanik’s (R-N.Y.) recent opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal pointed out that Harvard’s Title IX training warns students about the potential for “abuse” and “violence” that the “use of the wrong pronouns,” “cisheterosexism” and “fat phobia” would cause. The double-standard here is stunning.

Universities must be places for a diversity of views, opinions, thoughts and speech. However, it is the responsibility of the university leaders to educate their campuses on the dangers of hate speech, including on how abhorrent language can devolve into unlawful harassment, intimidation and violence.

It’s paramount to understand that, although hate speech may be allowed on campus, that does not mean that it should go unchecked or unchallenged. When vicious speech isn’t addressed and condemned, it can become viral, festering in the public mind until it becomes an infection in our discourse, a contagion that leads to hate-motivated crimes. 

History teaches us that there are pernicious implications when there is ineffective opposition to hate speech, including the rise of antisemitism and other forms of bigotry. University presidents’ failure to denounce antisemitic speech is partly the reason only one-third of Jewish students feel safe on campus, according to an Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International report.

As an example, the slogan, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,” is cited by Hamas supporters as code for the elimination of Israel and the genocide of Jews. While that might not be the intent of all those who recite the phrase, nonetheless, the speaker must be responsible for the incendiary interpretation.

A recent survey of 250 U.S. college students cited by the Jerusalem Post reports 86 percent of students support the chant, “From the river to the sea,” but only 47 percent knew which “river” and which “sea” were being referenced. Subsequent to learning basic facts about the Middle East, two-thirds of the surveyed students who supported the phrase turned around and rejected the use of the slogan.

The lesson from the recent House hearing was clear: University presidents must speak out clearly, unequivocally and forcefully to condemn genocide, hate, bigotry and violence, especially when it occurs on our own campuses. The antidote to hate speech is more speech, and the antidote to ignorance is more and better education. 

Ora Hirsch Pescovitz is president of Oakland University in Oakland County, Mich. Rep. Haley Stevens, a Democrat, represents Michigan’s 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives.