Argue with dangerous speech instead of banning it

Conservatives are supposed to understand the law of unintended consequences.

For 20 years, American colleges have been driven toward ruin by the cultural cancer of “safetyism” and “crybullying.” Famously, Harvard Law School professor Jeannie Suk Gersen wrote an essay for the New Yorker about her bruising institutional fight to teach students in criminal law classes about the laws governing sexual offenses. She was, students explained, hurting them. They went to the dean because they felt unsafe. Saying “rape” in class was violence. Professors who teach rape law are mean.

“One teacher I know was recently asked by a student not to use the word ‘violate’ in class — as in ‘Does this conduct violate the law?’ — because the word was triggering,” she wrote. “Some students have even suggested that rape law should not be taught because of its potential to cause distress.”

The opening sentence of that New Yorker essay frames the question with vividness and lawyerly clarity: “Imagine a medical student who is training to be a surgeon but who fears that he’ll become distressed if he sees or handles blood.”

Now, imagine a student who is training for adult life in a republic who fears he’ll become distressed if he hears “hate speech.” College is for people who have just started being grown-ups. The point is to face ugly things head-on, distinguish truth from lies, develop an ability to see logical fallacies and bad evidence, and become a disciplined, serious adult citizen.

When conservatives take up the cudgel of what kind of speech should be allowed, we’ve taken a hard left turn and driven into a cultural desert.

Sorry, I screwed up that last sentence: It was. The culture of open discourse has long been in retreat on college campuses — in the purge of wrong-thinking professors, in the distaste for dead white male authors, and in the absurd moment when “trigger warnings” were still a thing.

See, for one quick example in a sea of nonsense, the harsh response from UCLA to the business school professor who laughed off a student’s demand that exams be postponed for black students because of the trauma caused by Saint George Floyd’s murder. “More than 17,000 people have since signed a petition calling for UCLA to dismiss [Gordon] Klein from the school,” according to the Poets and Quants business school blog. Colleges purge and punish crimespeak with a joyful zeal that makes actual Red Guards a little jealous.

This week, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) confronted a panel of university presidents with statements being made on college campuses that hint at or openly call for violence against Jews. She demanded to know if those speech acts were being allowed: “Do you believe that kind of hateful speech is contrary to Harvard’s code of conduct, or is it allowed at Harvard?” she asked.

When conservatives take up the cudgel of what kind of speech should be allowed, we’ve taken a hard left turn and driven into a cultural desert. I agree that students and professors on many college campuses have crossed lines into repugnant Jew-hating rants, but colleges are supposed to teach. They’re supposed to run over hateful ignorance with the freight train of factual, rational thought. Bad discourse is supposed to encounter good discourse and lose on the battlefield. You cannot dismantle the left's ideological house with the left's cultural tools.

Arguing that calls for the genocide of Israeli Jews should be a code of conduct violation that results in a repressive administrative response — that colleges should make people stop saying that through punishment — Stefanik and others who back her point of view walk into a barely concealed pitfall trap.

Consider what recently happened to Professor John Strauss at the University of Southern California.

Strauss, an economics professor, is Jewish. Walking across campus, he encountered a student-led rally for the brave and gentle social workers of Hamas, who are righteously fighting against evil colonialism. They got his response on video: “Hamas are murderers. That's all they are. Every one should be killed, and I hope they all are.”

In a move that should shock absolutely no one, the student protesters were triggered. Professor Strauss, they told USC administrators, had called for genocide. His words were violence: I hope they're all killed.

Because people who support Hamas cannot tolerate violence, you see.

An online petition quickly got thousands of signatures, under the header, "Demand the Termination of USC Economics Professor John Strauss for Racist and Xenophobic Behavior." University administrators ordered Strauss off campus and told him not to come back for the rest of the semester. (He lawyered up, as you always should in comparable circumstances, and they reversed that decision.)

Of course campus codes of conduct taking aim at Hamas supporters for speaking in favor of hate and violence will be turned against Jewish students and professors. “It's against the code of conduct to call for genocide by supporting Israel, Zionist pig!” Who does DARVO well? Who's good at purge culture? Codes of conduct that punish hateful speech are a pistol on the ground that we’ll all be wrestling over for years.

Don’t leave the pistol there.

The gibbering campus dimwits framing the war between Israel and Hamas as brave decolonial struggle are the product of a closed culture that prevents bad ideas from being challenged and defeated. The exact problem is the long repression of campus speech and the punishment of discourse that makes people “feel unsafe.” At the risk of making up my own words, we desperately need to re-adultify our campuses with a giant dose of toughness and unpunished debate. Burn the speech codes. Let supporters of Hamas speak openly and hear the unmediated responses they get. Let supporters of Israel speak openly and hear the unmediated responses they get. Make arguments and counterarguments.

What we need is the open discourse of adults in a republic, in an atmosphere of well-earned contempt for stupid arguments and dangerous ideas. Some of the things people say in that atmosphere of openness will be horrible, but none of it will be as horrible as a repressive culture that hides evil and forbids its exposure.