Let’s suppose you’re a conservative outraged about the fate of law Prof. Amy Wax, who was suspended for a year with half pay by the University of Pennsylvania for making racist, sexist, and homophobic remarks. But you also want universities to penalize anti-Israel protesters for their antisemitic comments.
Now let’s imagine you’re a liberal who defends the right to chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine should be free” on campus, which many Jews find offensive. But you also want Wax to be penalized — or fired — for maligning other minority groups.
Welcome to the topsy-turvy world of American higher education, where everyone wants to protect their own speech and censor others. And we can’t have a free university on those terms.
Tuesday, Penn issued a public letter of reprimand against Wax for her “history of making sweeping and derogatory statements” about immigrants, African-Americans, and gays. In addition to her suspension, she’ll lose her named chair and her annual summer pay. It’s the stiffest sanction that Penn has given to a tenured professor in at least 20 years.
The response from conservatives was fast and furious: Wax is a free-speech martyr, singled out for her right-wing views on immigration, affirmative action, and other contested public questions. “Her cardinal sin was that she expressed her opinions on the issues of the day that were not in accord with those of Penn’s woke supremacy,” wrote Richard Vedder on Minding the Campus, a right-of-center website.
But conservatives have also spearheaded the effort to censor anti-Israel protesters and to sanction colleges that fail to do so. That campaign started with the appearance of three university presidents before Congress last December, when they said calls for genocide wouldn’t be prohibited on campus.
Republicans pounced, demanding that the presidents resign. “Two down, one to go,” Rep. Elaine Stefanik gleefully tweeted, after the Penn and Harvard leaders quit.
Meanwhile, Rep. Virginia Foxx has pressed colleges to take harsher measures against antisemitic speech. “The problem of antisemitic harassment, disruption, and violence has not been resolved,” Foxx warned, in a letter last month to administrators at Penn, Harvard, and eight other universities. “These disruptions are likely to return to campuses this fall and you must be prepared to act.”
Get it? We should protect Wax’s right to make racist statements, including “Blacks have lower cognitive ability than whites” and America is “better off with fewer Asians.” But when a protester says something we find antisemitic, we need to censor it.
There’s a similar inconsistency on the left, where critics have claimed Wax should be fired for her offensive comments. They praised the sanctions placed upon her this week but said that wasn’t enough: Wax retained her tenure, and her suspension won’t kick in until next year.
“That’s really unfortunate,” one Penn Law student said last week. “Her harm is ongoing.”
That’s also the argument for censoring “From the river to the sea”, “Globalize the intifada,” and so on: these statements harm Jewish students. But here, campus leftists have gone all ACLU on us: we need to protect free speech, no matter whom it harms.
I agree with them. As the one-year anniversary of the war in Gaza approaches, we must defend the rights of everyone on campus to criticize Israel in whatever ways they want.
But I just don’t see how you can do that if you also want to muzzle Wax. When you call for an intifada, it’s free speech that we need to protect; when she calls for restricting immigration from non-Western countries, it’s racism that we need to shut down. Really?
I find many of Wax’s statements despicable, offensive, and false. I have denounced them in print and also in person, during a debate with Wax earlier this year.
But I will never stop supporting her right to speak, even when I’m appalled by her. Ditto for demonstrators who charge Israel with genocide, which I also think is wrong. If you’re not willing to defend both of them, stop telling me how much you value free speech. You just want freedom for your speech.
And once you open the door to censorship, watch out! In his letter reprimanding Wax, Penn Provost John L. Jackson Jr. warned her against “disparagement of any individual or group in the University community.” Who will decide what that means? And what will you say when the censors come for you?
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn” and eight other books.
