Will UC Ban ‘Hate Speech’?
My take : hate speech laws are bad, stupid, wrong, and bound to backfire. Know those who hate by their speech. Stand up and counter them with your own voice.
Not yet. But if the UC’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion has its way, it might start.
Last month, that council issued its “Jewish Student Campus Climate Fact-Finding Team Report & Recommendations.” Through that report, the council recommends that the UC system adopt ill-defined hate speech codes and prohibit “hate organizations” from speaking on UC campuses. Those policies would inevitably trigger litigation against the cash-strapped UC, but the council is full of the sort of you-can-take-that-guy bravado-by-proxy that inebriated friends display in late-night bar fights: “The Team recognizes that changes to UC hate speech policies may result in legal challenge, but offer [sic] that UC accept the challenge.”
What was the impetus for such a sweeping recommendation? The council, tasked to explore how the UC could be made more inclusive and welcoming for Jewish students, found that many were distressed by the rhetoric emerging from campus debates about Israel and its policies. Organized events like “Israeli Apartheid Week” have become increasingly contentious and fraught with incendiary language, particularly at UC Irvine and UC Berkeley, where such protests led to a lawsuit asserting that the university failed to protect Jewish students from assaults by violent anti-Israel protesters.
Should universities protect students from violence? Of course. Does the First Amendment protect assault? No. But the council’s report suggest that it does not aspire merely to keep students physically safe. Rather, it suggests that the council wants the UC to protect students from constitutionally protected political rhetoric they find painful and offensive. In discussing student reactions to anti-Israel protests, the Council describes and implicitly condemns a wide variety of speech that, while confrontational and inflammatory, is plainly protected by the First Amendment:
These protests routinely include “Apartheid Walls”- a depiction of the barrier/wall constructed by Israel along its border with the West Bank; “die ins” in which students portraying Palestinians spontaneously fall down as though they have been subject to mass killings by Israelis; mock “checkpoints” which are intended to mimic Israel checkpoints on the West Bank in which students coming through the “check point” are supposed to experience what Palestinians are allegedly subjected to. These “check points” include students re-enacting scenes in which Israeli soldiers are portrayed as engaging in indiscriminate acts of violence and degradation of Palestinians; and the dissemination of literature and information which accuse Israel of “genocide,” “ethnic cleansing” and the imposition of an “apartheid state.”