Fear and loathing on America’s college campuses as free speech is disappearing

On a recent Monday night along the University of Pennsylvania’s iconic Locust Walk, students Sonya Stacia and Sparrow Starlight took out some chalk and got a lesson not listed in their curriculum on the oppressive, absurd zeitgeist of the 20th-century novelist Franz Kafka.

Stacia and Starlight were already facing possible disciplinary action for their protests with the university’s Freedom School for Palestine, but that didn’t stop them from chalking messages against Israel’s invasion of Gaza on a section of the pavement where others — from climate activists to comedy troupes — had scrawled erasable messages in the past.

As they wrote their messages, they recalled, passersby made critical comments, and someone started filming them. In an increasingly tense year on the Penn campus, Stacia and Starlight are used to that — but they weren’t used to what happened next. A large gaggle of security guards showed up at the scene, and when the two undergrads tried to leave, according to their account, about six university police officers showed up, surrounded them, and detained them for about a half hour.

“I was terrified,” Starlight told me two weeks later, as we talked on Penn’s College Green. “I did not know what my rights were in that situation.” They, Stacia, and another student who was present told me the campus police demanded their IDs and gave differing explanations for their detention — either for vandalism with spray paint (there wasn’t), or hate speech — and eventually let them go, apparently without future consequences.

The messages that had triggered their encounter with campus officers? “Free Palestine” and “Let Gaza Live.”

Welcome to a new kind of tension that has gripped American colleges and universities in the most divisive year on campus since the dawn of the 1970s. The wave of protests that began with the first shots of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7 has morphed into an age of paranoia. It’s been marked by increasingly tougher penalties or confusing new rules for students still wanting to speak out against Israel’s invasion of Gaza, with some schools banning indoor protests or preventing students from posting political messages on their dormitory doors.

Student activists told me they feel constantly watched, either by university officials they think are monitoring their Wi-Fi or watching from omnipresent cameras — or by pro-Israel outside groups that have “doxxed” the personal information of pro-Palestinian protesters.

This week’s jarring news out of the University of Southern California that its Muslim valedictorian, Asna Tabassum, would not be allowed to give her upcoming commencement speech because of what the school called “safety concerns” — after some critics had singled out some of her X/Twitter posts over Palestine — gave the rest of America a window into what students and some of their professors have been saying for months: Free speech and political expression at U.S. universities is facing its greatest threat since the 1950s “Red Scare” and the heyday of McCarthyism.

Two Carleton College professors who write frequently and host a podcast around questions of academic freedom actually argue the current crisis is even worse than that dark era.

“We’re both historians and so we don’t use this term lightly,” the Minnesota-based professors Amna Khalid and Jeffrey Aaron Snyder told me by phone. “The threats to free speech and academic freedom are unprecedented.” Their recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education — “Student Activism Is Integral to the Mission of Academe” — argued that the role of college since the 1960s as an incubator for powerful social and political movements is now endangered by “shut up and study” critics who see campus protests as an unwarranted distraction.

“It’s very clear where the force of censorship, silencing, and intimidation has fallen,” Viet Thanh Nguyen, the Vietnamese American refugee, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, and MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” winner, wrote this week in blasting administrators at USC, where he currently teaches, for the muzzling of Tabassum’s commencement speech. Yet, critics of the new campus speech restrictions are struggling to be heard over the louder narrative around increased allegations of antisemitism — some real, some disputed — since the Oct. 7 start of the war, as well as a right-wing political movement that sees an opening to wage a wider war against higher education.

I’m writing this column after twice recently speaking on college campuses — at New York’s Cooper Union (for, fittingly, an exhibit on Vietnam War protest there) and a climate class at Penn — and was struck by the questions I got from students desperately wanting to know how they could voice their political views in this new, frigid environment. I later returned to Penn and the College Green, where a handful of students from the Freedom School for Palestine were chalking protest messages or silk-screening them on T-shirts, to meet the student who’d asked me for help: 19-year-old sophomore Eliana Atienza.

An organizer with Fossil Free Penn, Atienza told me campus activists are frightened and confused by a tougher disciplinary stance from the Ivy League school, such as a threat of academic probation for taking part in a pro-Palestine “study-in” at a Penn library. She said protest “is both fundamental to the college experience and to pushing progress forward,” noticing that Penn touts movement-won gains such as its centers for women, LGBTQ people, and Africana studies to its prospective students. As we spoke on a bench near Penn’s main crossroads on a bucolic, early spring afternoon, there was a soft undercurrent of tension. Over on the main walk, a passing student poured out his water bottle on one of the chalked messages. I watched a maintenance worker with a roller painting over the nearby light pole, stressed from a year of political messages taped on and ripped down.

The national meltdown over campus protest is happening on the eve of this fall’s 60th anniversary of an event that defined campus politics for decades: 1964’s Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley. Harsh restrictions on where students could set up tables for political causes — from fighting racial segregation in the South to college Republicans — united a diverse array of protesters who staged an often-chaotic battle with administrators throughout that fall. The Free Speech Movement tugged at the essence of higher education: Are students essentially children who are wards of the college, or adults with the freedom to voice political opinions? With support from the faculty, the young people of Berkeley won.

The golden age of campus protest, which reached its zenith over widespread opposition to the Vietnam War in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, was always a double-edged sword. The hothouse environment on campus became an incubator for an array of social movements — environmentalism, LGBTQ pride, ending support for apartheid in South Africa, and much more — that have bettered society, boosting a once widely held opinion that college protest wasn’t antithetical to the mission of higher education, but central to the notions of developing critical thinking skills and a moral philosophy of life. But it also triggered a powerful conservative backlash — Ronald Reagan’s political rise began by railing against the Berkeley protests — that has stripped political support for the once universally popular public universities, which led to astronomical tuition and a student debt crisis.

Still, you could hear the faint echoes of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement as recently as the start of the current academic year. At Penn, then-president Liz Magill resisted pressure from large donors and others to cancel a Palestinian literary festival on campus — criticizing the views of some speakers but stating that “as a university, we also fiercely support the free exchange of ideas as central to our educational mission.”

Times have changed. Magill resigned in December after criticism from several Penn megadonors and on Capitol Hill over her handling of complaints about antisemitism against the school’s sizable population of Jewish students. The high-profile ouster of Magill and Harvard president Claudine Gay highlighted how the aftermath of the Oct. 7 attack by Hamas — killing some 1,200 Israelis and taking several hundred hostages, trigging an Israeli onslaught against Gaza that has killed some 33,000, a majority of them women and children — has turned U.S. college life upside down.

» READ MORE: Liz Magill’s ouster at Penn will help the worst people take down free speech, higher ed | Will Bunch

As passions rose, colleges saw some ugly incidents of both antisemitism and Islamophobia. In the mainstream media, among the wealthy donor class that wields increasing clout over university policies, and on Capitol Hill, the reported rise in antisemitic incidents is clearly the dominant narrative hovering over the 2023-24 school year. The passion in both political parties for the greater cause of Israel — despite increasing criticism of Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government and attacks on civilians and aid workers — was again demonstrated just this week when the U.S. House voted 377-44 to condemn the popular pro-Palestinian chant “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as antisemitic.

The students and professors I spoke to for this column universally condemned antisemitic attacks against Jewish people or their religion, yet they also voiced deep frustration that legitimate criticisms of the Israeli government and attacks on civilians, or even anodyne statements like “Let Gaza live,” are also being branded as antisemitism. Meanwhile, many free speech advocates predicted that the ugly presidential ousters at Penn and Harvard would have a chilling effect on student rights that would go well beyond the war in the Middle East — and that is exactly what is happening.

At American University in Washington, D.C., administrators have banned indoor protests and said they’ll only permit student clubs, or allow posters, that are “welcoming and build community.” At California’s Pomona College, a peaceful sit-in at the president’s office seeking divestment from Israel was met with a phalanx of riot cops who arrested 20 students, many of whom are now facing suspension or expulsion. The University of Michigan is pushing a proposed ban on “disruptive protests” that critics say would cripple free speech at a flagship public university.

At New York University, an incident in which students were hauled in for disciplinary hearings after staging a reading of poetry by the Palestinian author Refaat Alareer, killed late last year in an Israeli airstrike, is cited by professors Paula Chakravartty and Vasuki Nesiah as part of what they call an “alarmingly constrained” environment around free speech at NYU.

Experts in free speech said this moment didn’t happen overnight, even if it seems that way. Carleton’s Khalid and Snyder, in particular, make a powerful argument that an essentially liberal movement — the relentless but, over time, flawed emphasis on diversity, equity, and especially “inclusion” on campuses — set the stage for a free speech crisis by devaluing the often messy diversity of ideas for an emphasis on so-called safety that constricts debate. The professors argue that what they criticize as “DEI Inc.” — an overadministrated regime of rigid rules and trainings that’s harmed freewheeling academic debate — created the language that’s now being weaponized against pro-Palestinian activists.

You can hear that in the language at American University, which justified its indoor protest ban by stating that “recent events and incidents on campus have made Jewish students feel unsafe and unwelcome,” or in USC’s use of the safety issue to bar Tabassum. The language enshrined in today’s DEI regime has, unexpectedly, become the tool for college presidents who are under intense pressure from major donors and GOP lawmakers to respond to the antisemitism pressures and who want to avoid becoming the next Magill or Gay.

But arguably an even more insidious weaponization of the Gaza crisis is from right-wing politicians who’ve been waging war for decades against college campuses they see as breeders of left-wing thought, indoctrinating students against conservatism. Red-state governors like Florida’s Ron DeSantis or Texas’ Greg Abbott and their far-right legislatures are seizing the Oct. 7 moment as an excuse to, ironically, eliminate campus DEI programs, place further limits on anti-racism teaching, or flat-out ban student groups that aggressively support Palestinian liberation.

“The political movement to undermine universities in the public sphere is making the most of this moment,” Jonathan Friedman, managing director of U.S. free expression and education programs at PEN America, told me. In many ways, the uproar over Gaza feels like the new “Red Scare,” borne back ceaselessly into the 1950s that preceded the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and everything that’s happened since. But I also agree with Friedman that this low moment could also spark a turnaround. “That’s what censorship does,” he said. “It makes [people] realize that free speech matters.”

A recent Harris Poll conducted for Axios found that 77% of college students “said campus speech should be protected even if some feel the language is deeply upsetting” — and these opinions were shared equally by young Democrats and Republicans. The question is whether student activists who tilt left — and who’ve faced accusations of thwarting academic freedom with noisy protests that have shut down controversial speakers — are now ready to embrace a 1964-style vision around free speech.

They just might. “Free Speech at Columbia Is a Joke” was the headline on a Columbia Spectator op-ed by School of Social Work grad student Layla Saliba. She complained about “an unrivaled attempt to suppress student voices” on her campus and affiliated Barnard College — citing a ban on dorm door decorations, restrictions on where students can protest, and reports that the college is monitoring student Wi-Fi. Saliba says Columbia administrators have a Google Alert on her name.

“It should not be considered controversial to say you’re against children being killed, but at Columbia, it is,” Saliba — a Palestinian American who says she has lost 14 family members to Israeli bombs — told me by phone. She said she’s faced much more repression for protesting at Columbia than she did advocating for Black Lives Matter as an undergrad at North Carolina State, in the heart of the former Confederacy.

The painful ironies of this fraught moment are not lost on Penn’s Atienza. She grew up in the Philippines where her family is close friends and a source of support for Nobel Peace Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa, famed for fighting her homeland’s repressive regime. And Atienza embraced what she thought would be Philadelphia’s freedom of expression from the day she arrived on campus. Atienza was one of 19 students arrested in October 2022 for storming the field during a Penn football game at Franklin Field. She said those protesters were allowed to escape harsher college discipline by writing an essay, and administrators noted their concerns about climate change were “legitimate.”

Atienza and her fellow activists say there is no similar empathy for protesting for Palestine.

“We try our best not to get in disciplinary trouble. They try their best to get us into disciplinary trouble,” Atienza said. Although still a teenager, the sophomore is developing a keen understanding of the traditions that now face a dire risk. Passing out flyers at a Penn football game calling for divestment from fossil fuels, she said one alumnus told her about sitting in at College Hall to protest the Vietnam War, while another in the same row had protested for divestment from South Africa.

“Something I like to remind myself when things feel hopeless is that the university has had activism as long as it’s been here,” she said. Yet, those rights — for young people to learn how to speak their minds, on a path to becoming tomorrow’s engaged citizens — weren’t won without a fierce fight. In 1964, the legendary Berkeley activist Mario Savio said that sometimes “the machine” of repression becomes so odious that “you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus — and you’ve got to make it stop!”

Nearly 60 years later, America’s colleges need another free speech movement.

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