One person’s hate speech is another’s free speech

Why should we allow hate speech on our campus?

That’s the most common question I get from my students. And the latest controversy at Penn — where I teach — provides a clear answer: Hate speech is in the eye of the beholder. Once you decide to prohibit it, almost any speech can be banned.

Witness the kerfuffle over the Palestine Writes conference at Penn this weekend, which will draw dozens of authors and speakers from around the world. Citing allegedly antisemitic statements by participants, critics have called on Penn to cancel the conference or disinvite some of the speakers.

The best-known participant is Pink Floyd guitarist Roger Waters, who has compared Israel to the German Third Reich. He recently wore a Nazi-style uniform during a concert in Berlin, where the name of Anne Frank — a Jewish victim of the Holocaust — was juxtaposed on a big screen next to the name of a Palestinian American journalist who was shot by Israeli soldiers on the West Bank.

The conference will also feature Rutgers professor Noura Erakat — who has suggested that Zionism is a “bedfellow” of Nazism — and Australian writer Randa Abdel-Fattah, who recently called Israel “a demonic, sick project” and added that she “can’t wait for the day we commemorate its end.”

Conference organizers vehemently deny that any of the participants are antisemitic.

Conference organizers vehemently deny that any of the participants are antisemitic. They’re anti-Zionist, the organizers say, which is different.

Is it? That should be up to us — you, me, and everyone else — to decide. And we can’t do that if the conference is canceled, or if the speakers are censored. “We, as a university, should be a space where difficult conversations are had,” Huda Fakhreddine, a Penn professor of Arabic literature, told the student newspaper. “Come have a dialogue about things you are afraid of because that is how we learn.”

I agree with her. But I also worry that we’re applying this principle unevenly, to protect our own speech even as we censor others.

And that brings us to Amy Wax, the Penn law professor who is embroiled in disciplinary proceedings over her long history of allegedly racist and xenophobic remarks. She is back in the news again, for inviting white nationalist Jared Taylor to her class for a second time.

Taylor has claimed that Black people have a higher tendency toward “psychopathic personality,” and that “when Blacks are left to their own devices, Western civilization — any kind of civilization — disappears.” He visited Wax’s class in 2021, which was one of the reasons cited by law school dean Ted Ruger in his plea to impose a “major sanction” on her.

“Taylor’s explicit racism, hate speech, and white supremacy contravenes the University’s express policies and mission, and his white supremacist ideology has been associated closely with those perpetuating violence towards minorities,” Ruger wrote.

That’s the same argument critics of next week’s conference are making, of course. Antisemitic incidents have surged at our colleges and universities in recent years. Now Penn is bringing antisemitic speakers to campus, the critics say, and smack in the middle of the Jewish High Holidays. What could be more hateful — or dangerous — than that?

Let me be clear: I am not equating the participants at the Palestine Writes conference with Taylor. But other people do equate them. And you can’t expect protection for your own speech if you’re not willing to grant the same to everyone else.

Where were the organizers of next week’s conference when Wax came under attack? Sitting on their hands, I would guess, or — more likely — calling for her head.

We can see the same inconsistency in Wax defenders like Paul Levy, who quit the law school’s Board of Overseers in 2018 to protest the campaign against her. In his resignation letter, Levy wrote that universities need to protect “open, robust, and critical debate.”

I agree with that, too. But I haven’t heard Levy or any other Wax supporter step up to protect the Palestine Writes conference, which is the heart of the problem. In American higher education, we talk a good game about free speech. But most of us just want our own side to win.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author (with cartoonist Signe Wilkinson) of “Free Speech and Why You Should Give a Damn.”