The crackdown: Pro-Palestinian campus protesters brought it on themselves

The battle began last Wednesday morning when Columbia University students set up a tent encampment on the campus to protest the university’s financial ties to Israel and demand a cease-fire in Gaza. The university warned the students that the encampment violated university rules. When they refused to leave, the university called in the police, who arrested more than a hundred protesters. 

As of this writing, pro-Palestinian demonstrators both on and off campus have prompted Columbia to hold only remote classes. One reportedly told Jewish students to “go back to Poland,” and another held up a sign suggesting that Hamas attack Jewish counterdemonstrators.  

In responding to campus demonstrations, universities have generally emphasized academic freedom of expression. This is how Columbia initially responded to the wave of antisemitic protests that subjected Columbia’s Jewish and Israeli students to “racist epithets and antisemitic tropes" after Hamas's Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel. A university antisemitism task force concluded that the university’s hands-off response was inadequate.

The demise of the unconstrained campus speech model occurred when Harvard President Claudine Gay was asked at a hearing by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce whether calls for extermination of Jews violated university policies. She replied that “it can be, depending on the context,” which shocked both Jews and non-Jews alike.

Her answer might have been the right one to a “hard constitutional question,” whether calls for Jewish genocide are protected by the First Amendment. But the question really asked whether universities had an obligation to protect students from abhorrent hate speech by other students or faculty, and her answer, “maybe, maybe not,” was disastrous. Gay, dogged also by accusations of plagiarism, resigned. The pendulum began to swing from virtually unconstrained free speech toward a civility model — that is, toward rules that maintain a safe and welcoming campus environment. 

In her appearance last week before the same House committee, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, armed with lessons learned from Gay’s debacle, emphasized campus civility. She testified that calls for Jewish genocide violated Columbia’s rules and described disciplinary measures against students and faculty who had allegedly engaged in antisemitism. The next day, Shafik called in the police to remove the tent encampment.

Progressives complained that, in removing the encampment, Shafik had capitulated to McCarthyite-style pressure from the Republican-driven House committee at the expense of the “academic principle” of free expression. But one must wonder whether they would have been as critical had she removed an illegal tent encampment set up by, say, anti-abortion students who refused to leave after a warning.

We have learned since Oct. 7 that there is a serious civility problem on American campuses that has nothing to do with free expression and debate, and which involves alarming antisemitism. Since the beginning of the current school year, 73 percent of Jewish college students in the U.S. reported seeing or experiencing antisemitism, some of it well beyond epithets. After Oct. 7, Jewish students at Cooper Union sheltered in a library while pro-Palestinian demonstrators banged on its glass windows and doors. Protesters at Tulane University assaulted a Jewish student, breaking his nose. 

A new campus civility model is also needed to respond to the disturbing increase in apparent Islamophobic incidents on college campuses since Oct. 7. Pro-Palestinian students have been doxxed and harassed, and some have lost their jobs. An Arab Muslim Stanford student was hospitalized after an on-campus hit and run that is now under investigation as a hate crime.

In the battle of Columbia University, demonstrators, who claim to be exercising the right of academic free expression deprived tens of thousands of Columbia University students and faculty of the academic freedom to enter their classrooms.

Civility-based campus governance, which recognizes academic freedom without tolerating harassment, intimidation and disruption, is long overdue.

Gregory J. Wallance was a federal prosecutor in the Carter and Reagan administrations and a member of the ABSCAM prosecution team, which convicted a U.S. senator and six representatives of bribery. He is the author of "Into Siberia: George Kennan’s Epic Journey Through the Brutal, Frozen Heart of Russia."