Credit
Angie Wang
More than 25 years ago, at the height of the effort to pass hate speech codes on college campuses, I wrote a monograph about how to do it without censorship.
It began with a quotation from a student who had been bullied because he was Asian-American: “I wish they had hit me.” If he had been beaten, he said, the damage would have been easier for everyone to see.
No college student should be threatened, harassed or intimidated through words or deeds. But every student should be disquieted and forced to wrestle with difficult ideas, even hateful ones, and especially with ideas they find disagreeable.
On some campuses pro-Israel Jewish students feel victimized. Some classmates who back the Palestinian cause view them as racist, and some activists have encouraged violations of academic freedom, from the heckling of pro-Israel speakers to the boycotting of Israeli academic institutions.
But, as was true 25 years ago, the worst remedy is to prohibit speech deemed offensive, disparaging or bigoted that would otherwise be protected by the First Amendment. The proposed Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2016 is a speech code for schools and colleges that’s presented as common-sense protection against bigotry. After it was unanimously passed by the Senate recently, the House Judiciary Committee put off consideration until 2017. As I have told the committee, it should not be considered in any form.
The act would require the Department of Education, when deciding whether federal antidiscrimination laws have been violated, to consider the Department of State’s definition of anti-Semitism, which is a version of the “Working Definition of Anti-Semitism” issued in 2005 by the European Monitoring Center on Racism and Xenophobia. I was the lead author of the center’s definition, when I was director on anti-Semitism for the American Jewish Committee. I encouraged the State Department to use it when discussing anti-Semitism with other countries.
The definition contains examples related to criticism of Israel, including applying double standards by demanding it behave in ways not expected of other democratic countries, or denying Jews the right of self-determination by claiming that the existence of Israel is a racist endeavor.
The definition was intended for data collectors writing reports about anti-Semitism in Europe. It was never supposed to curtail speech on campus.
And Jewish students are protected under the law as it now stands. In 2010 the Education Department clarified that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination based on race, color or national origin in federally funded programs, also protects Jewish students. That means that schools and colleges could lose federal funding when they’re the site of a Title VI violation involving anti-Semitism. In the wake of that clarification, in 2011 I initiated a Title VI case against a school district where Jews were bullied, intimidated and even kicked, forcing officials to take action.
But some right-wing Jewish groups, and individuals, have tried to overstep the bounds of the clarification by filing Title VI cases arguing that the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement against Israel, educational programs about the occupation of the West Bank, and anti-Israel classroom texts and speakers transgressed the definition and were evidence of a Title VI violation. All the cases lost.
Then these groups urged the University of California system to adopt the State Department definition. It didn’t.
Now they want to enshrine the definition into law so that the Department of Education would consider anti-Israel speech when it assesses a Title VI violation.
What’s next? Should Congress define what speech is Islamophobic? Anti-Palestinian? Racist? Anti-white? How about defining “anti-United States” speech? We could dust off the files of the House Un-American Activities Committee.
One group supported the legislation because it believes “Jewish students do not receive the same protections that other demographic groups receive.” It cites examples of a professor being suspended over a blog post on gay marriage that was considered homophobic and the canceling of a campus screening of the film “American Sniper,” which was called anti-Islamic.
Rather than see these as troubling violations of academic freedom and free speech, proponents of the congressional bill want to suppress criticism of Israel, too. If this bill becomes law it is easy to imagine calls for university administrators to stop pro-Palestinian speech. Even if lawsuits alleging Title VI violations fail, students and faculty members will be scared into silence, and administrators will err on the side of suppressing or censuring speech.
In a political environment in which all good is seen on one side and all bad on the other, a law that punishes political speech stirs more hatred.
When people are seduced by the false notion that a law can stop hateful ideas, they neglect to actually fight bigotry. Aside from conducting anonymous student surveys about campus climate, and making sure students know how to report harassment, there should be more courses on anti-Semitism, on the human capacity to hate, on the conflicting narratives of the Israel-Palestine conflict and on how to discuss difficult subjects.
Rather than suppressing speech about the conflict, we should be encouraging it. How else will students learn?
