From FIRE yesterday:
[Tuesday], the U.S. House Committee on Education & the Workforce held a hearing on "Holding Campus Leaders Accountable and Confronting Antisemitism." For hours, members of Congress grilled the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on their responses to anti-Semitism on campus following Hamas' October 7 attack on Israel — and many observers noted the hypocrisy of leaders of institutions with checkered records on free expression suddenly claiming their institutional commitments to free speech prevented them from cracking down on anti-Semitic speech.
Of course, one can understand the frustration of critics who rightly observe how quickly college administrators — including those at Harvard, Penn, and MIT — will reach for speech codes when certain disfavored views are expressed, yet don the cloak of free speech when they are more sympathetic to the speech at issue. Speech codes depend for their very existence on the exercise of double standards, as FIRE co-founder Alan Charles Kors has said.
But the solution to this moral cowardice is not to expand the use of vague and overbroad harassment codes so that they apply in more cases. Rather administrators should eliminate these codes and defend free speech in all cases. No hypocrisy. No double standards.
FIRE has battled vague, broad college harassment policies since our founding in 1999. We have defeated hundreds of unconstitutional, illiberal harassment policies at campuses nationwide — and we target these particular speech codes because harassment policies have long been the tool of choice for censorial college administrators. FIRE's case archives prove that harassment charges are regularly used to censor all kinds of speech, from punishing a student group at Long Island University critical of trans issues to investigating pro-choice students at American University.
