“If the problem with campus speech codes is the selectivity with which universities penalize various forms of bigotry,” wrote James Kirchick just lately in The New York Occasions, “the solution is not to expand the university’s power to punish expression. It’s to abolish speech codes entirely.”
Kirchick was writing about widespread outrage on the deeply nuanced and deeply hypocritical protection of speech provided by the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the College of Pennsylvania at a congressional listening to about antisemitic and anti-Zionist campus reactions to the October 7, 2023, Hamas assaults on Israel.
Though Kirchick, the writer of Secret Metropolis: The Hidden Historical past of Homosexual Washington and The Finish of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Darkish Age, is an ardent defender of Israel, he’s additionally a self-described free-speech absolutist who’s disgusted by calls to limit expression, whether or not on or off-campus. He says that as an alternative of clamping down on speech, we needs to be arguing extra brazenly and publicly, even when it is deeply uncomfortable, because it was when he raised novelist Alice Walker’s antisemitic views throughout a literary convention at which they have been each talking.
We speak about how id politics has overwhelmed the left’s conventional protection of free speech, why so many youthful journalists appear lukewarm at finest to the First Modification, and the best way to muster the braveness to talk up for first ideas in uncomfortable and hostile conditions.
Earlier appearances on The Cause Interview:
How Homophobia Warped the Chilly Conflict, June 1, 2022
The Very Thought of Europe Is Completed, April 23, 2017