What makes this a tough issue is that there is a tension between applying the right incentives to the university administrators and expressing a coherent speech protective viewpoint and treating Jewish students equally.
The problem is that there are strong incentives for university administration to punish and prevent a wide range of raci…
What makes this a tough issue is that there is a tension between applying the right incentives to the university administrators and expressing a coherent speech protective viewpoint and treating Jewish students equally.
The problem is that there are strong incentives for university administration to punish and prevent a wide range of racist, sexist, homophobic etc speech and they've consistently violated norms of free expression to do so in the past.
Now suppose that whenever an issue like this one comes up where their previous non-nuetral stance gets them in trouble comes up they can switch to a free expression defense and get support from those of us who want a culture on campus that allows for a wide range of debate. Their incentives will be to just make that move every time. Worse, if they make this move only when it's Jewish students being targeted they are necessarily treating them worse than similarly situated students.
It's hard because if you commit to critisize them now no matter what they do they have no good incentives either. If you let them say we now believe in free expression and accept that as good enough they get away with treating Jewish students worse and have every incentive to do it again.
So I think the right move is to say that they only get credit for a free speech defense if they take responsibility for the ways they violated that (inconsistent application) in the past and explain how they'll commit not to do so in the future.
In other words, they need to publicly identify the times that they intervened to protect other groups and violated free speech norms and say they were wrong to do so. That's the closest you can get to equalizing the way they treat Jewish students because at least you retroactively say that we shouldn't have intervened to defend these other groups.
I don't think the administrations of these colleges are prepared to do this.
What makes this a tough issue is that there is a tension between applying the right incentives to the university administrators and expressing a coherent speech protective viewpoint and treating Jewish students equally.
The problem is that there are strong incentives for university administration to punish and prevent a wide range of racist, sexist, homophobic etc speech and they've consistently violated norms of free expression to do so in the past.
Now suppose that whenever an issue like this one comes up where their previous non-nuetral stance gets them in trouble comes up they can switch to a free expression defense and get support from those of us who want a culture on campus that allows for a wide range of debate. Their incentives will be to just make that move every time. Worse, if they make this move only when it's Jewish students being targeted they are necessarily treating them worse than similarly situated students.
It's hard because if you commit to critisize them now no matter what they do they have no good incentives either. If you let them say we now believe in free expression and accept that as good enough they get away with treating Jewish students worse and have every incentive to do it again.
So I think the right move is to say that they only get credit for a free speech defense if they take responsibility for the ways they violated that (inconsistent application) in the past and explain how they'll commit not to do so in the future.
In other words, they need to publicly identify the times that they intervened to protect other groups and violated free speech norms and say they were wrong to do so. That's the closest you can get to equalizing the way they treat Jewish students because at least you retroactively say that we shouldn't have intervened to defend these other groups.
I don't think the administrations of these colleges are prepared to do this.