The Review: The end of feelings-based censorship?

What a pair of linked law-review controversies tells us about academic culture now. ADVERTISEMENT [The Review Logo]( You can also [read this newsletter on the web](. Or, if you no longer want to receive this newsletter, [unsubscribe](. Is the era of feelings-based academic-speech limitations coming to an end? “There is growing acknowledgment that this speech regime is broken,” writes Tascha Shahriari-Parsa, a recent Harvard Law School graduate and a former online editor at the Harvard Law Review, in an [essay]( in The Nation. “To fix it, progressive students should first admit that it is a regime we helped create.” Last year, in her role at the Harvard Law Review, Shahriari-Parsa invited the Palestinian lawyer and Harvard Law doctoral student Rabea Eghbariah to contribute an essay to the Law Review’s blog about Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza. Ehgbariah’s draft was harshly critical of Israel — he “concluded that Israel is committing genocide and apartheid.” There was an uproar among the staff of the Law Review, which decided to pull the essay. Was this an example of the “Palestine exception” to academic freedom? Maybe. But, as Shahriari-Parsa points out, it’s not the first time in recent memory that an academic law review rejected a contribution on flagrantly political grounds. A couple of years ago, the Emory Law Journal pulled an invited essay by Larry Alexander, a law professor at the University of San Diego, because his contribution expressed skepticism about the concept of “systemic racism.” “The refutation of the presence of systemic racism might be a highly controversial viewpoint,” the journal’s editors told Alexander; moreover, they considered his language “hurtful and unnecessarily divisive.” (Northwestern’s Andrew Koppelman has written about [both]( [incidents]( in our pages.) A few months after his piece was suppressed by the Harvard Law Review, Ehgbariah’s writing on the war in Gaza would again find itself targeted for censorship, this time at the Columbia Law Review, and on similarly political grounds. In the end, the attempt at censorship was successful in the Harvard case, but not, ultimately, in the Columbia one. What was the difference? Here’s Shahriari-Parsa: Unlike at Harvard, no Columbia editors openly accused Eghbariah’s article of being antisemitic. Unlike at Harvard, no Columbia editors asserted that publishing Eghbariah’s piece would be personally hurtful to them. Unlike at Harvard, no Columbia editors gave their peers an ultimatum: Nix the piece, or else proclaim to your Jewish friends — and to Jews around the world — how little you care about them. In other words, the persuasive — or coercive — rhetoric of identitarian harm made the difference between the suppression of the piece and its publication. While both sets of editors were exposed to such outside pressures as fear of public attacks and of professional repercussions, only the Harvard group feared being accused of bigotry. As Shahriari-Parsa observes, fear of such accusations can be incredibly powerful: “It’s one thing to defend academic freedom in the abstract. It’s another to choose a stranger’s abstract right to publication — or the even more intangible ‘pursuit of truth’ — over the heartfelt cries of your friends.” SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. For Shahriari-Parsa, the lesson is clear: Liberals and progressives in academe should recommit to principles of free speech and defend a broadly permissive vision of academic freedom. Otherwise, “the same justifications we once offered to restrict conservative speech” will continue to “be used to silence us.” Versions of this argument are now quite common among liberals concerned about the last decade’s censorial drift, but the most prominent have come from baby boomers whose ideas about free speech were formed in the shadow of McCarthyism. The generational rift on free speech, whereby a younger cohort is far more suspicious of libertarian speech norms than their elders, has been observed both by those who find this development alarming and by those, like the NYU comparative literature professor Ulrich Baer, who consider the new sensibility salutary. “As a scholar of literature, history and politics,” Baer [wrote]( in The New York Times in 2017, “I am especially attuned to the next generation’s demands to revise existing definitions of free speech to accommodate previously delegitimized experiences.” (Baer refers throughout to the phrase “free speech,” rather than “academic freedom,” but his examples include instances of speech plainly protected by academic freedom, for instance Charles Murray’s [visit]( to Middlebury in 2017, which triggered violent protest.) History happens fast, and there’s some evidence that “the next generation” is rethinking such revisions. “In 2017, when I was a student at Pomona College,” Shahriari-Parsa writes, “my classmates physically barricaded and shut down a speaking event with author Heather Mac Donald, whose core argument was that Black people are safer with more police around.” When administrators rebuked students for de-platforming an invited speaker, “my classmates objected: Mac Donald had not come to debate ‘mere difference of opinion,’ some of them wrote in an open letter, ‘but the right of Black people to exist.’” The accommodation of “previously delegitimized experiences” might, Shahriari-Parsa implies, look an awful lot like old-fashioned ideological censorship. Students like Shahriari-Parsa have spent their entire academic careers — from college to graduate or professional school — under a speech regime in which first the left and now the right has attempted, often successfully, to shut down some speech by invoking the specter of psychological or dignitary harms. That regime is now on the defensive, not least from members of the very generation thought most to embrace it. It will be interesting to see how things shake out in the coming academic year. Read Tascha Shahriari-Parsa’s “[It’s Time for Progressives To Recommit to Academic Freedom]( ADVERTISEMENT UPCOMING PROGRAM [The Chronicle's Library and Institutional Success Program | July 2024] The Chronicle is partnering with Ithaka S+R to host a brand new [professional development program for librarians]( in July. This innovative two-week program will help library leaders understand the many roles they might take on, boost the success of the campus library, and better align with their institution’s goals. Learn more about our seminars and workshops, and [register today]( The Latest THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Want to Understand the Right? Look to the 1990s.]( By Kim Phillips-Fein [STORY IMAGE]( How Ross Perot, David Duke, Pat Buchanan, and others inaugurated a politics of betrayal. ADVERTISEMENT [Want to Understand the Right? Look to the 1990s.]( THE REVIEW | OPINION [Community Groups Shouldn’t Dictate Academic Hiring]( By Alexander Jabbari [STORY IMAGE]( Recently, the University of Minnesota tarnished its reputation by caving to community pressure over the hiring of a director for its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. THE REVIEW | ESSAY [Joking Around Helps Us to Live Together]( By Ben Wurgaft [STORY IMAGE]( The philosophy of wisecracks. 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