For NYT's 'Free Speech' Maven, Racism Needs Protection, Gaza Protests Don't

Ari Paul

What are the limits of free speech on a college campus? The New York Times has deployed one of its highest-ranking foot soldiers in the culture war against liberalism to remind us that the speech of white supremacists must be defended, but criticism of Israel and support for Palestinian human rights are going too far.

Times columnist John McWhorter, who teaches at Columbia University, is a part of the paper’s growing chorus of elite, pearl-clutching commentators (e.g., 6/7/18, 11/9/21, 3/18/23, 2/24/24) who blame society’s ills on an amorphous enemy of tyrannical “wokeness,” which McWhorter (3/21/23) presents as "an anti-Enlightenment program." The Times embraces the idea, widespread in corporate media (Atlantic, 1/27/21; Newsweek, 7/25/23), that today’s social justice warriors are the true enemies of free speech.

John McWhorter (New York Times, 4/23/24): "Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?"

McWhorter found a limit to free speech and academic freedom earlier this year. He wrote (New York Times, 4/23/24) that he decided not to subject his students to an exercise where they would listen to the sounds around them, because they would be forced to listen to pro-Palestine protesters' "infuriated chanting." He said:

Lately that noise has been almost continuous during the day and into the evening, including lusty chanting of “From the river to the sea.” Two students in my class are Israeli; three others, to my knowledge, are American Jews. I couldn’t see making them sit and listen to this as if it were background music.

I thought about what would have happened if protesters were instead chanting anti-Black slogans.... They would have lasted roughly five minutes before masses of students shouted them down and drove them off the campus.... Why do so many people think that weeklong campus protests against not just the war in Gaza but Israel’s very existence are nevertheless permissible?….

The idea is that Jewish students and faculty should be able to tolerate all of this because they are white.

He's clearly trying to portray leftist protesters as hypocritical and applying double standards: They readily seek to shut down racist speech but find anti-Israel speech "permissible."

Yet McWhorter himself, so quick to condemn what he says is "a form of abuse" of Jewish students through the "relentless assault" of protesters' Israel-critical speech—and with no words of reproach for the school president's decision to "crack down" on the protests and their freedom of expression—applies a very different standard when the campus speech in question is racist, sexist or homophobic.

'Flagrant unprofessional conduct'

For McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24), "upholding the ideals of free speech" requires not punishing a professor who publicly insults her Black students.

In sharp contrast to his denunciation of pro-Palestine protesters' speech, McWhorter (New York Times, 10/3/24) offered a full-throated defense of Amy Wax, a University of Pennsylvania law professor who has been sanctioned by the school for "flagrant unprofessional conduct," including “a history of making sweeping, blithe and derogatory generalizations about groups by race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and immigration status,” as well as "breaching grade privacy requirements" (Wall Street Journal, 9/24/24).

A faculty panel unanimously recommended Wax be suspended for a year at half salary, publicly reprimanded and stripped of her named chair; Wax has appealed the recommendation and is still teaching.

Wax has said that the US is “better off with fewer Asians and less Asian immigration” (CNN, 9/25/24). The Daily Pennsylvanian (8/10/17) wrote that, in an interview, Wax "said Anglo-Protestant cultural norms are superior”: “I don't shrink from the word ‘superior'.... Everyone wants to go to countries ruled by white Europeans.”

Wax made public comments about Black students' grades that were both a violation of confidentiality and, according to the Penn law school dean, false (Vox, 2/16/23):

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a Black student graduate in the top quarter of the class, and rarely, rarely, in the top half. I can think of one or two students who scored in the top half of my required first-year course.

The law professor has repeatedly invited white nationalist Jared Taylor to deliver guest lectures in her class, including this semester, after the faculty panel's recommendation. She will be a featured speaker at a conference sponsored by Taylor's white supremacist journal American Renaissance (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24)—where, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center, "racist ‘intellectuals’ rub shoulders with Klansmen, neo-Nazis and other white supremacists.”

Given McWhorter's previously stated belief that Jewish students shouldn't have to listen to speech like "from the river to the sea," one might expect that he would similarly condemn Wax's subjection of her Black and brown students to eugenicist, white supremacist speech.

Instead, McWhorter uses the Wax affair to defend the right of free speech, a role he didn’t take on when his own school clamped down on anti-genocide protests (Columbia Spectator, 4/4/24). Her views might be "Outrageous, Demeaning, Dangerous," his headline declared, but "She Shouldn't Be Punished" for them.

'Living with discomfort'—or not

"We regard this to be a case not of free speech, which is broadly protected by University policy...but rather of flagrant unprofessional conduct by a faculty member," a U Penn faculty panel insisted (Daily Pennsylvanian, 9/10/24).

McWhorter, as a part of the anti-woke media movement to frame liberalism as the opponent of openness, accepts Wax as a victim of the cancel mob: “Her suspension,” he said, “is a kind of ritual act, an unconvincing performance of moral purity.”

He wrote: “Upholding the ideals of free speech means living with the discomfort—or even anger and injury—that offensive ideas can cause.”

The contrast with his earlier column is striking. If a Black or brown student is subjected to white supremacist speech, by his account, that student’s "discomfort—or even anger and injury" is their problem, and of less importance than protecting free speech. But if a white student is subjected to anti-Zionist speech, McWhorter considers it a "form of abuse" that they should not be expected to simply "be able to tolerate."

Penn Provost John L. Jackson, Jr.’s statement on the matter makes clear that Wax isn’t being sanctioned for merely breaking liberal conventions of decorum. A faculty review board found that Wax "engaged in 'flagrant unprofessional conduct' that breached [her] responsibilities as a teacher to offer an equal opportunity to all students to learn" from her (University of Pennsylvania Almanac, 9/24/24). The decision resulting from the investigation, to which the statement links, also says that the inquiry board decided against recommending a much tougher punishment, “namely, termination from her faculty position.”

McWhorter deems the disciplinary action "egregious," yet he voiced no similar complaints about disciplinary actions taken by Columbia and other schools against pro-Palestine protesters. He was also quick to call for the ouster of Harvard President Claudine Gay, a Black scholar who had been hounded by right-wing congressmembers over allowing criticism of Israel on her campus (NPR, 12/12/23; FAIR.org, 12/12/23) before being pushed out in a plagiarism scandal. McWhorter (New York Times, 12/21/23) admitted that the school’s plagiarism “policy may not apply to the university’s president,” but said the vibes of the matter trumped procedure, saying “Gay would be denigrating the values of ‘veritas’ that she and Harvard aspire to uphold” if she stayed.

Acceptable and unacceptable restrictions

Columbia University's suspension of the school's Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace chapters (Columbia Spectator, 11/29/23) apparently did not contradict "the ideal of free speech," in McWhorter's view, because the university had not "categorically prohibited criticism of Israel."

McWhorter recognized the parallels between the Wax affair and the pro-Palestine protests, but insinuated the usual, and false, media equation between pro-Palestine and anti-Black speech that paints anti-Zionism as antisemitism (FAIR.org, 12/15/23). He wrote that the protests are another example in which universities have struggled with "identifying the line between legitimate protest and threats or harassment":

Student clubs have been suspended, demonstrations have been pushed off campus and at least one professor has been fired for sharing anti-Israel sentiments. But no university has categorically prohibited criticism of Israel. That’s because, as uncomfortable as the debate about Israel can be, and as close to home as it hits for many students, letting them encounter ideas that differ from their own is an important part of their education that prepares them to take their place in a democracy.

The idea that racism is so uniquely toxic that it should be an exception to the ideal of free speech is not self-evident. It is specific to this moment, and will probably seem unwise and arbitrary to future chroniclers. Especially for universities, if exposing people to potential discomfort is permissible when it comes to geopolitics, then it must also be permissible when it comes to race.

McWhorter seems to be drawing a line between acceptable and unacceptable restrictions on speech: Suspending student clubs, "pushing" demonstrations off campus (with the help of police in riot gear) and firing professors for anti-Israel sentiments are apparently fine by McWhorter, whereas "categorical" prohibitions on anti-Israel speech would cross the line.

It's remarkable that McWhorter doesn't see that firing a professor over anti-Israel views is quite obviously a much harsher punishment than Wax faces—or that suspending a professor for a year for specific actions that harmed students is not a categorical prohibition on racist speech.

Enormous chilling effect

Natasha Lennard (Intercept, 5/16/24): "Since the beginning of Israel’s war on Gaza, academics...have been fired, suspended or removed from the classroom for pro-Palestine, anti-Israel speech."

What's more, while he claims there has been no blanket ban on pro-Palestine thought, there have been so many official actions against faculty and students that we now see an enormous chilling effect on speech.

McWhorter did link to the Intercept story (9/26/24) on the firing of a tenured professor at Muhlenberg College for having

shared, on her personal Instagram account…a post written not by herself but by Palestinian poet Remi Kanazi calling for the shunning of Zionist ideology and its supporters.

But there’s much more. New York University added “Zionist” to a list of “examples of speech that could violate the university’s Non-Discrimination and Anti-Harassment policies” (Washington Square News, 8/26/24), which has FAIR wondering what impact this might have on professors who teach Middle Eastern history.

Steven Thrasher, an acclaimed journalist who has commented here at FAIR, teaches social justice reporting at Northwestern University, where he may lose employment because of his activism against the genocide in Gaza. Democracy Now! (9/5/24) reported that the university “filed charges against Thrasher for obstructing police that were later dropped.” However, “students returning to Northwestern for the fall term will not see him in their classrooms, because he has been suspended as Northwestern says he is under investigation.”

Hyperallergic (9/20/24) reported that at Barnard College, the women’s college associated with Columbia, the administration sent

behavioral directives for Barnard employees, specifying that “messaging...supporting a geopolitical viewpoint or perspective while denigrating or remaining silent about an opposing geopolitical viewpoint or perspective” and posting political signs on office doors would go against the college’s community values.

Telling sociologists, historians, political scientists and anthropologists to refrain from “supporting a geopolitical viewpoint” is like telling a quarterback not to pass the football. Once again, this is the kind of directive that undoes the kind of open discourse McWhorter says he supports.

Tip of the iceberg

Radhika Sainath (Inside Higher Ed, 9/16/24): "Trying to appease pro-Israel forces by preventing protests against Israel’s brutal war in Gaza...colleges are rewriting policies that will have dire consequences on university life for years to come."

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to campus repression of anti-genocide activists—many of whom are Jewish, despite McWhorter's attempt to treat criticism of Israel as a form of anti-Jewish bigotry. Radhika Sainath, a senior staff attorney at Palestine Legal, wrote about the widespread erosion of freedom on campuses this year at Inside Higher Ed (9/16/24):

Indeed, my office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves. Often, no reason is given.

On one campus, students were slapped with conduct violations for writing an op-ed discussing a Gaza encampment in positive ways. Potlucks for Palestine have been canceled. Professors who reference Gaza or Palestine in their courses are told those courses are not fit for the curriculum, or having their syllabi scrutinized—or turned over to Congress in a manner reminiscent of the McCarthy era. Adjuncts have been fired. Tenure-track professors suspended. Tenured professors investigated.

If universities banned students from wearing Tibetan clothes or canceled “momo night” because these things might offend Chinese students, we could bet good money that McWhorter and the rest of the anti-woke pack would be up in arms, and rightfully so.

But McWhorter is only fighting to protect conservatives, which are classified as political victims in liberal academic society. We have come to expect such hypocrisy from the New York Times and other media’s anti-woke moral panic (FAIR.org, 10/23/20, 7/23/21, 11/17/21, 3/25/22). But it's remarkable that McWhorter feels comfortable being so contradictory and misleading in disingenuous pursuit of “free speech.”

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