Don’t confuse academic freedom with free speech
- When it comes to free speech, I am a relativist. But with academic freedom, I am an absolutist, almost
I find myself agreeing with some of the most pro-Israeli, anti-China members of the US Congress. Good God, I need to check in with my head doctor!
Maybe it has to do with Hong Kong’s experience of hundreds of students vandalising their own university facilities and buildings during the anti-government unrest of 2019.
I don’t see why universities anywhere in the world need to tolerate destructive behaviour and/or wrecking of properties and mass disruptions, by their students, however justified and righteous they think their cause may be. That is not free speech. But even if it were …
I am thinking about this all again because of the latest congressional testimonies given by the heads of three top US universities – Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania – about the alleged rise of antisemitism on US campuses.
As the shoe is on the other foot, US politicians who cheered Hong Kong student rioters as freedom fighters are now denouncing their own protesting students who have actually been far more peaceful, if noisy, as being antisemitic, for taking a stance against the US-Israeli war on the Palestinians.
Only in the US Congress, as opposed to most other places in the world, does criticising Israel’s war on Gaza amount to antisemitism.