Meanwhile, another Times article today profiled pro-Palestinian activists who feel chastened after intense backlash to campus protests. Some wear masks to demonstrations, worried about job prospects. One Palestinian-American student said simply: "I am scared to talk about Palestine and I'm Palestinian."
Everyone claims their speech rights are under assault, yet somehow everyone also seems to be silencing everyone else. Campus speakers require small armies for protection. Protesters face professional blacklisting. Students fear expressing their identities. Administrators cave to political pressure from all sides.
We have lost the ability to distinguish between protecting speech and protecting speakers, between civil disobedience and coercion, between the right to protest and the right to silence others. This is not a free speech crisis. It is an ethics crisis.
I am writing a book that argues that a secularized form of Jewish ethics is exactly what the world needs today. These are exactly the types of thorny questions that a cohesive ethics framework can help answer, and where today's existing ethics frameworks fall woefully short.
Consider how the Times article on anti-Israel protests systematically conflates different categories of action. Some students participated in peaceful protests. Others occupied buildings, blocked access to classes, and harassed Jewish students. The article treats these as points on a single spectrum of "protest activity" and "civil disobedience" rather than fundamentally different kinds of acts. But the ethical obligations around speech are not identical to the obligations around physical obstruction and intimidation. You may have the right to express unpopular views. You do not have the right to prevent others from accessing their workplace, attending their classes, or moving freely through public spaces.
When activists shut down bridges and train stations, they were not engaging in speech. They were using their bodies as weapons to coerce compliance. The same applies to occupying campus buildings or blocking access to facilities. These are forms of power assertion, not discourse. The article quotes Tyler Coward of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression expressing concern about threats "both from the government and from within the university itself that are really damaging the climate for open debate." But notice what is missing: any discussion of threats from protesters themselves to open debate and free inquiry. When students chant slogans that make Jewish peers feel unsafe, occupy buildings, disrupt classes, and prevent normal university operations, they are exercising power to silence others. Calling it "resistance" does not change its nature.
The article quotes activists with wistfulness: "We spent a year thinking about what went wrong. We thought we'd all get arrested, and then everyone would rise up and stop the United States from aiding Israel." This is remarkably revealing. These activists did not think they were participating in conversation. They thought they were sparking revolution. They believed disrupting normal university operations would force others to see the world as they did and join their cause. This is not the mindset of people engaged in persuasion. It is the mindset of people engaged in coercion.
Civil disobedience in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. involved accepting punishment as part of bearing moral witness. Modern campus protesters seem shocked their actions carried consequences. They occupied buildings and blocked access, then expressed outrage that universities suspended them or withheld degrees. They engaged in tactics designed to impose costs on others, then claimed victim status when they themselves faced costs. There is a coherent ethical framework for protest that crosses legal boundaries: accepting responsibility for the breach, making the moral case so compelling that the punishment itself becomes persuasive, and maintaining nonviolent discipline. What we saw on many campuses was different: attempts to impose costs without bearing them, to disrupt others' lives while claiming immunity, to silence opposing views while demanding protection for one's own. That is not about exercising rights. It is about weaponizing rights.
The proper response to these thorny questions is not whataboutism. If politicians or campus administrators go too far to penalize valid protests, then that should be called out as unethical as well. The underlying error is treating ethical evaluation as comparative rather than categorical. An act is either ethical or not based on its own merits, not based on whether something worse exists elsewhere. The whataboutism defense reveals how thoroughly rights language has corrupted our moral reasoning. We cannot acknowledge that our side might have done something wrong without feeling we have conceded the entire argument. We have lost the ability to say: "Yes, what we did was problematic, but it does not rise to the level of what they did, and both can be true simultaneously."
Then there are competing obligations that transcend simple questions of free speech rights.
When the University of Florida hosted Spencer in 2017, security cost over $600,000. Spencer's organization paid about $10,000 to rent space. The university paid the rest. One Times op-ed argues universities should "proudly pay for as much security as is necessary" to protect free speech. But this misses the fundamental question: is spending the equivalent of one hundred students' annual tuition to protect one speaker a sound allocation of university resources?
This is not primarily a free speech question. It is an institutional ethics question. Universities have finite resources and multiple obligations: educating students, supporting research, maintaining facilities, providing financial aid. The reflex to frame every campus controversy as a free speech issue prevents us from asking whether universities should be required to host any speaker regardless of cost.
But there is a deeper problem. If people understood the line between speech and coercion, we should never reach the point where threats to peace are so dangerous that half a million dollars in security becomes necessary. Police are needed to protect against violence, not against nonviolent protest. When security costs reach this level, something has gone catastrophically wrong with our civic culture.
The massive security requirement reveals one of two ethical failures. Either the anticipated protesters do not understand that disrupting an event through force or intimidation crosses from protest into coercion—in which case our educational institutions have failed to teach basic civic ethics—or the speaker's own words constitute incitement that predictably provokes violence. If Spencer's rhetoric itself incites violence or constitutes threats, then he has disqualified himself as a legitimate campus speaker regardless of First Amendment protections. Universities are not required to provide platforms for speech that crosses from persuasion into incitement. The question is not whether Spencer has a legal right to speak somewhere, but whether a university or other institution has an ethical obligation to facilitate it.
The problem is that we have lost the conceptual framework to make these distinctions clearly. Instead of asking "Does this speech serve truth-seeking or does it incite harm?" we ask only "Is this legally protected speech?" These are different questions requiring different kinds of reasoning—ethical versus legal—and conflating them leaves us unable to resolve the dilemma.
Perhaps the most complex issue involves career penalties. Should students face professional consequences for political activism? The Times profiles students "worried the blowback has been so severe that the American belief in civil disobedience to achieve political ends has been eroded." Jewish ethics offers more nuance than rights language allows. Human dignity suggests people should not face professional ruin for expressing political views, particularly on matters of conscience. But truth-seeking and institutional integrity suggest organizations have legitimate interests in evaluating whether prospective employees' publicly expressed views are compatible with the organization's mission.
The distinction matters. If a student participated in peaceful protest, wrote opinion pieces, or engaged in lawful advocacy, punishing them professionally seems vindictive and wrong. But if they participated in tactics that violated others' rights, engaged in harassment or intimidation, or celebrated violence, then organizations are justified in considering that behavior relevant to employment. This is not about punishing political views. It is about evaluating character and judgment. The article mentions federal judges declaring they would not hire law clerks from Columbia because of how it handled demonstrations. This seems like collective punishment, penalizing students who had no control over administrative decisions. But business figures discouraging employers from hiring specific activists who crossed ethical lines are making individual judgments about specific conduct. That is categorically different. The principle is not "never let politics affect employment decisions." It is "distinguish between lawful political expression and conduct that violates ethical obligations toward others."
The Times article notes that "some states have tried to put new restrictions on campus speech that are testing the limits of the First Amendment. Last week, a judge blocked a Texas law that would forbid protest activity at public universities during nighttime hours and would limit noise, among other restrictions." But noise ordinances are not a free speech issue. Every municipality has noise ordinances restricting how loudly you can play music or set off fireworks, particularly at night. No one considers this a grave threat to liberty. We accept that your right to make noise ends where it creates unreasonable burdens on others' ability to sleep, study, or enjoy their property.
Why should protest be different? To say that protests can violate others' rights while late night wedding receptions cannot is to twist free speech in ways that make it run roughshod over other rights. The entire idea of competing rights muddies the waters of what is permissible or not. The Bill of Rights allows owning guns, that does not mean one can practice shooting at 2 AM. Rallies with megaphones are no different. The ethical principle is proportionality. Your right to express political views does not override others' right to access their workplace, attend their classes, or move through public spaces. When protest tactics impose costs on people who are not the targets and who have no power to address the protesters' grievances, those tactics cross ethical lines.
All of this confusion reveals the bankruptcy of rights-based frameworks for resolving complex social conflicts. When everyone claims absolute rights and no one acknowledges competing obligations, we get paralysis punctuated by power struggles. What we need is a coherent ethical framework that acknowledges multiple legitimate interests and provides principled ways to balance them. Start with core values: truth, dignity, mutual responsibility, preventing harm. These are not competing rights that cancel each other out. They are complementary obligations that create conditions for human flourishing.
Here is one suggested framework applied to campus controversies.
On controversial speakers: Universities should protect unpopular views but are not obligated to subsidize unlimited security costs. Rescheduling for safety is not censorship. Refusing to spend $600,000 on security for one speaker is reasonable resource allocation.
On speaker obligations: Anyone invited to speak should be willing to engage in dialogue, not just broadcast monologues. Speakers who refuse to take questions are not participating in the academic enterprise. They are using campus facilities as platforms for propaganda.
On protest tactics: Peaceful protest, including walkouts and symbolic demonstrations, should be protected even when offensive. But tactics that prevent others from hearing speakers, accessing buildings, or conducting normal business cross ethical lines. The test is not whether the cause is just but whether the tactics respect others' equal standing as moral agents.
On professional consequences: Students should not face career penalties for lawful political expression, even when unpopular. But organizations are justified in considering whether students' publicly expressed views or actions suggest poor judgment or unwillingness to respect others. The distinction is between penalizing political identity and evaluating character.
On institutional obligations: Universities must protect students from harassment regardless of political content. When protests create environments where Jewish students fear attending class, the university has failed. When administrators suspend students for peaceful sit-ins while ignoring harassment of minorities, they have abdicated responsibility. The standard is not ideological neutrality but functional integrity: can all students pursue education without fear?
On the difference between speech and incitement: Calling for illegitimate violence, even in coded language, is never acceptable. Chanting "Globalize the Intifada" or "By any means necessary" are calls to violence that cross the line from free speech into incitement.
This framework will not eliminate controversy. Hard cases remain hard. But it provides structure for reasoning through conflicts that honors multiple legitimate concerns rather than treating every issue as a battle between absolute rights.
The real free speech crisis is not that controversial speakers face protests. It is that we have lost the ability to distinguish between speech and conduct, between discourse and coercion, between protecting expression and subsidizing disruption. A university committed to truth would say: we welcome vigorous disagreement, but we insist on intellectual honesty. We protect speech, but we do not subsidize security circuses. We honor protest, but we prohibit coercion. We evaluate ideas based on their correspondence to reality, not their political valence. We hold everyone to the same standards of ethical conduct.
That is not censorship. That is integrity. And it is exactly what our universities, and our society, desperately need.
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