UT protects free speech — unless it’s pro-Palestine
Months before the University of Texas at Austin President Jay Hartzell oversaw an “outrageous and unnecessary” crackdown on Gaza solidarity demonstrators, the record of public intellectual activity on UT’s “Forty Acres” campus casts doubt on Hartzell’s claim to be protecting free speech “uniformly and consistently” without “discriminating against any particular point of view,” as he wrote in a recent Chronicle op-ed. During the late fall and winter, UT showcased a pernicious double standard. Speakers supporting Israeli policy were twice backstopped by campus security while a prominent Palestinian-American legal academic was sidelined over alleged safety concerns. It is an example of the phenomenon legal scholars have dubbed “The Palestine Exception to Free Speech.”
On Dec. 6, 2023, the UT law school hosted “An Evening with Bari Weiss,” featuring remarks by the conservative former New York Times columnist. Minutes into Weiss’ address, some 40 demonstrators stood and began calling, “Free, free Palestine.” They were promptly escorted outdoors by UT police. Weiss resumed her talk, with hundreds — including myself — still in attendance.
Her narrative was that Israel and its allies were fighting a civilizational struggle against barbarism, a thesis that I found erroneous and objectionable. Still, I was glad that the law school had hosted Weiss, that the UT administration had not let agitators silence her and that I had heard her argument. I hoped that all attendees would return for the series’ next event, “The Athenaeum presents Prof. Noura Erakat,” on Jan. 25.
Erakat, an accomplished human rights attorney, author, professor and public intellectual, contends that international law, while chronically flouted by the United States and Israel, remains integral for resolving the Israel-Palestine conflict. Therefore attendees of both talks would have gotten two influential, distinct perspectives on the IsraelGaza war: one that envisioned a clash of cultures, and one that celebrated the principles underpinning international order. Yet on the cusp of Erakat’s visit, event organizers yielded to the heckler’s veto they had proven so adept at neutralizing the month prior.
Days before Erakat was to visit Austin, law professor Ward Farnsworth announced her talk was being moved online. Citing “information from multiple sources,” he reported that badfaith actors had hoarded seats to crowd out “others who want to hear the talk,” that “many attendees (planned) to disrupt” the lecture and that there was an increased “threat of unspecified safety risks.” Farnsworth concluded that a shift to a webinar was “the available step most protective of speech under the circumstances.” Reaching for a throughline, he added parenthetically, “(I think the Weiss event would have been better if done online, too.)”
Contrary to Farnsworth’s reading, I think Weiss’ appearance would have been sorely diminished online, while the actual event — dissenters and all — was a model for handling controversial speech. Known figures such as Weiss and Erakat appear regularly on podcasts and YouTube channels. Physical lecture spaces on university campuses provide a qualitatively superior opportunity for engaging a cross-section of the local community. Watching Erakat lecture from my computer, I sensed the university was conceding its intellectual mission and free-speech principles to a shadowy, if not mythical, mob.
As it happened, the threat of hecklers — and the need to consign guest lecturers to Zoom — vanished overnight. The day after Erakat’s virtual appearance, Israeli-American writer Yaron Brook spoke on campus for 90 minutes about “Israel’s Moral War.” (He also livestreamed.) Amplifying Weiss’ themes, Brook called on the Israeli military to “defeat the Palestinian people” as the Allies in World War II had defeated Germany and Japan. Dissenting attendees periodically made counter statements, but UT police officers ensured that Brook retained the floor. (They even arrested one audience member after he refused instructions to stop recording on his phone.)
It stands to reason that UT police could have defended Erakat’s First Amendment rights just as well as they did Brook’s and Weiss’. Hartzell claims to be running a viewpoint-neutral university with events that “challenge the ways we think.” Yet to the best of my knowledge, for the rest of the semester, there were no high-profile in-person lectures covering anything like Erakat’s message. If the university president believes in permitting a robust and open-ended debate on the Israel-Gaza War, he will need to prove it. The first step would be to direct the resources of his office, including campus police, toward hosting and protecting — rather than suppressing — pro-Palestinian speech.