Brandeis lands in the thick of clashing views over Israel-Hamas war

Censorship is not how to combat antisemitism

Brandeis University president Ronald D. Liebowitz turned to censorship to combat campus antisemitism. He’s wrong.

On the same day the Globe published Liebowitz’s op-ed, “How universities should confront antisemitism on campus” (Nov. 6), Brandeis became the first private university to ban its campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine following the national SJP’s call for its chapters to support Palestinian resistance. Liebowitz claimed this ban does not “violate higher education’s deep and enduring commitment to free speech.”

If Brandeis, a private institution, is genuinely committed to free speech (“Brandeis ban raises free speech issues,” Page A1, Nov. 8), it must uphold, not censor, student advocacy. “Core political speech,” according to the Supreme Court, is where free speech protections should be at their “zenith.” Without evidence that Brandeis’s SJP chapter crossed the line into true threats, incitement, harassment, or material support for terrorism, all Brandeis has done is censor a pro-Palestinian student group, setting a precedent for more censorship.

Barring groups that “spew hate” from campus may seem laudable, but it allows administrators to censor ideas they subjectively find offensive. Censorship is not how you combat antisemitism. The university’s own principles on maximizing free speech cite Justice Louis Brandeis’s remedy of “more speech, not enforced silence,” for the process of education.

GRAHAM PIRO

Program officer, campus rights advocacy Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Washington, D.C.

If Brandeis is genuinely committed to free speech, it must uphold, not censor, student advocacy.