Westneat: Back to school on speech

“We don’t want Israel to exist,” one student organizer said to the crowd.

It has led to many calls to shut it all down.

“Ana Mari Cauce, when will you stop this?” wrote Roei Ganzarski, a Redmond tech CEO and UW business school grad, referring to the UW president. “Governor Jay Inslee, this is happening on state campuses. You need to stop this!”

On Thursday, Congress passed a resolution condemning any support for Hamas on college campuses, citing protests such as the ones at UW.

Here’s the thing: They can’t shut it down, even if they wanted to. It’s a public school, so UW is the government. As a result it has to allow free speech in public spaces no matter how offensive or misguided, provided there’s no specific threat attached.

I think Cauce has played this impossible issue about right. You can tell this because everybody is mad at her. She said the UW doesn’t condone the rallies. But also that they are protected speech and so she’s not going to do anything to stop them.

Students United for Palestinian Equality & Return, the rally sponsor, said it was their takeaway from Cauce’s comments that she’s siding squarely with Israel and “that the University of Washington supports Zionist war crimes.”

Meanwhile commenters on the right have charged that Cauce has allowed the UW to become a “cauldron of hate” where left-wing educators are indoctrinating young people into antisemitic views.

Can we have some perspective here? The rallies have featured a couple hundred students out of UW’s 50,000-plus.

It is unclear, though, how much support there even is on campus for the free speech principles that have been playing out there in real life.

When asked, for example, whether the UW should allow a speaker on campus who argues that abortion should be illegal, 66 percent of students said no. They said this though the anti-abortion view is a common position held by many Americans.

But when asked whether the UW should permit a speaker who argues to repeal the Second Amendment and confiscate guns, 67 percent of students said yes.

Free speech does not mean listening only to what you want to hear (although you are free to do that). The answers to both these questions should have been 100 percent yes. Because of its unique role as a public university, it would be illegal for the UW to bar either one of these speakers.

Maybe the Bill of Rights needs to be a required class?

Those calling for Cauce to be fired for allowing rallies where offensive views are expressed might also recall that her own brother was killed by the Ku Klux Klan during a protest in 1979, when she was 23. I’m sure she feels the pros and cons here as viscerally as anyone.

Now some bills in Congress are calling for defunding universities that don’t police anti-Israeli speech. Sorry, but the underpinning of our free speech culture is that anger, no matter how hatefully or ignorantly expressed, is better diverted into words than violence. Try banning or defunding certain speech and watch the pressure rise.

It is good, and also painful, that students are hashing all this out. Hopefully some are learning how to talk about the Middle East without falling into rank antisemitic or anti-Muslim tropes. Ideally they’re learning the value of free speech, but also how it comes with consequences. They’re young students after all. These are concepts countless adults are still struggling with.

UW is not a cauldron of hate. But it is a cauldron — exactly as it’s supposed to be.