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No venue of American life is more fraught with the tension between safety and censorship than the American college campus. Since the Hamas attack on Israel on Oct. 7, that tension has peaked as campuses across the country erupted with pro-Hamas demonstrations and, in many cases, against Jewish students and faculty.

Currently, the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights is conducting more than three dozen investigations related to antisemitism complaints on college campuses, according to a source with direct knowledge of many of the current investigations.

One of the more troubling recent episodes occurred at the University of California-Berkeley on Feb. 26. That night, Jewish students were forced to flee from protestors who a student-organized event, which featured a member of the IDF and Gaza war veteran as the main speaker.

from that night features the mob of protesting students shattering the glass of the building’s front doors and shouting, “Long live the intifada!” in unison. One student was called a “dirty Jew” while he .

Berkeley officials abruptly canceled the event over security concerns and evacuated Jewish students from the building. But not before some students were spat on or left in tears.

“It looks like the university chose to cancel the speech in the face of these protesters,” wrote UC Berkeley professor of law and former Justice Department official John Yoo in an email to 麻豆传媒映画. “Of course it’s outrageous. It gives the hecklers a veto. And it is anti-Semitic in intent. I thought Berkeley would do better.”

Long proud of its institutional reputation for free speech and its legacy at the epicenter of the anti-war and protest movements of the 1960s, administrators at Cal, like many other prestigious and progressive institutions in 2024, grow instantly timid in the face of hate speech or even physical attacks against Jews.

In January, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) that more than 500 antisemitic incidents have taken place on college campuses since Oct. 7, and said they had experienced or witnessed such activity on campus this academic year.

“As an urgent priority, colleges and universities must rigorously enforce their codes of conduct to protect against antisemitism, just as they do for other forms of identity-based harassment and discrimination,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt.

While there ought to be a place for vocal and even impassioned disagreement over Israel’s policies, many of the incidents cannot be dismissed as mere expressions of political disagreement over Israel’s military response to Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. They are expressions of visceral hatred.

At the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, for example, pro-Palestine protestors held up a sign that read, “Keep the World Clean,” with the image of a Jewish star of David in a trash can, according to a report by .

At Tufts University, Jewish undergrads said they were at a student government meeting. In another instance, a woman protesting just outside the Harvard campus held a sign that included a swastika.

These episodes of overt and, at times, physical harassment come on the heels of the of the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania at a congressional hearing over antisemitism on their campuses last fall. Those hearings precipitated a crisis at all three institutions and revealed a troubling double standard.

These were leaders of markedly progressive institutions, well-known for their careful policies that call for sensitivity on matters of language, race, and gender. Yet, when they were asked whether students should be allowed to call for the genocide of Jews, none were willing to give a direct answer. Can one imagine such a feeble response from those three elite university presidents had the question been about calling for the extermination of any other ethnic or religious minority group?

In an era where progressive leaders have often advocated for and put billions of dollars behind programs designed to police language and enforce sensitivity to marginalized groups that fall within the progressive basket of sympathetic identities, it provided a bracing contrast to see the collective shrug they offered when some extremists, emboldened by the Hamas attack on Israel, began to openly call for the death of Jews on American college campuses.

“I have lost confidence in the determination and ability of the Harvard Corporation and Harvard leadership to maintain Harvard as a place where Jews and Israelis can flourish,” wrote former Harvard president Larry Summers , previously known as Twitter.

Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the UC Berkeley School of Law, wrote in the in late October, “Nothing has prepared me for the anti-Semitism I see on college campuses now.”

Chemerinsky listed just a few examples of professors who went public with their hatred in the weeks following Oct. 7: A Yale professor called it “such an extraordinary day!” while a Columbia professor called the Hamas terrorist attack “awesome.” Not to be outdone, a Chicago art professor responded by saying, “Israelis are pigs. Savages. Very very bad people. Irredeemable excrement,” while a UC-Davis professor warned that “Zionist journalists” shouldn’t feel safe in their homes and should fear for the safety of their kids. “They can fear their bosses, but they should fear us more.”

In late January, the advocacy group Speech First filed a with the University of North Carolina after members of the group Students for Justice in Palestine disrupted a guest lecture by journalist Bari Weiss and faced no consequences for their actions. “Bari, Bari, you can’t hide; you’re committing genocide,” the students chanted.

These campus outbursts reflect a kind of contagion of negative attitudes about Jews and the state of Israel, particularly among the young. “Surveys suggest that many younger and minority voters deny the Holocaust and even favor ,” writes sociologist .

Some college administrators have responded to these outbursts with a glaring double standard. Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon that Middlebury College administrators told student organizers to remove the word “Jewish” from a vigil they were planning to honor victims of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack. The dean of students hoped that by making the change, “such a public gathering in such a charged moment might be more inclusive.” Meanwhile, Middlebury administrators, apparently, raised no such objection when the Muslim Students Association held a “Vigil for Palestine” less than a month later.

On the other hand, free speech advocacy groups worry that, in some cases, university officials have come down too hard on pro-Palestinian speech. For example, the Academic Freedom Alliance sent a to Texas Tech University after it suspended a professor for a series of social media posts that were critical of Israel and the war in Gaza, which the university as “hateful, antisemitic, and unacceptable.”

Likewise, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) to Ben Sasse, the former Republican senator and current University of Florida president, urging Sasse not to comply with an order by State University System Chancellor Ray Rodrigues on behalf of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to deactivate the Students for Justice in Palestine student group – an order that FIRE described in the letter as unlawful and in violation of the First Amendment.

The test many college administrators are facing and failing right now is whether they can apply a consistent policy when it comes to drawing the line between student safety and free speech.

In response to the violent protest last month at UC Berkeley, FIRE president Greg Lukianoff called for the expulsion of every student involved in the violence, and meaningful punishments for those who organized the shutdown of the event but did not participate in the violence. “If students that flagrantly and proudly violate the norms of free inquiry, open discourse, and freedom of speech on campus are not disciplined, the inevitable consequence will be even less hesitation to do it again,”

Shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater may be the Constitution’s . Oliver Wendell Holmes came up with it in a 1919 Supreme Court opinion as a way to illustrate the limits of free speech when it endangers public safety. And in the 100 years since, it has grown to occupy a place in popular culture, to the point that some – – believe that any speech that could cause harm to others falls outside the protection of the First Amendment.

In fact, there is a great deal of legally permissible speech that is downright harmful. Writer Jeff Kosseff has that Holmes’ metaphor is “widely and wrongly held to be a far-reaching exception to the First Amendment.”

So, what is a college president to do? If you can’t shout “Fire!” in a crowded theater, can you shout “Intifada Revolution” and “From the River to the Sea” on a college campus where Jewish students live and study? Where exactly is the line between deplorable yet allowable speech, and speech that is beyond even the scope of the widest practical interpretation of free speech? Under what circumstances is a university legally liable for failing to protect its students?

In an interview with 麻豆传媒映画, civil rights attorney William Trachman, a Jewish graduate of UC Berkeley and a former deputy assistant secretary in the Office of Civil Rights, explained that under Department of Education guidelines, “mere offensive language – whether about support for Hamas or the denial of the instances of rape perpetrated on October 7 – should not, standing alone, trigger liability under federal civil rights laws.”

In other words, while there may be room for legitimate debate among well-intentioned individuals on a given question, a line must be drawn when it comes to physical violence and incitement.

“Nevertheless,” Trachman added, “the Department owes a duty to enforce the law. No more, and no less. That includes responding to allegations of antisemitic harassment that go unaddressed by schools, and it means actually using its ability to withdraw federal funds in instances where schools don’t swiftly course correct.”

On March 5, the U.S. Department of Education UC Berkeley to a growing list of universities that are being investigated for possible discrimination and civil rights violations.

For any large research university, that means of dollars of federal funding annually are potentially at risk. A spokesman for the Department of Education declined to comment on the specifics of that investigation because it is ongoing.

Meanwhile, antisemitic outbursts on campus continue to raise concerns about academic leaders and their ability or willingness to respond properly. “I was shocked to see students and school officials announce their ‘exhilaration’ at the murders and rapes on October 7, and to offer support for Hamas in their published fliers, and by ripping down posters of Jewish hostages,” Trachman told 麻豆传媒映画. “It is shameful to see such conduct in places where learning is supposed to occur.”

“And with this latest disruption at UC-Berkeley,” Trachman continued, “I grieve for my alma mater, which was once at the center of the free speech movement. The Department of Education has not acted with sufficient speed in making sure events like these are adequately addressed, or done enough to prevent future inevitable instances of anti-Semitic harassment on campuses around the United States.”

Threatening students and causing the shutdown of campus events are not protected under the First Amendment. Furthermore, the principles of free speech applied to one group must be applied equally to all others.

The most revealing thing we saw from college administrators over the past five months, particularly those at elite institutions, was the inconsistency of their standards.

We observed that some administrators – who had spent years disinviting controversial speakers and aggressively enforcing policies to police language and ensure sensitivity toward marginalized groups –  suddenly became free speech champions in the face of calls for the death of Jews. No intellectually honest person could fail to question that double standard.