With the rapid spread of the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) industry on campus, free speech principles have taken yet another hit in America. Up until now, it has been little appreciated just how incompatible DEI rules are with the First Amendment, but events on campuses relating to the recent Israel-Hamas war have shined a light on the issue.
The values embedded in the Bill of Rights of our Constitution begin with a presumption of equality. EVERYBODY gets to say whatever they wish, everybody is protected from unreasonable searches, everybody gets to have a gun and defend himself, everybody gets to go to whichever church they desire, etc. Further down the line, exceptions begin to appear: maybe felons don’t get to have guns, maybe pictures of children being sexually assaulted are not “free speech,” maybe the religion that practices ritual sacrifice of virgins doesn’t get the same deference as, say, Baptists. But equality is where we start.
DEI, however, starts not with equality, but with a hierarchy based on group victimhood. Muslims are at or near the top, then gays and transsexuals and blacks and people of color, and women and Hispanics and third-worlders, and so on. At the bottom are white people and Jews (who are sort-of white and sort-of “colonizers”), and Asians who study hard and get perfect SAT scores. The good people at the top of the scale can say or do whatever they want and it’s OK because they have been oppressed. The whites and Jews and Asians can be silenced and ignored and beaten and have no right to even complain about it. All rights flow from the accepted hierarchy of oppression.
The reaction on American campuses to the October massacre of Israeli innocents is entirely derived from the DEI hierarchy, which is widely accepted at the most prestigious schools (e.g., Ivy League), in America. Muslims, at the top of the list, are justified in doing ANYTHING to Jews because Jews are oppressors and scum and colonizers and sort-of white. And that belief among the DEI-addled students would be just fine with the administrators and professors who run these places if the kids would just keep quiet about it.
But they can’t. Not only do the leftists loudly blame Israelis for being massacred, they try to beat up Jewish students who object to it and they tear down posters of Israeli hostages the Jewish kids put up on campus. If there were any respect for free speech and the First Amendment, Jewish students would at least be allowed to express their disapproval of the beheadings and torture, but any respect for the First Amendment is based in equality, and in the idea that anybody can speak, even Jews. That idea is intolerable to anyone who has been indoctrinated with the tenets of DEI.
One problem that has arisen is that a lot of people who give a lot of money to these universities are Jewish, and they are now saying they don’t want to give any more money. Presidents of universities have to answer to their boards and the board members want to know if the school is still going to get $100 million donations from this Jewish guy or that one.
The response to this from university presidents has been (almost) humorous. They will NOT embrace equality and free speech because that would be incompatible with the DEI business. They cannot conceive of Jews and white people having the same right to speak as Muslims and gays and others at the top of the pyramid. Instead, their plan is to ban more speech, specifically antisemitic speech. This is the scheme of Liz Magill, President of the University of Pennsylvania, which is currently experiencing a revolt by its most generous alumni.
I close with the letter I sent to the Philadelphia Inquirer about the problems at UPenn.
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To the Editor:
Penn will never get past its speech problems until it accepts its obligations under the First Amendment.
The Foundation of Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has put Penn on its list of America's 10 worst colleges for free speech. Its national survey of students puts Penn second worst in the country (behind only Harvard), for suppression of student speech. Yet President Liz Magill’s solution to Penn’s donor revolt is simply to add Jew-hatred to the list of things that cannot be expressed at Penn.
The real solution is not complicated. Allow people to say or chant whatever they want, no matter how loathsome or “threatening” it may be to the more delicate sensibilities on campus. At the same time, anyone committing vandalism, real violence, or silencing of other speakers or speech should be expelled immediately and turned over to the cops.
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Copyright2023MichaelKubacki
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