Hundreds of hate incidents have taken place on college campuses over the past two years, from nooses hung on trees to a 77 percent increase in White supremacist propaganda during the 2017-18 school year. Anti-Semitic acts have seen a particular surge in the past month, as swastikas have been carved in pumpkins, stamped in the snow, and painted on a Jewish professor’s office walls, to name just a few examples. “It’s unsettling at best, it’s terrorizing at worst,” said Lecia Brooks of the Southern Poverty Law Center in response to two incidents at Duke last month.
Despite the frequency of these events, many campus leaders continue to stumble badly in their responses. Some have put out public statements that do not condemn the hateful content of the messages, focusing only on how these actions violate campus policies, such as being posted by non-students, without permits or with improper adhesives. Others have responded unevenly to incidents targeting different groups. In other instances, leaders have only noted that such acts are protected by the First Amendment, and that people have the right to disagree.
Responses that do not strongly condemn the content of hateful acts can add a sense of institutional indifference to these already vile incidents, particularly in the eyes of those targeted. They also mistakenly position free speech against hate speech, assuming that protecting free speech means there are constraints on denouncing hate. This is categorically wrong.
Recent developments are making this more challenging, because hate speech is increasingly appearing in designated and de facto ‘free speech’ areas. In the past month for example, swastikas have been spray-painted twice on the Rock at University of Tennessee-Knoxville, as well as on the “free expression bridge” at Duke University. At the former, the interim chancellor was criticized for responding by stating only that the university “does not condone” such actions. Separately, the university noted that such messages were “hurtful and threatening to many members of our community.”
Statements like these can leave the impression that offense to hate is optional. By suggesting that only some on campus are impacted by a hateful incident, such statements miss the importance of expressing solidarity with vulnerable populations when it is most needed. Equivocating on this matter can adversely affect students’ sense of well-being, and contribute to negativity and anxiety in the campus climate.
Such deliberately neutral statements may be related to concerns about how to best navigate protections for free speech, or avoid accusations of censoring political opinions. After all, barring a threat to public safety, the First Amendment does offer protections for free speech at public universities and colleges (and most private universities also follow this standard). Historically, this protection has been extended even to terribly offensive and noxious statements. Although there have been changes in some university policies — such as at the University of Virginia’s recent ban of White supremacist Richard Spencer and nine other speakers in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville last year — free speech on campus continues to be litigated and enforced.
But university leaders who respond to hate by only citing free speech concerns misunderstand the relationship between the two issues. Condemning hate does not infringe on free speech protections. On the contrary: it is possible – and, in fact, essential — that campus leaders strongly condemn hateful incidents and simultaneously affirm the values of free speech and inclusion to their core research and teaching missions.
