After seeing anti-Israel protesters reestablish their encampments and grow increasingly threatening for over a week, Columbia University yesterday allowed riot police to remove demonstrators who had taken over a campus building. That doubtlessly would not have been required had the school’s administrators been less reluctant to act. Ilya Shapiro, an expert on constitutional law, argues that academic administrators have ample means at their disposal to crack down on the sources of the unrest, without running afoul of protections on freedom of speech or other civil liberties:
Long before October 7, chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) were notorious among openly anti-Semitic pro-Palestinian groups. . . . During the 2022–23 academic year, SJP chapters were responsible for 423 of 665 documented campus anti-Israel incidents. The presence on campus of an SJP chapter is “one of the strongest predictors of perceiving a hostile climate toward Israel and Jews,” according to a 2016 study from Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies.
Threats, harassment, intimidation, and interference with educational programs are all lawful justifications for restricting students’ expressive activities. But can they justify disallowing student groups?
Indeed they can, Shapiro explains, when these groups can be shown—as is the case with SJP—to provide material support for terrorism:
Notably, soon after Hamas’s massacre, national SJP released a Day of Resistance Tool Kit that boasted: “we as Palestinian students in exile are PART of this movement, not in solidarity with this movement.” As the Supreme Court ruled in 2011, the government may prohibit even nonviolent “material support” for terrorist organizations, including legal support and other advice, without violating the First Amendment. Though the government must provide valid reasons for dissolving the chapters, that may not be hard here.
What schools should do to avoid supporting nasty groups is adopt clear, neutral principles, requiring applicants to adhere to constitutions that ban discrimination based on ancestry, ethnicity, or religion, and they should apply the rules consistently. A low bar, perhaps, but that so many institutions fail to reach it further highlights the decay in higher education.
More about: American law, Columbia University, Israel on campus