On Friday, Columbia University agreed to fulfill the Trump administration’s demands in exchange for the release of millions of dollars in suspended funds. Charles Fain Lehman explains that the government, by withholding the money, has in fact succeeded in protecting free speech on campus:

The ideal of academic freedom requires order and safety—not safety from “dangerous ideas,” but from actual violence. Free speech on campus is only possible if students do not have to fear that their dissenting views will be met with threats. And it is only possible if they can participate in classes or enter buildings without intimidation or disruption—otherwise, discourse is not possible.

Several of the conditions are tailored to check disruptive “speech” that forestalls actual discussion. The demand that Columbia implement “rules to prevent disruption of teaching, research, and campus life” means that student protest doesn’t get to shut down academic life. And the insistence that Columbia impose a ban on masking is . . . consistent with the First Amendment and with the dozens of state laws that recognize public, non-health-related masking as intimidating and deceitful.

But perhaps part of the problem is that Columbia’s administrators themselves do not understand the meaning of freedom of expression:

Two Columbia janitors recently filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in which they allege that they were not only routinely forced to scrub swastikas from campus walls, but were assaulted during the occupation of Hamilton Hall [by anti-Israel radicals]. When they raised concerns about the graffiti, the two claim, they were told that “the trespassers and vandals were exercising their First Amendment rights.”

There is, of course, no interpretation of the First Amendment that protects the freedom to trespass or to destroy property. All that being said, there are serious concerns that can be raised about the effects of current federal policy on freedom of speech, and Keith Whittington provides a rare good-faith formulation of these concerns here.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.