Tag: give
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June 5th Closing Reception & Artist Walkthrough of *GIVE LIGHT* Exhibit @CUNYSLU
Higher Education Inquirer : June 5th Closing Reception & Artist Walkthrough of *GIVE LIGHT* Exhibit @CUNYSLU
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Euro visions: Austrian HE has much to give, but the love is wasted
As I type, a UK-EU “reset” summit is due to be held in 24 hours’ time, and in the face of “Brexit betrayal” and “surrender summit” commentary from the likes of former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, the government is out on the media rounds talking up Europe.
As such, it could probably have done without our Eurovision entry getting the dreaded “nul points” from televoters across the continent on Saturday night.
The Swiss are especially upset about a voting system that saw them come second with juries but share our “nul points” with televoters – although the commentary there is characteristically introspective.
It’s probably for the best that UK journalists filed all of their stories after the full UK televote was published in the night. We always tend to vote for Malta and Israel – but we also gave points to Poland, Greece, Lithuania, Latvia and Albania, which was almost certainly more about the size of their diaspora in the UK than the quality of their entries.
Meanwhile our televoters managed to give “nul points” to eventual winners Austria – whose singer Johannes Pietsch is a “soprano” countertenor at the Music and Arts University of the City of Vienna.
Rehearsals in Basel means that JJ missed out on placing his vote in last week’s Österreichische Hochschülerinnenschaft elections. In Austria, SU elections are held at the same time, using the same platform, nationwide at three levels – the federal level (BV), the university level (HV), and field of study (STV).
Traditionally, the ÖH gets less interest in private universities, where significantly fewer students vote, and only one “list” tends to compete at the university level. In the federal election, political parties’ youth wings’ involvement means that the process picks up considerable national press coverage – and students’ participation in it at least involves national debates about higher education rather than who’s giving out the best lollipops.
It also means that politicians are much more likely to have been involved in student representation and university governance than in the UK – a decade or so ago, current higher education minister Christoph Wiederkehr was chair of JUNOS (Junge liberale Studierende), the liberal student faction affiliated with NEOS, which is sort of like the Lib Dems, just without the weird stunts.
But despite the level of influence, given the political situation in Austria, rectors likely feel like JJ in “Wasted Love” – despite having much to give, his love ultimately goes to waste because the recipient isn’t willing to fully engage.
I reach out my hand
Until a decade or so ago, the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) (the centre-right, Christian democratic party) was in a “grand coalition” with the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) under Chancellor Werner Faymann, holding key ministries but facing criticism for slow reforms.
The ÖVP’s approach to higher education had typically balanced market-oriented perspectives with traditionalist values. Under Education Minister Martin Polaschek (an ÖVP appointee), they had focused on “stabilising university funding” while simultaneously introducing more restrictive admissions policies.
But like a lot of European countries, populism was on the march, and in 2017 it switched leader and formed a hardline coalition with the far-right Freedom Party (FPÖ) – although that collapsed in 2019 when the FPÖ’s leader was caught on camera discussing potentially corrupt deals with a woman posing as the niece of a Russian oligarch (the so-called “Ibiza scandal”).
Despite all of that, the Freedom Party (FPÖ) secured the largest vote share in last September’s federal election – and its stance on higher education was all about national identity, cultural conservatism, and scepticism towards progressive influences. Its manifesto was strong on the promotion of the German language and Austrian cultural values within universities, opposed “woke” ideology and “gender diktats”, and even proposed the reporting of mechanisms to flag “politically active educators”.
It topped the polls with nearly 29 per cent of votes – not quite enough to form a government, so the Austrian People’s Party (ÖVP) attempted to form a government with the Social Democrats (SPÖ) and the liberals (NEOS) to block the FPÖ.
When those talks collapsed in January 2025, President Van der Bellen tasked FPÖ leader Herbert Kickl with forming a government – leading to five weeks of negotiations between FPÖ and ÖVP, during which leaked documents revealed plans to significantly increase tuition fees, slash student representation in university governance, and tighten controls on academic freedom – as well as plans to restrict international student admissions, prioritise “native Austrian” applicants in competitive fields like medicine, and impose stricter oversight of academic content to curb what the FPÖ described as “leftist indoctrination.”
Eventually, Austria returned to a centrist coalition, with the ÖVP and SPÖ including NEOS in their new coalition, forming a government in March 2025 under Chancellor Christian Stocker (ÖVP). It’s quite a spread of views – the conservative ÖVP champions efficiency, market discipline and selective admissions with an eye toward business alignment, the centre-left SPÖ calls for open access, generous student grants and democratic governance as vehicles for social mobility, and the liberal NEOS promotes structural modernisation, flexible learning pathways and income-contingent loans to balance access with sustainability.
But you watch me grow distant
As in the UK, there are some major fiscal constraints. Austria’s budget deficit exceeded the EU’s 3 per cent limit in 2024 and is projected to reach 4 per cent in 2025, and so the coalition has agreed to implement cuts of €6.4 billion overall – with the ÖVP pushing for fiscal restraint, the SPÖ advocating for educational equality, and NEOS championing system reform.
And there’s no indication that the government will address the increasing financial pressure on university operations that led providers like TU Wien (Vienna University of Technology) to close its campus for a month as a cost-saving measure in the winter of 2022/23.
Students occupied the main auditorium under the banner “TUbesetzt” – calling it an unacceptable abdication of responsibility by both the government and the rectorate, given it denied students access to libraries, labs and study spaces right before exams.
They also criticized what they saw as conservative, outdated teaching and highlighted the lack of coursework on “societally relevant topics like queer-feminism, the climate crisis, and ethics” in technical curricula.
Occupiers demanded that the university recognize that “technology is not apolitical” and reform its teaching to prepare students for future challenges. On the same day, about 40 students at the University of Graz also occupied a lecture hall, focusing on campus sustainability (they demanded exclusively plant-based menus in cafeterias and more free student spaces) and mandatory climate-protection classes for all students.
Since the protest, TU Wien has launched its “fuTUre fit” initiative, culminating in a 2024 convention on sustainability, student-centered learning, and innovation. Key new initiatives include new courses like “Sustainability in Computer Science” and a sustainable design focus within the Faculty of Architecture.
You don’t want to go under
More widely, in the face of rocketing inflation, Austrian public universities had requested an extra €525 million, but ultimately only got €205 million in the 2024 budget. The government had previously topped up the national university budget by a total of €850 million to buffer rising prices – now a new multi-year commitment will only offset inflation and provide a “solid basis” for the next three years.
For students, an ÖH survey showed that students spend on average 43 per cent of their income on housing alone. Rising rents and utility costs are said to be pushing many into financial hardship, prompting calls for government intervention as private “luxury” student dorms proliferate but remain unaffordable.
The ÖH has urged reintroduction of a nationwide subsidy for student dormitories – abolished in 2011 – noting that since 1994, student grants had risen only about 15 per cent while living costs jumped roughly 90 per cent.
Even campus food has become a flashpoint. In 2024, student “mensas” (cafeterias) in Graz and Innsbruck shut down due to rising costs, while others hiked prices.
It cannot be that students have to go to the nearest supermarket or fast food because the local Mensa is outrageously expensive or even closed.
…argued ÖH chair Sarah Roßmann.
So far the coalition has only committed to maintaining the indexation of student financial aid to inflation, with the additional income limit for student grants already increased, and the value of study grants set to be adjusted for inflation each September.
When student numbers are capped, you can announce, take credit for and target investment – so it is growing study places in high-demand fields, particularly STEM subjects at Universities of Applied Sciences (UAS), with a goal of addressing skills shortages while also increasing the proportion of women in technical disciplines.
Digital transformation is seen as one of the ways out of the financial crisis – and with funding from government, Austria’s Digital University Hub (DUH) is attempting to achieve it via a major expansion in shared infrastructure rather than spend on commercial platforms.
There’s an Austrian University Toolkit (a modular IT toolkit for standard processes), a Digital Blueprint (a “toolbox for tech challenges”), ePAS+ (a national system for digital recruitment), HR4u (a national HR backbone), m:usi (a sports management platform), PASSt (a sector-owned student analytics platform), a Diversity Platform (a multilingual, interactive platform to enhance counseling and information processes), UVI-Sec (IT security enhancement) and uniCHAT (collaboration platform).
How do you not see that?
The FPÖ’s rise has been a challenge for a sector whose students are used to fighting far-right influence on campus. There have been ongoing protests, for example, against a University of Vienna professor (Lothar Höbelt) known for his far-right affiliations and favourable stance toward the FPÖ.
In 2020 left-wing and anti-fascist student groups repeatedly disrupted Höbelt’s lectures, eventually forcing the cancellation of one under slogans like “No room for Nazis at the university” – as well as protesting student fraternity (Burschenschaft) groups that they say use academic spaces to spread racist or antisemitic ideas.
More controversially, in late 2023 a “Pro-Palästina” protest camp was set up at the University of Vienna’s Altes AKH courtyard, demanding universities cut ties with institutions linked to military funding, including the European Defence Fund and the national defence program FORTE. Eventually, the police were sent in. Given Austria’s complex historical relationship with antisemitism and its post-World War II commitment to supporting Jewish communities and Israel, encampments were much more controversial than in the UK.
Both the university administration and the ÖH strongly condemned the protests, citing concerns over antisemitism, extremism, and the involvement of the BDS movement, and stressed the need for free but respectful discourse. Education Minister Martin Polaschek also called for “zero tolerance” towards hate, arguing that academic freedom should not shield extremism. FPÖ figures cheered the crackdown on the camp, claiming it validated their warnings about imported extremism on campuses – demanding harsher consequences for student protestors who “disrupt teaching” or “insult Austria”.
This wasted love
But probably the most interesting policy shift is one that is starting to recognise some of the limits of massification. While the universities of applied sciences are expanding, traditional universities have been told to tighten admissions for postgraduate courses and introduce more selective entry criteria.
It’s being discussed as a more “managed” expansion, in areas deemed to be economically strategic – and while government has tried to balance it all by indexing student grants to inflation and expanding support for underrepresented groups in STEM, the critique is that vocational will seen as the more accessible option, while traditional academic routes become even more exclusive than they are now.
That debate can be obscured in the UK, given the way in which we swedged together everything and called it a “university” back in 1992. But the coalition in Austria is grappling with the same problems that Labour is – Austria needs more graduates, just not that sort and not there. Coalition politics there may well mean it’s more likely to deliver it.
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Why First-Year Comp Classes Give Me Hope (opinion)
First-year composition courses, which are required of incoming students at many colleges and universities, lack cachet. No student gets excited about a comp class, and the faculty who teach these classes usually occupy the low rungs on the academic ladder. And right now, as crisis after crisis batters the country, and the world, first-year composition may seem even less important than usual. But in my 30 years of college teaching, it’s first-year comp classes that give me hope, because they offer the possibility of change.
These small, discussion-based classes give students much-needed practice in how to disagree without disrespect, and—if these classes were embedded more firmly into university curricula—they could radically reshape not only how students learn but how they participate in public life.
My students often come into their comp class with a chip on their shoulder: Why should they have to “learn to write”? They got themselves into college, after all, and if they get stuck on a writing assignment, there’s always ChatGPT. First-year writing is a waste of time, they think; they’re in college to take “real” classes, courses that matter.
I harbor a secret affection for these reluctant students, because I know that their resistance will melt when they discover the immensely practical importance of finding the right words for their ideas—and the accompanying sense of power that comes with being able to express themselves so that others understand them. Universities tell students that comp classes aren’t “content courses,” because writing courses aren’t discipline-specific. But then again, neither is the world we live in: Most of us live, work and think in multiple, overlapping contexts.
For many students, the composition class is the first (and for some, the only) place in college where they experience a seminar-style class that emphasizes process as much as (or more than) product. The paradigm of a composition course involves a reset: It’s not about “the right answer”; it’s about prioritizing curiosity over certainty and about students discovering not only that they have a voice, but that they can use this voice to explore their world. In the 21st-century university, in which faculty are asked for their “course deliverables,” as if learning were an assembly-line widget, comp classes exemplify an alternative to the sludgy tide of university corporatization.
Composition classes encourage questions, welcome mistakes and revisions, and value messiness and curiosity. During peer workshops, which are an integral part of these courses, I remind students that grades aren’t pie: Everyone can, conceivably, get an A in the course, so their workshop task is helping one another create more effective writing, not to tear each other’s drafts to shreds. Their success, in other words, does not depend on someone else’s failure.
There are other disciplines where students work iteratively and collaboratively—computer science, for example. But in composition workshops, students learn to ask the kinds of questions that promote reflection and refinement. They’re quick to pick up on one another’s sweeping generalizations—“throughout history, men and women have always disagreed”—and explain why those sorts of generalizations aren’t effective.
As they talk, they see how their own experiences might be radically different from those of the people reading their work, and they begin to understand how their experiences, consciously or not, have shaped how they see the world. In classroom conversations and workshops, they learn to disagree without rancor and to understand that how they chose to explain (or not explain) an idea has consequences for how they are understood. In a recent essay in The New York Times, Greg Weiner, president of Assumption University, writes that college campuses “are places where dissenting views deserve an elevated degree of respectful and scholarly engagement.” That’s a tall order for U.S. colleges these days, it seems, but it’s one of the underlying principles of composition classrooms.
“How could I say this better?” is a question I hear writers ask, to which their readers reply, “What do you really want to say, and why?” Students ask one another to explain the evidence for their claims, to examine their assumptions and to think about alternative ways of presenting their ideas. Composition courses help people become more effective writers because they help people become better listeners: Students learn to disagree without dismissiveness or disrespect. And as they help one another, they see ways to improve their own work; it’s a feedback loop that helps them find critical distance, which is essential for revision. Quite literally, students have to re-see their ideas and consider the impact of those ideas on their audience.
I remember when a male student from Shanghai read an essay written by a female student from the Persian Gulf about her struggles to be a dutiful daughter. “She totally read my mind,” the Shanghai student proclaimed. “Being a good son, trying to keep my parents happy—it’s exhausting!” His comment prompted a class discussion about the generational struggles they all shared, albeit across wildly divergent cultural experiences. Their differences prompted questions that led to connections; difference became an opportunity for exploration rather than a threat. Students were excited to write the essays that emerged from this conversation; they were invested in examining their own experiences in order to open those experiences to others.
That’s what reading and writing can give us: moments of connection with other people’s lives, which then help us see ourselves in a new light. Connection and distance, empathy and self-reflection: These are the qualitative moves that students practice in composition class. These are the deliverables.
These deliverables, however, don’t translate into status for composition teachers, who are typically not tenure-track or tenured; they are often called lecturers rather than professors, despite having a Ph.D. Most of us are what’s known as contingent faculty because we work on renewable contracts (sometimes semester to semester, sometimes in longer increments).
To be a composition teacher, then, means working in the trenches of the university rather than its ivory towers. I’ve been teaching some version of first-year writing for more than 30 years, and while I might hope otherwise, I know that only one or two semesters of writing instruction isn’t enough to create lasting change, even though the most resistant students admit to feeling like more confident and competent writers by the end of the course.
If universities had the courage to put composition at the center of their missions, however, they could create real change: What if students had expository writing classes every year for four years, regardless of their majors? Four years of slow, reflective, process-based writing about the world outside their specific subjects, with an emphasis on exploration and curiosity, rather than “the right answer”? What if the ability to reflect and reconsider, the twinned abilities at the heart of critical thinking, were the deliverables that mattered?
Imagine those students bringing that training into the public sphere. People who are eager to ask questions and interrogate assumptions (including their own), people who think in terms of process rather than product: These are the basic tenets of almost any composition class and yet, increasingly, these attitudes seem almost radical. People trained in this way could re-shape public discourse so that it becomes conversation rather than a series of point-scoring contests.
First-year comp is a content course. We just need to see that content as valuable.
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To Improve Peer Review, Give Reviewers More Choice (opinion)
“Greetings! You’ve been added to our journal’s editorial system because we believe you would serve as an excellent reviewer of [Unexciting Title] manuscript …”
You probably get these, too. It feels like such emails are propagating. The peer-review system may still be the best we have for academic quality assurance, but it is vulnerable to human overload, preferences and even mood. A result can be low-effort, late or unconstructive reviews, but first the editors must be lucky enough to find someone willing to do a review at all. There should be a better way. Here’s an idea of how to rethink the reviewer allocation process.
The Pressure on Peer Review
As the number of academic papers continues to grow, so do refereeing tasks. Scientists struggle to keep up with increasing demands to publish their own work while also accepting the thankless task of reviewing others’ work. In the wake, low-effort, AI-generated and even plagiarized reviewer reports find fertile ground, feeding a vicious circle that slowly undermines the process. Peer review—the bedrock of scientific quality control—is under pressure.
Editors have been experimenting with ways to rethink the peer-reviewing process. Ideas include paying reviewers, distributing review tasks among multiple reviewers (on project proposals), transparently posting reviews (already an option for some Nature journals) or tracking and giving virtual credits for reviews (as with Publon). However, in one aspect, journals have apparently not experimented a lot: how to assign submitted papers to qualified reviewers.
The standard approach for reviewer selection is to match signed-up referees with submitted papers using a keyword search, the paper’s reference list or the editors’ knowledge of the field and community. Reviewers are invited to review only one paper at a time—but often en masse to secure enough reviews—and if they decline, someone else may be invited. It’s an unproductive process.
Choice in Work Task Allocation Can Improve Performance
Inspired by our ongoing research on giving workers more choice in work task allocation in a manufacturing setting, it struck me that academic referees have limited choices when asked to review a paper for a journal. It’s basically a “yes, I’ll take it” or “no, I won’t.” They are only given the choice of accepting or rejecting one paper from a journal at a time. That seems to be the modus operandi across all disciplines I have encountered.
In our study in a factory context, productivity increased when workers could choose among several job tasks. The manufacturer we worked with had implemented a smartwatch-based work task allocation system: Workers wore smartwatches showing open work tasks that they could accept or reject. In a field experiment, we provided some workers the opportunity to select from a menu of open tasks instead of only one. Our results showed that giving choice improved work performance.
A New Approach: Reviewers’ Choice
Similar to the manufacturing setting, academic reviewers might also do better in a system that empowers them with options. One way to improve peer review may be as simple as presenting potential referees with a few submitted papers’ titles and abstracts to choose from for review.
The benefits of choice in reviewer allocation are realistic: Referees may be more likely to accept a review when asked to select one among several, and their resulting review reports should be more timely and developmental when they are genuinely curious about the topic. For example, reviewers could choose one among a limited set of titles and abstracts that fit their area of domain or methodological expertise.
Taking it further, publishers could consider pooling submissions from several journals in a cross-journal submission and peer-review platform. This could help make the review process focus on the research, not where it’s submitted—aligned with the San Francisco Declaration on Research Assessment. I note that double-blind reviews rather than single-blind may be preferable in such a platform to reduce biases based on affiliations and names.
What Can Go Wrong
In light of the increased pressure on the publishing process, rethinking the peer-review process is important in its own right. However, shifting to an alternative system based on choice introduces a few new challenges. First, there is the risk of authors exposing ideas to a broader set of reviewers, who may be more interested in getting ideas for their next project than engaging in a constructive reviewing process.
Relatedly, if the platform is cross-journal, authors may be hesitant to expose their work to many reviewers in case of rejections. Second, authors may be tempted to use clickbait titles and abstracts—although this may backfire on the authors when reviewers don’t find what they expected in the papers. Third, marginalized or new topics may find no interested reviewers. As in the classic review process, such papers can still be handled by editors in parallel. While there are obstacles that should be considered, testing a solution should be low in risk.
Call to Action
Publishers already have multi-journal submission platforms, making it easier for authors to submit papers to a range of journals or transfer manuscripts between them. Granting more choices to reviewers as well should be technically easy to implement. The simplest way would be to use the current platforms to assign reviewers a low number of papers and ask them to choose one. A downside could be extended turnaround times, so pooling papers across a subset of journals could be beneficial.
For success, the reviewers should be vetted and accept a code of conduct. The journal editors must accept that their journals will be reviewed at the same level and with the same scrutiny as other journals in the pool. Perhaps there could be tit-for-tat guidelines, like completing two constructive reviews or more for each paper an author team submits for review. Such rules could work when there is an economy of scale in journals, reviewers and papers. Editors, who will try it first?
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Don’t Give Trump Student, Faculty Names, Nationalities
The American Association of University Professors is warning college and university lawyers not to provide the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights the names and nationalities of students or faculty involved in alleged Title VI violations.
The AAUP’s letter comes after The Washington Post reported last week that Education Department higher-ups directed OCR attorneys investigating universities’ responses to reports of antisemitism to “collect the names and nationalities of students who might have harassed Jewish students or faculty.” The department didn’t respond to Inside Higher Ed’s requests for comment Thursday.
In a 13-page Wednesday letter to college and university general counsels’ offices, four law professors serving as AAUP counsel wrote that higher education institutions “are under no legal compulsion to comply.” The AAUP counsel further urged them “not to comply, given the serious risks and harms of doing so”—noting that the Trump administration is revoking visas and detaining noncitizens over “students’ and faculty members’ speech and expressive activities.” The administration has targeted international students and other scholars suspected of participating in pro-Palestinian advocacy.
Title VI of the federal Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination based on, among other things, shared ancestry, which includes antisemitism. But the AAUP counsel wrote that “Title VI does not require higher education institutions to provide the personally identifiable information of individual students or faculty members so that the administration can carry out further deportations.”
And Title VI investigations, they wrote, “are not intended to determine whether the students and faculty who attend these schools have violated any civil rights laws, let alone discipline or punish students or faculty.” They wrote that investigations are instead “intended to determine whether the institution itself has discriminated.”
Providing this information to the federal government may violate the First Amendment rights of those targeted, plus the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act and state laws, they wrote, adding that this information shouldn’t be turned over without “clear justification for the release of specific information related to a legitimate purpose in the context of a particular active investigation.”
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American Jews must not give an inch on free speech — even when words hurt us
This essay was originally published in Jewish Telegraphic Agency on March 14, 2025.
We can’t make antisemitism go away by censoring antisemites.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has said it is combating antisemitism at Columbia University by canceling $400 million in funding and detaining a former student over what the president has vexingly called “illegal protests” against Israel. It is also making a host of additional demands of the university.
Some Jewish groups are applauding the effort. But as an American Jew and free speech lawyer, I can tell you that protest alone isn’t illegal — and that giving the government the power to punish hateful speech will only erode our own right to speak out against hate.
In the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack led by Hamas on Israeli civilians and Israel’s military response, protests erupted on campuses nationwide. Some of the activities by student protesters were unlawful, like blocking fellow students from entering parts of campus or occupying buildings. But many students engaged in pure speech by marching, displaying signs, or shouting slogans. These are protected and celebrated forms of protest in our country. Whether in support of Israel, Palestine, or even Hamas, the First Amendment prevents the government from punishing or censoring them.
As a historically persecuted population, Jews have a vested interest in ensuring American civil rights protections remain in full force. The First Amendment guarantees not only the freedom to practice our religion in this country, but our ability to speak out when our rights and lives are in danger.
Our institutions of higher education are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas. Even if you think those ideas are bad, protecting all speech means your speech is protected, too.
In 1943, 400 rabbis marched on Washington to draw attention to the mass murder of European Jews, helping lead to the creation of an American War Refugee Board that saved thousands of Jewish lives. In 1963, American Jewish leaders like German-born Rabbi Joachim Prinz marched again, this time with Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking just before Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, Rabbi Prinz lamented that his former countrymen “remained silent in the face of hate” and pleaded that “America must not become a nation of onlookers. America must not remain silent.”
But we endanger the ability to speak out when we allow the government to erode our First Amendment protections. That’s why White House statements this week threatening punishment for anti-Israel speech should have all Americans concerned — even those of us who would appear, at first blush, to benefit.
Regarding the arrest of Palestinian protester Mahmoud Kahlil by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, President Trump said, “We will find, apprehend, and deport these terrorist sympathizers from our country — never to return again.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted an advisory from the Department of Homeland Security saying that Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas,” and has also claimed the power to deport a legal resident whose activities “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.” But those justifications could merely describe Khalil’s on-campus protests, including his protected speech.
Threatening to deport Khalil without accusing him of any crimes chills speech. And that threat extends to everyone, no matter what side of the Israeli-Palestinian debate you are on, or whether you are promoting or combatting antisemitism. Would a green-card-holding Jew feel free to criticize special government employee Elon Musk for publicly supporting the far-right, German-nationalist AfD party, knowing our government could deem such criticism creates “adverse foreign policy consequences”? That standard is just too vague to risk deportation, and it permits the government to punish speech it just doesn’t like.
The Trump administration’s pledge to remove “pro-Hamas” students, coupled with Khalil’s arrest, make it hard to see the administration’s actions this week against Columbia and other institutions of higher education as anything other than attempts to police and punish campus speech.
To be sure, it has been a difficult year for Jewish college students, and there have been documented instances of bad actors preventing them from getting to class, or even assaulting them. Title VI requires colleges and universities that receive federal funding to ensure discriminatory harassment does not deprive Jewish students of an education, and it is possible Columbia has failed that obligation.
But protest alone is not grounds by itself for a Title VI violation. And the government did not make sure it was punishing only actionable misconduct before canceling Columbia’s funding, like it is supposed to. The Supreme Court rightly set a high bar for conduct that amounts to discriminatory harassment that is supposed to ensure pure speech rarely rises to that level.
And with good reason: Our institutions of higher education are supposed to be a marketplace of ideas. Even if you think those ideas are bad, protecting all speech means your speech is protected, too.
I’m no stranger to fear of the recent public increase in antisemitism. Last year, given online antisemitism approaching the anniversary of Oct. 7, my wife and I chose to keep our daughter home from her Chabad preschool that day. The current political moment terrifies me. Antisemitism is coming from both sides of the political spectrum, and it feels like there is nowhere to run. So instead, I think we should fight.
But allowing the government to ignore our rights to free speech would only deprive us of our most powerful weapon.