Would You Believe Student Protesters Say They’re Free-Speech Martyrs?

Examining which view on the Middle East conflict is most likely to be censored

“It’s clear that this is just another attempt to honestly make Palestinian students and their allies more vulnerable to doxing, make them easier to identify, make it easier to suppress their speech.”

So says Zaid Yousef, a member of Students for Justice in Palestine at Berkeley and president of the campus Muslim Student Association.

Yousef is reacting to new rules that many universities are putting in place this school year. Administrators hope that time, place, and manner restrictions will reign in protests and encampments. They seek to prevent protesters from masking in order to hide their identities or intimidate others. They’re also targeting other forms of intimidation such as blocking walkways and doorways. 

In news reports these days you can find plenty of comments like Yousef’s. As a new school year begins, pro-Palestinian protesters want to cast themselves as free speech martyrs. But does that role reflect reality? 

Which point of view is most likely to be censored on campus today?

Let’s take a big-picture view. 

The First Wave

For decades, universities have worked to construct a very peculiar campus environment. 

Campus leaders decide what the “correct” and “incorrect” opinions are on a wide range of issues, including the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Then they deploy massive taxpayer subsidies to support the “correct” point of view and punish the “incorrect” point of view. 

The monoculture’s first wave hits students at freshman orientation. 

Administrators’ presentations introduce the newbies to the oppressor-oppressed fable that will be retold to students throughout the next four to seven years of their lives. The story mostly stays the same, but occasionally administrators reshuffle the angel and demon roles. It seemed like a safe bet that straight white males would remain atop the oppressor hierarchy indefinitely, but then campus mandarins quickly replaced them with Jews—oops, I mean, Zionists (wink, wink). 

Students quickly learn that the administration absolutely supports free speech (for oppressed groups) but has zero tolerance for hate speech (unless it’s directed at oppressor groups). Misgender someone and administrators will release the hounds. But call for the genocide of the Jews, and campus leaders stroke their chins and pontificate about context. 

The blase attitude persists even at schools with large Jewish populations. At Columbia University, three deans were recently caught mocking students’ concerns about antisemitism. And according to a new report, Columbia administrators routinely dawdled as Jewish students were subjected to threats, harassment, and attacks. 

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The Second Wave

Then comes the monoculture’s second wave—professors. 

Yes students can choose from a wide array of classes, but professors generally hew to the same oppressor-oppressed narrative. Good luck finding any actual debate in class because the fairly decent levels of intellectual diversity that endured through the mid 90s have vanished. At liberal arts campuses, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans stands at 17 to 1 in psychology and 70 to 1 in religion.

Republicans have gone extinct in departments of anthropology and communications. Today’s students are more likely to encounter a socialist at the head of the class than any flavor of conservative, classical liberal, or libertarian. 

Like their administrative colleagues, professors are eager to stick up for oppressed people, as long as they’re the “correct” kind of oppressed people. Students shouldn’t expect to be excused from class if  they’re protesting the treatment of Venezuelans, North Koreans, or Nigerian Christians. But as long as they stand on The Right Side of History, they’ll receive plenty of special treatment when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

From UCLA to the Ivy League, professors have locked arms with pro-Palestinan students on the front line of the protests. They jumped on emergency phone calls and risked arrest. The professors did all this, said one, because “the students asked the faculty members to protect them.”

How many professors rushed to protect Jewish students who were in actual physical danger? At Columbia, Jewish students reported being “being followed, stripped of necklaces and pinned against walls.” Sometimes professors joined in on the harassment:

In the classroom, reports of threats, ridicule and exclusion prompted some Jewish students to avoid particular majors and teachers. At the School of Public Health, a faculty member called Jewish Columbia donors “wealthy white capitalists” who “laundered” money at the university […]

One faculty member told an Israeli veteran she had served in an “army of murderers,” the report said. Another suggested Israeli military veterans shouldn’t be allowed to study on campus. Military service is mandatory for most Israelis.

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The Third Wave

Now for the monoculture’s final wave—students. 

Unlike administrators and professors, students come to campus with a good deal of intellectual diversity. But the typical freshman won’t realize that. 

That’s because administrators and professors embolden the loudest and most aggressive students. The true believers set the tone. They might only represent a minority of students, but they join with paid staff to cow the fence-sitters and demonize the relatively few dissidents. 

But in the upside down world of the modern university, dissidents get the worst of both worlds. Not only are they censored and threatened, but they’re cast as oppressors. As we show in The Coddling of the American Mind movie, even a black man can be deemed “a tool of white supremacy” if he refuses to fall in line politically. 

On campus today, students who agree with administrators and professors, still get to play the role of “dissident.” You can be the teacher’s pet, and still embrace radical chic. 

You can break the rules that govern protests, and know that administrators won’t deliver meaningful punishment.  

You can shout down speakers you disagree with, and still claim to be the free speech victim. 

In 2024 alone, FIRE’s Campus Deplatforming Database lists dozens of instances of mob censorship (attempted and successful) carried out by pro-Palestian students. 

It’s important to acknowledge that sometimes campuses do censor pro-Palestinian voices, and if the new rules governing protest do end up stifling speech, they should be called out. 

But pro-Palestinan students typically benefit from the twisted state of debate on campus, and as with people in general, they transform into free speech champions only when it suits their political interests. If they’re so confident the facts are on their side, why not call for a series of campus debates on the conflict? (No screamers allowed.)

But so many student activists have made it clear they’re not interested in a genuine exchange of ideas. 

Again and again, they shout down and intimidate their opponents and rarely get punished. Again and again, professors and administrators give them preferential treatment. Again and again, the older adults on campus shield them from debate and reward their chutzpah.

In that kind of environment, why wouldn’t student protesters claim to be victims? 

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Ted Balaker is a filmmaker, and former network newser and think tanker. His written work has appeared in many publications including The New York Times, USA Today, Reason, and The Washington Post. His recent film work includes Little Pink House starring Catherine Keener and Jeanne Tripplehorn, Can We Take a Joke? featuring Gilbert Gottfried and Penn Jillette, and the new feature documentary based on the bestselling book, The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt. Stream the very first “Substack Presents” feature documentary here.