Left Outrage Over ‘Free Speech’ Is Conveniently Selective

Our socialist friends are writhing in dismay over what they claim is the abrogation of their free speech rights. Exhibits A, B, C, and D: graduate students at Columbia—Yunseo Chung from South Korea, Mahmoud Khalil from Syria, and Ranjani Srinivasan from India—and at Tufts, Rumeysa Ozturk from Turkey. The school on Morningside Heights seems to attract more than its fair share of such incidents.

Yes, in an ideal world, citizens and green cardholders would enjoy the same rights and privileges. But in practice—and under the law—that simply isn’t the case.

Let’s focus on the case of Mr. Khalil, as it is the most high-profile of the group. I refer to his “rights” as so-called, not because of what he wrote or said, but because his green card was revoked due to repeated acts of trespass.

He occupied campus property that did not belong to him, first by joining the tent city on the quad, then by participating in the takeover of Hamilton Hall. A vocal Hamas supporter, Khalil helped violate the rights of fellow students, especially Jewish ones, who were blocked from attending classes and pursuing their education. Their rights—not his—were the ones truly abrogated.

[RELATED: Deporting Pro-Hamas Mouthpieces is Good and Legal]

(Full disclosure: I was a graduate student at Columbia from 1965 to 1971, a period that included the campus riots of 1968. I was so consumed with coursework that I didn’t have the time—or the energy—to protest or counter-protest anything. I even gave up playing sports and probably gained 40 pounds. It makes you wonder: what are they doing at Columbia these days? Don’t they keep their graduate students busy anymore?)

The left is outraged at this supposed limitation on free speech and academic freedom. As Ron Unz put it:

For the last several generations, America’s elite academic institutions have been among the most prestigious in the world, drawing top students from across the globe and constituting a central pillar of our country’s soft power … Since World War II elite American universities have tended to attract the best and the brightest young men and women from around the world, thereby shaping the minds of so many future global leaders. So I suspect that these shocking news stories of harsh ideological crackdowns on academic freedom and sudden dramatic arrests by masked federal agents are already reverberating around the world, severely damaging one of the few remaining pillars of American geopolitical dominance.

A Washington Post headline reads: “Opening the door to green card deportations endangers us all.” Reason Magazine offers this gem: “Universities Should Challenge Trump’s Speech-Based Deportations of Students in Court. A lawsuit brought by universities could potentially be much more effective than leaving individual students to fend for themselves.”

And a Truthout headline reads, “As ICE Jails Palestinian Protester, Universities Must Commit to Academic Freedom. Universities may sow their own demise if they continue to aid the suppression of pro-Palestine campus movements.”

Now, it cannot be denied that some of these commentators have also opposed restrictions on free speech emanating from the left. But, for the most part, the radical campus faculty were entirely comfortable with, indeed, were and still are in the forefront of efforts to quell the views of conservatives and libertarians.

They were adamant that the proper pronouns be employed. They went apoplectic when anyone used the word “Negro” despite the fact that the United Negro College Fund has not seen fit to drop that appellation. They insisted that “people of color” be substituted for “colored people,” even though the National Association of Colored People is still a going concern. They turned vicious whenever anyone used the term “Orientals,” though many Chinese restaurants still use this word in their titles. And don’t even think about mentioning intelligence quotients; just ask Charles Murray what kind of reception he received on college campuses.

Jordan Peterson gave up his faculty position at the prestigious University of Toronto because he was worried about the influence of “diversity, equity, and inlcusion” (DEI) policies on his students’ futures, arguing that the mandates unfairly limited opportunities for his qualified white male graduate students to secure research roles in academia. And he believed his students would be negatively affected by associating with him. He wrote in the National Post:

First, my qualified and supremely trained heterosexual white male graduate students (and I’ve had many others, by the way) face a negligible chance of being offered university research positions, despite stellar scientific dossiers. This is partly because of Diversity, Inclusivity and Equity mandates (my preferred acronym: DIE). These have been imposed universally in academia, despite the fact that university hiring committees had already done everything reasonable for all the years of my career, and then some, to ensure that no qualified ‘minority’ candidates were ever overlooked. My students are also partly unacceptable precisely because they are my students. I am academic persona non grata, because of my unacceptable philosophical positions. And this isn’t just some inconvenience. These facts rendered my job morally untenable. How can I accept prospective researchers and train them in good conscience knowing their employment prospects to be minimal?

Then, there was the requirement for hiring and promotion that a DEI form be submitted. And when the left said DEI, this had nothing to do with the representation of different ideologies. Rather, they meant skin color and used it as a political litmus test to gauge whether applicants were properly left-leaning. Black “Studies,” Queer “Studies,” Feminist “Studies,” Middle Eastern “Studies,”—Israel bad, terrorists, good—were the order of the day.

[RELATED: It’s Only Overreach When Trump Does It]

Throughout these outrages, there was a deafening silence from the left side of the aisle in response to blatant attacks on free speech and academic freedom. In fact, biased faculty often led the charge in suppressing dissent, stampeding over academic norms in dozens of such cases. And now they have the audacity to complain when the shoe is on the other foot? Shameful.

Donald Trump is now making a valiant effort to clean out these academic Augean Stables. Bless him. He threatened to cut nearly half a billion dollars in funding from Columbia if it failed to address its outbreak of anti-Semitism. Admittedly, that was a bit indiscriminate—the real culprits are mostly in the humanities and social sciences, while much of the hard sciences faculty has remained relatively untouched by this ideological rot. Still, in a war against intellectual cesspools, few tactics are off the table.

One suggestion: don’t waste time banning “woke” content. The current professoriate will simply repackage their Marxist dogma—cultural or economic—under different labels. Instead, initiate affirmative action for conservative and libertarian scholars, and maintain it until they hold at least 50 percent of all faculty positions.

I wonder how the governments of India, Syria, and South Korea, or any other for that matter, would deal with an American student who enrolled in one of their universities and mixed studying with promoting protests against the policies of the government of the host country. Probably, not very nicely.