Moment Debate | Should Students Be Disciplined for Chanting “From the River to the Sea”?

Interviews by Amy E. Schwartz

INTERVIEW WITH CHARLES ASHER SMALL

Should Students Be Disciplined for Chanting “From the River to the Sea”? | Yes

Should students be disciplined for chanting “From the river to the sea”?

Yes. Absolutely. I understand the importance of the First Amendment and academic freedom, but even with those rights, there are limitations. You cannot yell fire in a crowded theater. In the current environment, radical leftists and political Islamists are intent on killing Jews and dismantling the State of Israel through violent means. There are intellectuals supporting the genocidal program of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood at our best institutions.

At a teach-in at the School of Social Work at Columbia a few weeks ago, I heard very intelligent PhD students citing Edward Said and postcolonial studies, saying resistance to occupation is justified by any means—they literally justified the pogrom that took place on October 7. It’s repugnant to blame the victim of any form of hate and violence. One poll found 70 percent of Jewish students in the United States have experienced antisemitism in the last two months. It’s incumbent on everyone at universities to put an end to this.

Does this specific chant call for genocide?

The Jewish community and political commentators have articulated clearly that it does. Many European countries have sought to ban demonstrations using this chant, including France and Germany. Under the UN’s Convention for the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide, Article 4, incitement to genocide is a crime, but under some interpretations of U.S. law, the speech only becomes incitement in retrospect if the genocide was carried out. But any call for genocide that’s backed up by threats, violence and intimidation needs to be stopped, particularly at a university, where young people learn to be citizens.

What kind of official response, if any, is appropriate?

Universities should ban intimidation of any student, especially based on any form of hate and racism. There should be federal and internal investigations into the impact of universities’ receiving billions of dollars from Qatar, whose government supports the goals of Hamas. Anyone who is overtly racist, sexist or antisemitic, and articulates it in a way that excludes any member of the community from functioning as a full and equal member, needs to be disciplined. The leaders of groups like Students for Justice in Palestine, who define themselves as not just supporting the struggle but part of the struggle, should be expelled. Those who are maybe more naive but still engaged in organized antisemitism should be put on probation and given more education. Universities need to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism and implement it effectively.

Universities should ban intimidation of any student.

When do rallies and protests rise to the level of a Title VI violation? I’m not a lawyer, but I met many students at New York University and Columbia who received death threats to their faces, young women whose fellow students went up to them saying they would be murdered and raped like the people in southern Israel. I knew this stuff intellectually, but hearing from a young woman who stays in her dorm knowing she’ll fail her classes, because her fellow students are calling her a child-killer—it was stomach-turning. A brilliant student I mentored at Oxford, an Israeli-American Jewish woman, left Oxford because she didn’t feel safe. So there’s a real toll to this intimidation.

Does it matter if students know which river and which sea? When somebody commits a crime naively or out of ignorance, they still commit the crime, but the punishment should be lenient. If it’s premeditated and conscious, punishment should be more significant. We’re all responsible for our actions and nonactions.

How can universities encourage civility on campus?

Emmanuel Levinas, the great Jewish philosopher, said two powerful things that inform my work. First, he said that in Jewish ethics, the moment we see our own face in the face of the Other is the moment we become human. He also taught that if any ideology dehumanizes and objectifies a group of people, you can’t tolerate that ideology or negotiate with it. To protect the space for learning, faculty and administrators need to engage in serious study and conversation about the state of antisemitism and antidemocratic ideologies in the university. If they’re willing to have more classes, programs and research on contemporary antisemitism, not to blame Israel or Jews for the problem but to understand the depth of it, that would be something positive.

What would a healthy public square look like? What would students be chanting?

Where all parties are on a quest to strengthen democratic principles and notions of citizenship, dignity, respect and equality, let them chant loudly and argue with vigor. But if anyone is arguing for racism, demonization, antidemocratic values or the elimination of any group, that crosses a clear line.

INTERVIEW WITH HARVEY SILVERGLATE 

Should Students Be Disciplined for Chanting “From the River to the Sea”? | No

Should students be disciplined for chanting “From the river to the sea”?

No. Two words: Academic freedom. The U.S. Supreme Court in both its liberal and conservative iterations has agreed on very few things, but they’ve agreed on free speech issues. The parameters of free speech are extraordinarily broad and have been consistent for decades: In the wider society, speech, no matter how offensive, is allowed, except for a few narrow categories: libel, slander, defamation, threats. Most people think you can’t yell fire in a crowded theater, but that’s wrong; you can’t falsely yell fire in a crowded theater. Of course you can yell it if there’s a fire. In the written arena, you can be sued for copyright violation, and if you’re a university president, as we’ve learned, you can be dismissed for plagiarism. So speech protections are very broad, and the things Palestinian students and their supporters have been saying on campus, tough and unpleasing to a lot of people including myself, are 100 percent protected and should be allowed.

I’ve been in hostile environments. I went to Princeton in 1964, and it was a hostile environment for a Jewish kid. Someone asked me how I could stand the antisemitic taunts. I decided then that I prefer loud antisemites to quiet antisemites. I find it very useful to know who hates me. It’s more important to protect hate speech than love speech. And the most important arenas for free speech are the academy and the press.

Does this specific chant call for genocide?

You’re allowed to call for genocide. You just can’t take steps to actually commit it. I personally want to know who’s calling for genocide of Jews. If they’re not allowed to say it, I won’t know. People think the First Amendment is theoretical, but it’s actually a practical tool for surviving in a free society.

You can encourage civility, but you can’t enforce it.

What kind of official response, if any, is appropriate? The job of the university is to provide a forum where all kinds of points of view can be expressed safely. I don’t think they should make pronouncements from on high with regard to public issues. Claudine Gay could have saved herself a lot of aggravation if that had been her policy.

When do rallies and protests rise to the level of a Title VI violation?

When they stop people from entering a building, when they’re so loud they stop people from hearing or studying. A rally is not allowed to be disruptive of the educational enterprise. The Supreme Court has settled that, just as it has settled the parameters for rallies in the street. There are close cases. The protest at Harvard’s Widener Library, where students did not speak but took every seat in the main reading room and quietly hung banners with Free Palestine slogans, was disruptive to people who wanted to study there, but it’s hard to prove that as a factual matter. There are ways—you could set time limits on using a seat without studying, and enforce that with monitors—but you need leadership that can think its way out of a paper bag.

Does it matter whether students know which river and which sea?

If you required that every demonstrator know what he or she is talking about, you’d have to do intelligence tests on some of the stupidest people in the world. We don’t educate our children very well, so we produce a lot of people who are unsophisticated about what the world is like. If you’re familiar with world history, you’re very careful before you call for genocide. It’s Santayana: Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it. It would be better if students could argue these issues out, but we’ve created an atmosphere in academia that is not friendly to the true expression of one’s beliefs because university officials may claim that something you say constitutes hate speech. Well, it doesn’t. There’s no such thing as hate speech. There’s hateful language, but it’s 100 percent protected. College administrators with nothing else to do have invented rules and kangaroo courts and this idea of enforced civility, which is impossible. You can encourage civility, but you can’t enforce it.

How can universities encourage civility on campus?

They can sponsor programs where civil libertarians come in and speak about the parameters of protected speech, and they can teach that civility, though optional, is an important adjunct of education, because we have to listen to and learn from one another. If you want to be an educated person, you should voluntarily undertake to listen to people who don’t agree with you. If you haven’t changed your mind about something in four years, you’ve wasted your money. It’s particularly important here, in the most diverse country in the world.

What would a healthy public square look like? What would students be chanting?

Whatever they believe.