Did they defend free speech when, during the 2021–22 academic year, the administration leveraged Title IX policies to grant pro-Palestine students “no-communication orders” against Jewish student-journalists, effectively barring the Jewish students from writing about campus conflicts over the Middle East? (For the shocking story, read current undergraduate Danielle Shapiro’s searing piece in the Wall Street Journal.) No, they did not. So much for “ironclad guarantees of the freedom of speech . . . especially for our students.”

Did they defend free speech when protesters loudly interfered with a lecture this past March on the (yes, controversial) proposals for judicial reform in Israel given by Ronen Shoval, an Israeli who was spending a year as a lecturer at Princeton (and has now returned to his country to fight in the war)? No, they did not. Indeed, three tenured professors (one of whom signed both the July 2020 and the Gaza letters) took to the pages of the Daily Princetonian to denounce him, suggesting, as one put it, that Shoval has an “affinity to fascist views.”

What these faculty members do seem to care about is the freedom to express themselves in ways that many of us consider anti-Semitic.

[Put more basically, this is ‘free speech for me but not for thee.’ That is no standard of free speech, of course. That’s simply the ancient exercise of brute force to silence dissent, brought about by decades of indoctrination replacing education and the production of an ‘educated’ class that can’t think well enough to deal with opposing points of view. That is the real root of our problems, and not just in Academia but also in the media and in the corporate world as well. — Ed]