This week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were dressed down by lawmakers for their refusal to unequivocally condemn expressions of antisemitism on their universities’ campuses.

Critics lambasted pro-Palestinian student demonstrators as antisemitic for chanting phrases such as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—both of which have been used by supporters of Hamas to call for the eradication of Israel—arguing that they are calls for the genocide of Jews.

The university leaders said, correctly in my opinion, that context was required to determine whether such statements constituted acts of harassment or calls to violence.

In other words, their argument was essentially that nuance was needed in interpretations of controversial speech, that we shouldn’t immediately ascribe the worst motivations to the speakers of such speech, and that Jewish students who felt unsafe by such expressions should accept that this is all part of the robust debate that should rightly occur in places of higher learning.

As a civil libertarian and near-absolutist on free speech, this is music to my ears.

The problem is that it flies completely in the face of long-standing campus policies surrounding speech codes and microaggressions. And it isolates Jews as a singular identity group for whom the rules and protections of campus safetyism don’t apply.