These are just a few of the examples I have come across since October 7 of universities declining to enforce their own content-neutral rules. Such actions leave the universities vulnerable to civil rights complaints, given that failure to enforce these rules (a) can contribute to a hostile environment for Jewish students, as their pleas for the university to enforce the rules are ignored; (b) may permit discrimination against Jewish students (as at Berkeley) contrary to school rules; and (c) may constitute discrimination by demonstrating selective indifference to the concerns of Jewish students, if the rules get enforced in other contexts.

But legalities aside, many people are calling for universities to crack down on “hate speech.” Instead, critics should demand that universities enforce existing content-neutral rules–and that they certainly should not, as at Cornell, be actively collaborating with student groups in breaking those rules.

[I think the disparity in enforcement provides enough context to conclude that universities and their administrators tacitly endorse the messages of speech they do not quash if they quash other speech that dissents from their orthodoxy. That’s the problem on American campuses. If we truly had content-neutral enforcement of disruptive behavior rather than enforced “safe spaces” from certain content, there would be no controversy at all. — Ed]