Dead Wild Roses

A common thread that runs through many of the issue around free speech and the freedom of expression in our Canadian society is the application of the rules and making sure they apply to everyone in the same manner.  If our institutions could stand up and once again treat equality before the law as a meaningful statement it would solve many of the problems we’ve been having.  The long shadow of Herbert Marcusé’s Repressive Tolerance has made the enforcement of our laws regarding protest apply only to one category of protester.  Demonstrations and gatherings perceived to be “on the right” are subject to the full letter of the law, while most activity from the Left – especially the activist Left – seems to fly underneath the authorities radar.  This permissiveness has emboldened the radical left and they will continue to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour in society because of lack of equanimity when enforcing the rules of our society.

We have very clear rules when it comes to protests, demonstrations, and freedom of expression in Canada – what we need is a return to a the just application of those rules to all parties in our society.

Greg Lukianoff in this excerpt looks at the encampment situation that is developing on many college campuses in the United States and how free speech is being used and abused within that context.

GREG LUKIANOFF: Since October 7th we’ve definitely seen a combination of clearly protected speech by pro-Palestinian students—speech that we’ve proudly defended because we are a nonpartisan organization; we will always defend people regardless of the content of their speech—but we’ve also seen an awful lot of assault, we’ve seen a lot of shout-downs, we’ve seen a lot of vandalism, and we’ve seen a lot of unprotected speech. It’s been accelerating for several months now.

Probably one of the worst places for this phenomenon has been Columbia University in New York City. What happened over the weekend, with the crackdown on the encampments that they had there, was interesting from a free speech standpoint, partially because you don’t have a First Amendment or free speech right to camp out on campus grounds. You have a protest right. But generally, every school in the country has rules that basically say, “No, you can’t camp here. You can’t turn this into your own encampment.” They just haven’t been enforcing them. So Columbia, to a degree, is paying the price for not actually fairly enforcing their rules, going far back.

Now, do I think that in the course of this, there are students engaged in protected speech who are getting in trouble? I have very little doubt that there are. And we want to know about those cases. But we’ve also seen, particularly at Columbia, examples of assault. Certainly examples of students being blocked and surrounded. Also, students engaging in things that, by pretty much any definition, would count as discriminatory harassment, which is a severe, persistent, and pervasive patterns of behaviour that a reasonable person would understand is discriminatory. And that’s something that we’ve seen, unfortunately, all over the country.

Now at Yale, we even know the student who was stabbed in the eye with a Palestinian flag, and she had to go to the hospital for it. That obviously isn’t protected. I think that there was a chance for a lot of these schools to prevent a lot of this from escalating by simply, fairly, and evenly enforcing their rules from the very beginning. But in a lot of cases, they simply didn’t.

One thing that readers really need to understand is that if you care about free speech on campus, you need to know that last year was the biggest year for deplatforming in recorded history, that we know of, on American college campuses. Deplatforming includes getting speakers disinvited and shout-downs. Yet this year, 2024, is going to blow 2023 out of the water, even just from shout-downs. And that has overwhelmingly come from pro-Palestinian students. Some of them have engaged in violence, including at Berkeley where they chased off an IDF speaker, for example, several weeks ago.