Jewish Students Regain Free-Speech Rights at Haverford

by Seth Mandel

Haverford College has settled a lawsuit with Jewish students, who were represented by The Deborah Project, over civil-rights violations in the wake of October 7. It is bound to be misunderstood, so let’s take a look at the complaints and what we know about the reforms the school will undertake to prevent such discrimination in the future.

First, via today’s Wall Street Journal, is the blatant violation of Jewish students’ speech rights:

“For several years Haverford told Jewish students to take their problems to the anti-Israel student activists staffing the Honor Council. The council administered an honor code that subordinated the speech rights of what it called the ‘privileged’ to the sentiments of the ‘marginalized.’ If in conflict, it said, the privileged can’t expect to be treated with ‘respect.’ Guess where the activists placed Jews in this schema?”

A hierarchy of free-speech rights in an institutionally unequal behavioral code. In this case it was Jewish students who were subjected to this discrimination and curtailing of rights, but of course the fact that this discrepancy existed at all is a mark of shame on the school.

It also gives the lie to the claim that schools could not remedy certain major sources of anti-Semitism without curtailing the rights of other

students. The Jewish students asked to be treated equally rather than be penalized because of their identity.

It’s also nice to see Jewish students get victories like this because most “free speech” groups concentrate specifically on government suppression of speech and have been largely useless during the academic suppression of Jewish free speech during the past three years. Some even worked against remedying anti-Jewish discrimination out of partisanship or public pressure, further stacking the deck against the many Jewish students who had to fight to regain their right to free speech on campus. Hopefully, U.S. free speech groups will see this and join the fight for liberty next time around.

Indeed, a larger lesson of this whole post-October 7 environment on campus is that all over the country, young Jews are teaching their elders what it actually means to speak truth to power and show some spine. If courage is contagious, perhaps they will have a few more allies in the future.

More from the Journal:

“Students conspired to block Zionists from leading campus tours and frequently called for all Zionists to be excluded from campus. A Jewish basketball player was pressured by administrators into dropping a long-approved ‘antisemitism awareness’ designation for a home game lest that provoke students to disrupt the game and cause her team to forfeit.”

Again, this is students and administrators working together to suppress Jewish rights on campus. The administration relying on Hamasniks’ heckler’s veto to squash an approved anti-Semitism awareness designation is very much the sort of thing “free speech” groups and student advocates used to claim to care about.

More:

“When Philadelphia Jewish leaders raised the hostile environment with Haverford, they say they were told to get used to it. In the past blacks and gays didn’t feel safe on campus to express their views, and now it is the Jews’ turn, Haverford’s diversity chief explained. Per the leaders in the room, the DEI chief said Jewish students need to disavow ‘genocide’ and ‘stop filing complaints about antisemitism.’”

There is a clip going around of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez brushing off past cancel culture by smiling and saying “Woke 1 was crazy.” The “was,” however, implies that the wokeness pandemic is long over. But the fact that Haverford was allowing its DEI chief to silence Jewish students, and that the case was only settled recently (it was announced Friday), suggests “Woke 1” continues to subject Jews to its madness.

Haverford’s DEI chief is reportedly resigning and the school is adopting a definition of anti-Semitism that closes the “Zionism loophole”—that is, the way institutions allowed and encouraged rank Jew-hatred so long as the discriminating source used words like “Zionist” instead of “Jew.”

Expect this part of the settlement to be widely and willfully misinterpreted. There will be accusations that the school is making a protected class of those who hold certain “political” views. But in fact nothing of the sort is taking place. Instead, schools have been permitting discrimination against certain disfavored aspects of Judaism and Jewish identity, and now they will (presumably) allow the Jews on campus to, finally, enjoy the same rights as everyone else.