UK: Edinburgh University’s shameful cancelling of David Hume shows how backward identity politics has become

Edinburgh University has decided to take yet another step to distance itself from its most important intellectual legacy – the Scottish Enlightenment.

It has decided to rename its David Hume Tower because some students claim that the 18th-century philosopher’s views on race cause them distress. In a letter to students, the university authorities said: ‘It is important that campuses, curricula and communities reflect both the university’s contemporary and historical diversity and engage with its institutional legacy across the world.’

It seems that one ‘institutional legacy’ the university is prepared to discard is the one that gave it its international reputation. For without the contribution of the Scottish Enlightenment, Edinburgh University would be just another provincial institution of learning.

The repudiation of Hume is more than just a blow against the man himself and his reputation. It represents an important symbolic victory for identity politics and its crusade against the intellectual legacy of human civilisation in general, and of the Enlightenment in particular.

Virtually every great philosopher who contributed to the development of the ideals of tolerance and freedom has become a target of the crusade to ‘decolonise’ British culture and force contemporary society to detach itself from its cultural and intellectual foundations.

From this standpoint, John Locke, whose philosophy developed the idea of tolerance, is just a 17th-century racist. Adam Smith, another towering figure of the Scottish Enlightenment, is also a racist, apparently. According to one 21st-century critic of Smith, his sin was to make a distinction between ‘savage’ and ‘civilised’ nations.

Immanuel Kant – arguably the most influential thinker of the Enlightenment – and John Stuart Mill – the most important philosophical advocate of liberalism – are no doubt seen as racists, too. The Natural History Museum in London has said it is thinking of conducting an inquisition into its Charles Darwin collection to see if any of it might be deemed ‘offensive’ by the same kind of people who are distressed by the sight of David Hume Tower. A curator warns that some people might find the exhibition of things collected by or related to Darwin ‘problematic’. Why? Because apparently Darwin’s voyage to the Galápagos Islands on the HMS Beagle was just another one of Britain’s colonialist scientific expeditions.

In response to the Black Lives Matter movement, universities and museums have held up their hands and more or less said they will get rid of anything that is potentially offensive. So even Darwin, who challenged Victorian dogma and revolutionised society’s understanding of the natural world, is casually cast aside in order to appease the crusaders against Britain’s past.

There is little doubt that David Hume held views that were racist. In line with the racial thinking that prevailed in 18th-century Europe, he believed that ‘negroes’ were ‘naturally inferior to whites’. And he didn’t simply express the racial prejudices that were dominant in his time – according to some accounts he was indirectly involved in the slave trade. So Hume, who denounced the practice of slavery in Ancient Rome, can also be accused of hypocrisy.

There is little that is exceptional about Hume’s views on race. Like the vast majority of people living in the 18th century, he interpreted human and social differences through the prism of race.

But the fact that Hume had racist views is one of the least interesting and least important things about him. He was an energetic foe of the dogmas and conventions of his era. His philosophical scepticism and atheism were frequently denounced by those who upheld the prevailing moral order. His powerful critique of religious miracles made a profoundly significant contribution to the development of secular and modern scientific thought. Contemporary cognitive science owes a huge debt to Hume.

Hume exercised great influence over philosophers such as Smith, Kant, Darwin and Jeremy Bentham. That is why he is regarded by many as the most important philosopher who wrote in the English language. Even his detractors recognise that his Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) is arguably the most significant work of philosophy published in English before the 20th century.

It is unlikely that those who claim to be ‘distressed’ by Hume have actually bothered to study his work. If they had, they would realise that the writings of this remarkably sceptical philosopher are an important intellectual resource that those opposed to prejudice can draw upon. He may have been a prejudiced man, but his writings were animated by a critical spirit that challenged prevailing dogmas. That is why those of us who are committed to free thinking continue to regard him as an intellectual giant.

Whatever the faults of Hume the man, they pale into insignificance in comparison to the faults of his 21st-century detractors. There is nothing critical or questioning about the ‘decolonisation’ movement. Unlike Hume, who questioned the conventions of his time and oriented his thought towards the future, his detractors are devoted to the dogma of reading history backwards. They want to fix the problems of the past through denouncing and ‘cancelling’ 18th-century philosophers. And since these philosophers cannot answer back and account for their thoughts and behaviour, it is easy to win a one-sided argument against them. Under the guise of radical campaigning, there is moral cowardice and intellectual sloth at work here.

This targeting of Hume and other figures from the past is a key part of today’s cause of diminishing the Enlightenment. Identity politics is deeply hostile to the Enlightenment ideals of universalism, tolerance and freedom. The dogma of ‘decolonisation’ is really about challenging people’s pride in the civilisational achievements of the past that helped humanity to face an uncertain world.

Edinburgh University should be ashamed of itself. Once upon a time it was the principal intellectual centre of the Scottish Enlightenment; it was referred to as the ‘Athens of the North’. Following its disgraceful cancelling of David Hume, perhaps it would be more appropriate to call it the ‘Sparta of the North’.

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Another blow to intellectual freedom: The University of Chicago’s English department is this year only admitting PhD students in ‘Black studies’

In the latest instance of illiberal academic wokery, the English department of the University of Chicago – a department that has already firmly established itself as, well, illiberally woke – has declared that in 2020-2021 it will be admitting only PhD students (five in all) who will pursue scholarship in ‘Black studies’.

That this brouhaha has arisen at the University of Chicago is seemingly surprising. No university in the world has historically been more committed to the principles of academic freedom and of freedom of expression than Chicago, and no university has such a storied heritage of scrutinising and upending the conventional wisdom and the shibboleths dominating higher education. From its founding in 1890 the university defined itself by its culture of fierce intellectuality, a culture characterised by relentless inquiry and robust debate. The university has recognised that such an environment demands protecting its faculty and students so that they can explore and develop the most unpopular ideas untrammelled. As Hanna Holborn Gray, a professor of history, emeritus, and the former president of Chicago, explained the university’s guiding principle: ‘Education should not be intended to make people comfortable, it is meant to make them think. Universities should be expected to provide the conditions within which hard thought, and therefore strong disagreement, independent judgment, and the questioning of stubborn assumptions, can flourish in an environment of the greatest freedom.’

To nurture and sustain that intellectually free environment, Chicago long ago recognised that it must commit itself and its constituent bodies – its departments, institutes and professional schools – to neutrality on political, social and moral issues, regardless of how right and settled the response to those issues might appear. The university’s ‘Kalven report’ enshrined this principle in 1967. Written as a response to the demands of some students and faculty that the university take a political stand on such issues as the Vietnam War and the civil-rights movement, the report is a singular and justly famous monument to academic free expression, and it remains, as the university proclaims, ‘one of the most important policy documents at the University of Chicago’. It acknowledges that ‘a university faithful to its mission will provide enduring challenges to social values, policies, practices and institutions. By design and by effect, it is the institution which creates discontent with the existing social arrangements and proposes new ones… a good university, like Socrates, will be upsetting.’ But, crucially, the report insists, ‘the instrument of dissent and criticism is the individual faculty member or the individual student. The university is the home and sponsor of critics; it is not itself the critic.’ Because a university must ‘maintain an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures’, it is ‘a community but only for the limited, albeit great, purposes of teaching and research. It is not a club, it is not a trade association, it is not a lobby.’ This strictly neutral posture is necessary, the report explains, because any collective stance would inhibit the expression and exploration of ideas contrary to that stance:

‘[The university] is a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness. There is no mechanism by which it can reach a collective position without inhibiting that full freedom of dissent on which it thrives. It cannot insist that all of its members favour a given view of social policy; if it takes collective action, therefore, it does so at the price of censuring any minority who do not agree with the view adopted. In brief, it is a community which cannot resort to majority vote to reach positions on public issues… It should not, therefore, permit itself to be diverted from its mission into playing the role of a second-rate political force or influence.’

For over 50 years the university has, correctly, held that an intellectually free university in which expression is afforded the widest possible latitude demands adherence to the Kalven report’s principles. As the university’s current president, Robert Zimmer, has argued:

‘[T]he focus on rigorous, intense, and open inquiry carried out by the faculty and students of the university must be accompanied by the greatest possible intellectual freedom, in an environment that supports openness and avoids steps that lead to chilling the environment…

‘[I]t follows that the university… should take no political positions and should remain neutral on such matters (except of necessity those in which it is a direct party), in order to ensure that we have a maximally open environment. Violations of neutrality are a mark against the maintenance of a non-chilling environment.’

Just as the university’s commitment to free inquiry has dictated adhering to institutional neutrality, it has also dictated that the university give its faculty members free rein to pursue their research, as well as their political predilections (even in the politically intolerant 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, the university held that the left-wing and even Communist politics of some of its professors weren’t its business).

A commitment to academic freedom has also meant that academic departments within the university have been given the widest latitude to establish their own academic agendas – that is, to set curricular and investigative priorities and, concomitantly, to set priorities in graduate (ie, ‘postgraduate’) student and faculty recruitment. On its face, therefore, the English department’s decision to privilege Black studies as an area of scholarly investigation, even if misguided, is defensible. But as the lengthy and overwrought statement in which the department has announced its decision makes clear, the logic behind that policy is, in fact, pernicious and violates the university’s long-held and hard-won principles of freedom of expression and academic freedom. In full, that statement reads:

‘The English department at the University of Chicago believes that Black Lives Matter, and that the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade, and Rayshard Brooks matter, as do thousands of others named and unnamed who have been subject to police violence. As literary scholars, we attend to the histories, atmospheres, and scenes of anti-Black racism and racial violence in the United States and across the world. We are committed to the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialised and dispossessed people, against inequality and brutality.

‘For the 2020-2021 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English department is accepting only applicants interested in working in and with Black studies. We understand Black studies to be a capacious intellectual project that spans a variety of methodological approaches, fields, geographical areas, languages, and time periods. For more information on faculty and current graduate students in this area, please visit our Black studies page.

‘The department is invested in the study of African-American, African, and African diaspora literature and media, as well as in the histories of political struggle, collective action, and protest that Black, Indigenous and other racialised peoples have pursued, both here in the United States and in solidarity with international movements. Together with students, we attend both to literature’s capacity to normalise violence and derive pleasure from its aesthetic expression, and ways to use the representation of that violence to reorganise how we address making and breaking life. Our commitment is not just to ideas in the abstract, but also to activating histories of engaged art, debate, struggle, collective action, and counterrevolution as contexts for the emergence of ideas and narratives.

‘English as a discipline has a long history of providing aesthetic rationalisations for colonisation, exploitation, extraction, and anti-Blackness. Our discipline is responsible for developing hierarchies of cultural production that have contributed directly to social and systemic determinations of whose lives matter and why. And while inroads have been made in terms of acknowledging the centrality of both individual literary works and collective histories of racialised and colonised people, there is still much to do as a discipline and as a department to build a more inclusive and equitable field for describing, studying, and teaching the relationship between aesthetics, representation, inequality, and power.

‘In light of this historical reality, we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere. In support of this aim, we have been expanding our range of research and teaching through recent hiring, mentorship, and admissions initiatives that have enriched our department with a number of Black scholars and scholars of colour who are innovating in the study of the global contours of anti-Blackness and in the equally global project of Black freedom. Our collective enrichment is also a collective debt; this department reaffirms the urgency of ensuring institutional and intellectual support for colleagues and students working in the Black studies tradition, alongside whom we continue to deepen our intellectual commitments to this tradition. As such, we believe all scholars have a responsibility to know the literatures of African-American, African diasporic, and colonised peoples, regardless of area of specialisation, as a core competence of the profession.

‘We acknowledge the university’s and our field’s complicated history with the South Side. While we draw intellectual inspiration from the work of writers deeply connected to Chicago’s south side, including Ida B Wells, Gwendolyn Brooks, Lorraine Hansberry, and Richard Wright, we are also attuned to the way that the university has been a vehicle of intellectual and economic opportunity for some in the community, and a site of exclusion and violence for others. Part of our commitment to the struggle for Black lives entails vigorous participation in university-wide conversations and activism about the university’s past and present role in the historically Black neighborhood that houses it.’

This statement is plainly a manifesto expressing political commitment. From its first sentence, it explicitly aligns the English department to a political movement, Black Lives Matter, that adheres to a specific ideology, built on premises that range from the undisputed to the debatable to the dubious, in pursuit of radical societal goals that are hardly uncontested. The manifesto next commits the department and all its members to ‘the struggle of Black and Indigenous people, and all racialised and dispossessed people’ – a struggle that, however laudable some might find it, is certainly far from politically neutral. In detailing its academic programme, the department makes another demand for collective political action – ‘we believe that undoing persistent, recalcitrant anti-Blackness in our discipline and in our institutions must be the collective responsibility of all faculty, here and elsewhere’. The department returns to an explicit declaration of social advocacy in the statement’s final paragraph: ‘Part of our commitment to the struggle for Black lives entails… activism.’

The English department’s proclamation, issued by a constituent body of the University of Chicago, flies in the face of the Kalven report. While the Kalven report maintains that any official orthodoxy on political and social issues must be avoided so as not to censure the minority, the English department has delivered a collective political declaration, which repeatedly presents as settled fact what are contestable claims that require scholarly exploration, to which presumably all current and future faculty and students must adhere. Imagine the ‘chilling’ effect, to quote President Zimmer, that this manifesto would exercise on those whose views deviated from the official departmental line, particularly if they were, say, graduate students beholden to advisers or associate professors up for tenure.

While the Kalven report asserts that only the individual within the university is the proper ‘instrument of dissent’, the English department demands that ‘all faculty’ participate in ‘undoing anti-Blackness’ – a mandate for collective responsibility and for collective political action. While the Kalven report argues for the importance of institutional neutrality and for ‘maintain[ing] an independence from political fashions, passions, and pressures’, the English department has defined its identity and purpose according to those fashions, passions, and pressures.

Because it is so fundamentally irreconcilable to the Kalven report, the English department’s manifesto is illegitimate. Moreover, that manifesto demonstrates that the department’s academic programme – its curricular and investigative priorities and its concomitant priorities in student and faculty recruitment – is plainly defined by, and emerges directly from, the department’s political commitment, its views on social justice, and its advocacy of anti-‘anti-Black’ activism. By the university’s own lights, the department should not be adopting a political stance or committing itself and its members to a programme of advocacy and activism in the first place; therefore, the academic priorities and programme that flow from and express that political commitment are, themselves, irreconcilable with the Kalven report’s insistence on official neutrality, and are also illegitimate.

Although a university spokesman, perhaps wishing to defuse the current imbroglio, stated that ‘as with other departments in the university, the [English] department’s faculty will decide which areas of scholarship they wish to focus on for PhD admissions’, that explanation is at best obtuse and at worst disingenuous. Certainly a history department, say, could legitimately define its academic priorities by privileging Marxian analysis. But if that department declared that, in pursuit of its conception of social justice, it was committing all its faculty to the workers’ struggle and to the concomitant project of squashing the workers’ class enemies, and was therefore prioritising scholarship informed by dialectical materialism in its curricular and recruitment decisions, then, plainly, the department’s academic programme would merely be a creature of its political advocacy.

In short, the decision of the University of Chicago’s English department to admit only graduate students pursuing ‘Black studies’ next year is reprehensible less for the policy itself than for the political commitment that dictated it. Alas, the English department is hardly the only unit of the University of Chicago to flout the Kalven report by indulging in political advocacy. The department of human genetics, the school of social-service administration, and the university’s art museum have issued similar political pronouncements, replete with their thudding litanies of slogans, jargon, and unargued assertions. If the university is to remain true to its glorious history as a bastion of free inquiry and free expression, it must reaffirm its commitment to the Kalven report. I don’t foresee it doing so.

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UK: George Bernard Shaw’s views do not diminish his legacy: RADA students want his name to be removed from one of its theatres as part of an ‘anti-racism action plan’

One of Britain’s oldest arts institutions is to erase its connections with the most important English-language dramatist after Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw has become the latest victim of the woke purge of cultural institutions following the Black Lives Matter protests this summer. Students at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA) have called for the college to remove the playwright’s name from one of its theatres because of his supposed support for racist eugenics. The school’s student body presented the proposal as part of an ‘anti-racism action plan’ to RADA’s ruling council and RADA has since promised to act.

Back in July, Edward Kemp, director of RADA, issued a lengthy apology to the Black Lives Matter movement, in which he confessed that RADA was institutionally racist. ‘We are profoundly sorry for the role we have played in the traumatic and oppressive experiences of our current and past black students, graduates and staff’, he said. ‘We are sorry for our inadequate response to the Black Lives Matter movement.’

It seems to matter little that Shaw was one of the earliest members of RADA’s council and a major posthumous benefactor. He also gives his name to the Shaw Fund, through which RADA financially assists emerging writers. According to the Telegraph, royalties from Shaw’s plays brought £78,000 to RADA last year alone.

Among its other proposals, the anti-racism action plan calls for a ban on performances of Restoration comedies, because of their connection with Empire. Students also complained about John Osborne’s landmark play, Look Back in Anger, because of its apparently exclusionary effect on BAME students. RADA’s curriculum is also to be ‘decolonised’, ‘master-and-servant’ exercises will be cut from improvisation classes, and training in received pronunciation will be ‘de-centred’.

The decision by Britain’s most elite performing-arts school to single out George Bernard Shaw for attack is astonishing. Shaw’s 60 plays are credited with killing off Victorian melodrama, ushering in the realist ‘theatre of ideas’ and revolutionising comedic drama. He influenced a spectrum of writers from the 1880s to the present day across Europe and America – from Noel Coward to Eugene O’Neill to Tom Stoppard. Even Shaw’s critics like TS Eliot and John Osborne were influenced by him.

Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925 and the Order of Merit in 1946, which he refused. His entry in Encylopedia Britannica describes him as ‘the most trenchant pamphleteer since Swift, the most readable music critic in English, the best theatre critic of his generation, a prodigious lecturer and essayist on politics, economics, and sociological subjects, and one of the most prolific letter writers in literature… He helped mould the political, economic, and sociological thought of three generations.’

Many writers have attempted to portray Shaw as an apologist for both Stalinism and Nazism, though they tend to draw on a handful of comments he made in the early 1930s – a time when both movements were in their infancy, before their most wicked atrocities had been committed. Academic opinion is divided on whether Shaw sincerely believed the most provocative things he said, or whether he was simply being characteristically rhetorical, contrarian and ironic.

Shaw was always questioning orthodoxies. He was an early adopter of vegetarianism and was against vaccinations. He spoke out against both sides in the First World War, and against English rule in Ireland, though he wasn’t republican. He made trenchant attacks on the values of polite Victorian society, especially concerning its hypocritical sexual conduct.

Despite what the students of RADA claim, there is no evidence he was a racist. He mocked the rampant anti-Semitism of his day. According to Michael Holroyd’s 1997 biography, he espoused racial equality and argued for interracial marriage.

In fact, Shaw should be counted among the Edwardian progressives. Most notably he was a radical feminist and tireless critic of the inequalities of capitalism. Unfortunately – though it may seem counterintuitive to us today – these principles led him to the dark and dangerous idea of what he called ‘creative evolution’ – ie, eugenics.

Shaw wrote variously in support of eugenics and lectured to the Eugenic Education Society. According to the Canada-based anti-eugenics pressure group Eugenics Archives, Shaw did not subscribe to the idea of ‘controlled breeding’. Instead, he reasoned that reducing poverty was paramount because civilisation was deteriorating due to income inequalities. He believed that the only way for the human race to improve was by making sure that natural instinct, unrestricted by social forces, would guide reproduction.

While this thinking is certainly backward today, such notions were very popular in the early 20th century – particularly on the left. William Beveridge, DH Lawrence, Marie Stopes, John Maynard Keynes, Emmeline Pankhurst and many others were supporters of eugenics for the same reasons as Shaw.

Should the work of these individuals also be cancelled and their honours removed? Singling Shaw out for condemnation when his ideas, however wrongheaded, were widely shared across society is fatuous. We cannot judge individuals or societies of the past by the standards we hold today. The Guardian newspaper, originally part-funded by cotton mill owners, supported slavery in America. It also wrote in support of eugenics. That is no reason to shut it down. Eugenics is a dreadful (and simply wrong) idea that has no place in a modern liberal political calculus. But the fact is that real historical figures are complicated and their lives cannot be reduced to nursery-rhyme morals.

Shaw might have held some obnoxious views. But he also held enlightened ones. For instance, he wrote a sublime play about persecution in a culture war: Androcles and the Lion. Its central idea is a powerful truth: that one must have an end outside oneself in order to make life worth living.

RADA has given the world Harold Pinter, Albert Finney, Glenda Jackson, Diana Rigg and countless other world-class actors who really understood theatre. Its current staff and students seem content to revel in their ignorance by dismissing Shaw out of hand on the basis of a partial reading of his life. If only they would learn from the past and engage seriously with Shaw’s work. Maybe then they would heed the warning within it: that an identitarian, narcissistic obsession with one’s own moral superiority diminishes life for all of us.

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Universities Must Cease Punishing Students for Their Online Pictures

Far too often, schools punish their students for the pictures, videos, and images they post online.

At the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, where I work, we focus on defending student and faculty free speech rights and encouraging universities to uphold those rights, even when it is difficult and unpopular to do so. With increasing frequency, we see colleges and universities failing to adhere to their free speech obligations.

For example, just this summer, FIRE criticized Fordham University for punishing a student over an Instagram photo memorializing the Tiananmen Square massacre which featured the student holding a firearm. For this display of political expression, Fordham found the student responsible for violating university policies on “threats/intimidation,” earning the student disciplinary probation and a ban from campus, campus athletics, and leadership roles in student organizations. Fordham also required the student to take bias training and write a letter of apology.

In an eerily similar case at Long Island University-Post in 2018, the university summoned a student back to campus from his summer break to answer for posting a photo of his legally obtained firearm. Like at Fordham, there was no evidence the student posed a threat to anyone, yet that did not stop the university from investigating his clearly protected expression.

In those cases, and others like them, colleges woefully misconstrue the standard by which expression loses its First Amendment protection as a “true threat.” Although private institutions like Fordham and LIU-Post are not bound by the Constitution to uphold freedom of speech, they pledge in their official policies to grant students rights consistent with First Amendment standards. Under those standards, only those statements demonstrating “a serious expression of an intent to commit an act of unlawful violence to a particular individual or group of individuals” qualify as an unprotected threat.

Without even a rudimentary showing that a student intends to commit violence, a university should not presume that students’ expression—especially in the form of a picture—meets the high bar of a true threat.

This ignorance of free speech principles was on full display at George Washington University last year. After a Snapchat surfaced online showing two students joking about bombing Israel and laughing during the entire seven-second clip, which was overlaid with the caption “Hot Girl Rosh Hashanah,” the university called the local police and FBI, apparently believing that two college students have the capacity to wage war against a foreign country. Without any indication that the video was anything other than a hyperbolic exchange between friends, the university’s investigation casts a profound chilling effect on student expression.

Perhaps the most callous disregard of what constitutes a true threat occurred at Valdosta State University, where then-president Ronald Zaccari expelled a student in 2007 for posting a collage on Facebook depicting Zaccari, a parking deck, and the caption “S.A.V.E.-Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage,” in protest of the environmental impact of Zaccari’s plan to build a parking garage on campus. Without a hearing, Zaccari found that the student’s posed a “clear and present danger” and immediately evicted him from campus. It took more than eight years of litigation to vindicate the student’s rights after Zaccari’s stunning failure to understand basic First Amendment principles.

Nor are graduate students spared from university discipline for their photos. Administrators at Cooper Medical School of Rowan University filed a “Professionalism Intervention Report” against a medical student in 2017 for her Instagram photos of her wearing a white medical coat and posing topless on a beach in Europe. In their meeting with the student, administrators recommended that she “stop posting” or at least ask her then-fiancé for a “second opinion” on her posts, before finding her responsible for violating the university’s social media policy.

Some universities do get it right—the State University of New York at Geneseo, for example, correctly decided that, as a public institution bound by the First Amendment, it cannot discipline students who reference blackface on Snapchat. Although the university did launch an investigation into the expression in the face of tremendous pressure to expel the offending students, SUNY-Geneseo’s accurate conception of its limited powers is a welcome sight. However, it should not require a letter from FIRE for a public school to adhere to its Constitutional obligations.

For students, forewarned is forearmed: Knowing one’s rights is the first step to challenging unlawful university action.
When confronted with racism in their educational communities, universities are not powerless. The First Amendment only limits the types of punishment they may inflict—it does not shield students from, for example, criticism by fellow students, faculty, and the institution itself or from consequences from non-university actors. The answer to distasteful speech is more speech, not censorship. Universities may not sacrifice their students’ rights on the altar of combating institutional racism.

As universities come under increasing pressure by members of their educational communities and others online to expel students who post offensive, hateful, or controversial images online, they should be mindful of their obligations to uphold student free speech rights. FIRE’s message to these institutions is the same as that of the Supreme Court in its 1973 decision Papish v. Board of Curators of the University of Missouri.

In Papish, the Court heard the case of a University of Missouri student newspaper editor expelled for publishing the headline “Motherfucker Acquitted,” and reprinting a cartoon depicting policemen raping the Statue of Liberty and Goddess of Justice, darkly captioned “With Liberty and Justice for All.” In finding for the student, the Court pronounced that “the mere dissemination of ideas—no matter how offensive to good taste—on a state university campus may not be shut off in the name alone of ‘conventions of decency.’”

Today, university officials must heed the words of the Supreme Court and uphold the free exchange of ideas—and images—on- and off-campus.

For students, forewarned is forearmed: Knowing one’s rights is the first step to challenging unlawful university action. When universities launch investigations, summon students into mandatory meetings, or curtail any rights or privileges over a student’s photographic expression, students should remain skeptical of the school’s proffered justification for such actions, especially when they’re based on the allegedly offensive, controversial, or threatening character of the expression. Students must remain cognizant of their rights and vigilant when schools seek to restrict their expressive freedoms.

Sometimes it does require lawsuits to hold universities accountable. The aforementioned litigation at Valdosta State University resulted in a $900,000 settlement for the student. Another lawsuit against the Los Angeles Community College District resulted in the district revising several severely restrictive policies on student expression. Students should not have to take schools to court to realize the full extent of their Constitutional rights.

At the end of the day, it is universities, not their students, that have access to billion-dollar endowments, teams of lawyers to interpret the law, and hundreds of administrators to write and apply institutional policies. University leaders need to develop a greater understanding of the limits of their powers to punish students for their expression. We are happy to work with administrators to craft speech-protective policies toward this end.

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