A university administration can
be susceptible to creating an unlevel playing field in the name of truth but with
political ideology in the driver’s seat. Amid controversial political disputes wherein
ideology is salient and tempers are flaring, free speech can be arbitrarily and
prejudiciously delimited as academic freedom is eclipsed by ideological
intolerance. More abstractly put, the ideology of an organization’s dominant
coalition can be stultifying. During the fall 2023 semester at Yale, for
example, I attended a lecture at which the lecturer, a faculty member, held his
own topic hostage by deviating to an unfounded ideological presumption of
systemic racism in Hollywood. The leap in his assumption evinced an ideological
agenda capable of blocking even his intellectual reasoning, and the resulting
irrational intolerance easily impaired the academic freedom of the students to
even question the unfounded assumption or ask what had happened to the
advertised topic. Whether the label is systemic racism or antisemitism, the
highly-charged application thereof into a political dispute can be act as a
weapon to weaken or block outright an unliked political position and thus
unfairly limit free speech and even academic freedom. I have in mind here calls
for a genocide of the Jews as Gaza ceasefire rallies were occurring on college
campuses. Which is more fitting: university codes of conduct against
hate-speech or the protection of free speech, which is vital to academic
freedom and a university’s academic atmosphere? In other words, are such calls
more accurately classified as hate-speech or political speech?
The full essay is at "Genocide of the Jews."
