This is interesting! I wonder how much of this has to do with the vast majority of liberal students having mixed or "softer" but still critical anti-Israel views than the further left vocal minority that has a more maximalist "Israel must be destroyed" POV. Perhaps those more moderate liberals simply don't want to be forced to pretend they agree with those more hateful, taboo views, or face social backlash from their peers if they draw that moral line.
Show me a college liberal who says "Israel is bad but they shouldn't all be genocided" that hasn't been labeled a Zionist and excommunicated from their lefty friend groups.
I think we make a mistake by combining "speech critical of Israel" with "speech that clearly violates moral taboos expressing overt hateful bigotry and calls for violence". If kids are only worried about the former, that's a problem. But if the examples they share are students facing consequences for egregiously violating these taboos and policies, then this is not a censorship problem. This is society doing exactly what it's supposed to to maintain a stigma around overt hateful bigotry, ensuring it remains unacceptable in polite society.
I think the answer is violent rhetoric. Far-left pro Palestine discussions tend to show overt approval towards anti-Western and anti-Jewish violence and terrorism. This can make less militant far leftists uncomfortable and also make any kind of discussion on the topic
Yes, I think this is right, but also needs some more context.
For a long time, universities - despite their broad claims to tolerate free speech - have made an exception for racist speech: there was general agreement that speech perceived of as racist should not be tolerated within university environments. This affected few people, because few people in the general left-leaning environments of universities had any inclination to be racist. But during the "Great Awokening", the concept of "racism" expanded, and more people got caught in its net, although even there, most were happy to go along with whatever the "anti-racists" prescribed.
But when it came to Jews and Israel, there was a catch. Unlike with racism against Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc., a LOT of people on the Left were inclined to say things about Israel in particular that most (not all) Jews regard as antisemitic. So universities were always (but increasingly after October 7) faced with a choice: EITHER clamp down on anti-Israel speech in a way that antagonized large portions of their left-wing members, OR appease their left-wing members by allowing anti-Israel speech, but then lay themselves open to charges of tolerating antisemitism in a way in which they would never tolerate other forms of racism.
Different universities negotiated that balance in different ways - it's hardly surprising that more left-wing institutions were more tolerant of anti-Israel speech, even when it verged into things perceived as antisemitic by most Jews. But they all had the balance to strike, and so it's not really surprising that what ended up happening is that a lot of left-leaning people, even at more left-wing institutions, felt in danger of having their speech suppressed: and at those institutions it was probably felt more keenly by them, precisely because students and faculty alike had assimilated the broad left-wing norms that implicitly treats racism toward Jews and Israel different from other minorities.
I very much agree with you. I think the issue is broader than Jews, and was about any groups deemed "oppressors", so included whites, men, rich people, etc. Of course, the vitriol against Jews specifically exploded since 10/7.
It's my view that this type of overt hateful bigotry is and always was a TABOO, but we simply stopped enforcing it due to this "oppressor vs. oppressed" framing, as well as because of tribalism (nobody wanted to denounce people from their own side).
I'm writing about this topic non-stop these days on my Substack Holding the Line elevin11.substack.com where I'm making the case that we must enforce these universal moral TABOOS in a principled way, with strict social consequences and ostracism, as we did to defeat the KKK, or their hatred will become normalized and spiral into violence and anarchy.
Israel is about the only safe nation to really lay into. Congo - black on black, Yemen - brown on brown, Uyghurs in Xinjiang getting slaughtered by the PRC - yellow on yellow and so forth. Israel codes as white and the Palestinians as brown so it is safe to be radical without accusations of racism. That the Palestinians are massively sexist and racist is lost in the cult of victimhood.
All the sins of the Earth can be heaped onto a convenient proxy. I would guess the students who feel the most uncomfortable are the ones who realize that HAMAS might not be the unicorn riding tolerance brigade the more radical students believe it to be. Anyone who believes that Palestinian rights equal trans rights probably should be barred from operating heavy equipment.
What the students are afraid to speak on in could effectively be termed as heresy, going against the progressive faith of victimhood in seeing HAMAS for what they really are.
1. "Not being able to say from the river to the sea without risk of being honor coded"
> Are we supposed to feel empathethic for this?
2. The ostracism and outright violent hostilities faced by conservative students and professors very few years ago have been way harsher than what any liberal had to face.
3. This is illustrated in your 4th plot, that shows conservatives are more worried about expressing their opinion on almost all topics.
I suspect the students are not predominently afraid of the administration or the people who are 'on the other side'. It's the people who are 'on their own side but less moderate than they are' they fear. You should be able to discover this next time you poll them with different questions.
FIRE seems to have a bias towards "any self-censorship is bad even if it means kids don't feel comfortable calling for the genocide of a group of people."
I suspect you are just picking up the fact that there is disagreement on this issue that cuts across the usual ideological sorting. The terminology in footnote 1 (or uncomfortable/difficult to discuss) doesn't suggest any kind of fear of punishment or external sanction. I think most people would say it is very difficult to discuss a will or other planning for death with their parents -- even if their parents want to discuss it.
Indeed, I would be most likely to describe an issue as difficult to discuss or uncomfortable if it was internal motivation -- for instance a desire not to be hurtful or offensive to people -- that made me avoid the issue. I'd describe fear of sanction (social or administrative) as a *dangerous* topic to discuss.
And this explains the information pretty nicely. Unlike the other issues on the list the Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides people of similar partisan identity. Discussion of all the other issues probably is mostly agreeable in most friend groups but it isn't uncommon to have friends who have strong deeply emotional views in both directions on Israel amoung moderates and on the left.
In other words: people don't like to have conversations that might get their friends mad at them.
Students quoted are from Barnard, Wellesley, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke. This is striking. And entirely consistent with the current Seven Sisters. The unease these young women report is surprise. They have finally run into an issue and people who offer a modicum of pushback to their latest, unexamined cause de jour. Smithies aren’t afraid of their administrators and honor codes, they’re shocked that some of their classmates don’t agree with them.
What is hard about saying israel and it's government is engaging in a genocide? That is factually true. Attacking seed banks is a pretty gosh darn, terrible thing to do.
I completely understand the choice here to keep the discussion general and not dive into the students' specific views, but the elephant in the room here is that a lot of college students have batshit insane views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
I'm talkin about things like supporting state-designated terrorist organizations, wanting Israelis to "go back to poland" or (on the pro-Israel side) not valuing Palestinian life or thinking the IDF was uniquely restrained in its conduct in Gaza.
It stands to reason that if you had views this extreme (or if some of your peers had views this extreme) you'd think twice before bringing up the subject!
This is interesting! I wonder how much of this has to do with the vast majority of liberal students having mixed or "softer" but still critical anti-Israel views than the further left vocal minority that has a more maximalist "Israel must be destroyed" POV. Perhaps those more moderate liberals simply don't want to be forced to pretend they agree with those more hateful, taboo views, or face social backlash from their peers if they draw that moral line.
Show me a college liberal who says "Israel is bad but they shouldn't all be genocided" that hasn't been labeled a Zionist and excommunicated from their lefty friend groups.
I think we make a mistake by combining "speech critical of Israel" with "speech that clearly violates moral taboos expressing overt hateful bigotry and calls for violence". If kids are only worried about the former, that's a problem. But if the examples they share are students facing consequences for egregiously violating these taboos and policies, then this is not a censorship problem. This is society doing exactly what it's supposed to to maintain a stigma around overt hateful bigotry, ensuring it remains unacceptable in polite society.
I think the answer is violent rhetoric. Far-left pro Palestine discussions tend to show overt approval towards anti-Western and anti-Jewish violence and terrorism. This can make less militant far leftists uncomfortable and also make any kind of discussion on the topic
impossible.
Yes, I think this is right, but also needs some more context.
For a long time, universities - despite their broad claims to tolerate free speech - have made an exception for racist speech: there was general agreement that speech perceived of as racist should not be tolerated within university environments. This affected few people, because few people in the general left-leaning environments of universities had any inclination to be racist. But during the "Great Awokening", the concept of "racism" expanded, and more people got caught in its net, although even there, most were happy to go along with whatever the "anti-racists" prescribed.
But when it came to Jews and Israel, there was a catch. Unlike with racism against Blacks, Hispanics, Asians etc., a LOT of people on the Left were inclined to say things about Israel in particular that most (not all) Jews regard as antisemitic. So universities were always (but increasingly after October 7) faced with a choice: EITHER clamp down on anti-Israel speech in a way that antagonized large portions of their left-wing members, OR appease their left-wing members by allowing anti-Israel speech, but then lay themselves open to charges of tolerating antisemitism in a way in which they would never tolerate other forms of racism.
Different universities negotiated that balance in different ways - it's hardly surprising that more left-wing institutions were more tolerant of anti-Israel speech, even when it verged into things perceived as antisemitic by most Jews. But they all had the balance to strike, and so it's not really surprising that what ended up happening is that a lot of left-leaning people, even at more left-wing institutions, felt in danger of having their speech suppressed: and at those institutions it was probably felt more keenly by them, precisely because students and faculty alike had assimilated the broad left-wing norms that implicitly treats racism toward Jews and Israel different from other minorities.
I very much agree with you. I think the issue is broader than Jews, and was about any groups deemed "oppressors", so included whites, men, rich people, etc. Of course, the vitriol against Jews specifically exploded since 10/7.
It's my view that this type of overt hateful bigotry is and always was a TABOO, but we simply stopped enforcing it due to this "oppressor vs. oppressed" framing, as well as because of tribalism (nobody wanted to denounce people from their own side).
I'm writing about this topic non-stop these days on my Substack Holding the Line elevin11.substack.com where I'm making the case that we must enforce these universal moral TABOOS in a principled way, with strict social consequences and ostracism, as we did to defeat the KKK, or their hatred will become normalized and spiral into violence and anarchy.
Why have “liberals” become anything but liberal, in the traditional sense.
Maybe, stop calling them “liberals”, and call them “left-wing, collectivists”.
Israel is about the only safe nation to really lay into. Congo - black on black, Yemen - brown on brown, Uyghurs in Xinjiang getting slaughtered by the PRC - yellow on yellow and so forth. Israel codes as white and the Palestinians as brown so it is safe to be radical without accusations of racism. That the Palestinians are massively sexist and racist is lost in the cult of victimhood.
All the sins of the Earth can be heaped onto a convenient proxy. I would guess the students who feel the most uncomfortable are the ones who realize that HAMAS might not be the unicorn riding tolerance brigade the more radical students believe it to be. Anyone who believes that Palestinian rights equal trans rights probably should be barred from operating heavy equipment.
What the students are afraid to speak on in could effectively be termed as heresy, going against the progressive faith of victimhood in seeing HAMAS for what they really are.
1. "Not being able to say from the river to the sea without risk of being honor coded"
> Are we supposed to feel empathethic for this?
2. The ostracism and outright violent hostilities faced by conservative students and professors very few years ago have been way harsher than what any liberal had to face.
3. This is illustrated in your 4th plot, that shows conservatives are more worried about expressing their opinion on almost all topics.
I suspect the students are not predominently afraid of the administration or the people who are 'on the other side'. It's the people who are 'on their own side but less moderate than they are' they fear. You should be able to discover this next time you poll them with different questions.
FIRE seems to have a bias towards "any self-censorship is bad even if it means kids don't feel comfortable calling for the genocide of a group of people."
I suspect you are just picking up the fact that there is disagreement on this issue that cuts across the usual ideological sorting. The terminology in footnote 1 (or uncomfortable/difficult to discuss) doesn't suggest any kind of fear of punishment or external sanction. I think most people would say it is very difficult to discuss a will or other planning for death with their parents -- even if their parents want to discuss it.
Indeed, I would be most likely to describe an issue as difficult to discuss or uncomfortable if it was internal motivation -- for instance a desire not to be hurtful or offensive to people -- that made me avoid the issue. I'd describe fear of sanction (social or administrative) as a *dangerous* topic to discuss.
And this explains the information pretty nicely. Unlike the other issues on the list the Israeli-Palestinian conflict divides people of similar partisan identity. Discussion of all the other issues probably is mostly agreeable in most friend groups but it isn't uncommon to have friends who have strong deeply emotional views in both directions on Israel amoung moderates and on the left.
In other words: people don't like to have conversations that might get their friends mad at them.
Students quoted are from Barnard, Wellesley, Smith, and Mt. Holyoke. This is striking. And entirely consistent with the current Seven Sisters. The unease these young women report is surprise. They have finally run into an issue and people who offer a modicum of pushback to their latest, unexamined cause de jour. Smithies aren’t afraid of their administrators and honor codes, they’re shocked that some of their classmates don’t agree with them.
Lol “Not being able to say from the river to the sea without risk of being honor coded” (Wellesley College)
“The college has been very pro-Israel, this has led to a lot of censorship away from pro-Palestinian conversations” (Mount Holyoke College)
“The admin here is pretty pro-Israel so sometimes I’m worried about expressing my pro-Palestine opinions” (Smith College)”
What is hard about saying israel and it's government is engaging in a genocide? That is factually true. Attacking seed banks is a pretty gosh darn, terrible thing to do.
Gaza is an open air prison.
I completely understand the choice here to keep the discussion general and not dive into the students' specific views, but the elephant in the room here is that a lot of college students have batshit insane views on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
I'm talkin about things like supporting state-designated terrorist organizations, wanting Israelis to "go back to poland" or (on the pro-Israel side) not valuing Palestinian life or thinking the IDF was uniquely restrained in its conduct in Gaza.
It stands to reason that if you had views this extreme (or if some of your peers had views this extreme) you'd think twice before bringing up the subject!