Philospher Jennifer Frey has given an argument that university governing boards have the right to clear students off their lawns and end their protests. According to her, doing so is enforcement of content-neutral restrictions on speech (manner and form restrictions), not content-based restrictions against speech. There are, I think, many ways to challenge her argument even on its own terms (esp. disproportionality and uneven enforcement), but I want to make another point that I think is illustrative, and often forgotten.
I think it would help if more people were familiar with the strategic thinking of MLK, and the Civil Rights movement in general, rather than the caricature that's often made of it. These were fundamentally in-system reformers, who were doing a very careful political trade-off between poking parts of the system, while simultaneously trying to appeal to other parts of the system. It was not the simplistic take-punishment that's retold as a fairy-tale. Plus they did have in-group philosophical critics, basically others who quite reasonably asked "If a racist tries to bash my head in because I want to vote, why should I let them bash my head in?"
Great article. It does, however, in my view lose track of a distinction I think is important.
Your article is a defense of the students’ right to protest and to encamp, written in response to Frey. The distinction I think you lose track of is the difference between the legitimacy of the students’ protest and the legitimacy of enforcing the rules against them.
In her thread, Frey did not argue for or against the first element of that distinction. She in fact stated that “[s]tudents who feel very strongly about divestment are free to choose how much they are willing to put on the line for their cause.” What she did argue for was the college’s right to partially limit students’ protest “rights” (college campuses aren’t full public forums with 1st amendment protections, hence my scare quotes.) I think this is justified for epistemic reasons.
From the point of view of a student, it can often be very justified to protest. Even if you assign a 60% credence to your belief in the college’s injustice, it can still be worth it to protest. But this bar is far lower than it is for the college.
From the college’s point of view, though, this looks a little different. The central goal of a college/university is to make students learn. Thus, colleges have to balance that goal with other considerations, such as students’ right to protest. If they did what you are advocating, and set out to determinate the legitimacy of every single protest and every single complex ethical/political indictment behind those protests, they would be sluggish, wasting time, and spending a lot of time on determine the legitimacy of ethical/political issues that people have been arguing about for hundreds of years. This would distract and even hinder their educational mission. Effectively, they would only be able to clear or positively permit encampments if they were able to be almost entirely sure in their judgment, which would be unusual given the complexity of said issues.
Colleges simply don’t have the time to form complete judgments on every single issue causing their students to protest against them. And, even if they did, could we really expect them to consistently arrive at the right answer? No. Thus, the only feasible way forward is a neutral approach of the likes advocated for by Frey, an approach that permits some sorts of political protest for all issues (peaceful non-permanent protests) and outlaws some sorts of protests for all issues (violence, encampments).
TLDR: I support peaceful protests but not encampments. It is far easier for a student to epistemically justify protest than it is for a college to be epistemically pass judgment on that protest. Colleges cannot be expected to either spend the requisite time on adjudicating each issue nor can they be expected to routinely arrive at the truth. Thus, a Frey-esque neutral way forward is the right answer.
Frey is right; moreover, protesting has always been the easy way out.
Protesting has always been a way of saying, "look how upset I am! I'm doing something about it!" while literally not doing anything whatsoever about anything. It's a form of attention-whoring; real action begins at things like boycotts and strikes. But those involve putting something substantial on the line, and precisely what the students aren't ready to do is put things on the line...this is evidenced by their, "oh, I'm being forcibly removed from property that isn't mine! This is unjust!" disposition.
The only thing that gives protest even a modicum of legitimacy is the willingness of the protestors to accept whatever punishments may come - but even so, it's an action of passivity and pleading for attention.
If the students really gave a shit, they'd simply leave. "Oh, but we just can't give up our educations and our career plans!" Well, clearly ye are of little faith and/or simply don't really care all that much about what you are not-at-all "up in arms" about.
A few not-very-coherent thoughts in reply (having found your blog via Scott Alexander's link to your survey).
First, I want to focus in on this sentence: "Suppose twenty years from now, it is widely agreed that Israel engaged in war crimes, and/or genocide against the Palestinians and that American universities played a modest role in that." I want to push back that "how things are viewed in twenty years" is a good proxy for "whether it was actually good or bad" (which it seems like you're using it for). Remember that twenty years after the end of reconstruction, it was quite widely agreed that it was a disastrously wrongheaded experiment in giving democratic rights to those who didn't deserve them (so thought only among whites, but they were such a strong majority of the population that it counts as "widely agreed", at least numerically); nowadays it is widely understood as a noble but unfinished attempt at full equality. (I agree with the latter, but then I *would*—I'm from today, not 1896!). Twenty years after Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, he was held to be in the high second tier of US presidents, and Ulysses S Grant was taken to be one of the worst; today those judgments are close to reversed. And so on. It's easy to imagine a case where 20 years from now Israel is widely held to have been justified but 100 years from now it's not... or vice-versa! It all depends, and there's no "judgment of history" substitute for making our own judgments.
Second, staying with that same sentence, I want to focus on the term "modest". I think it really matters,. You could argue that the US played a "modest" role in the Holocaust (by refusing to accept Jewish refugees), but I think that shutting down US universities in protest would have been so useless and counterproductive so as to be wrong (more on this in point four). On the other hand, shutting down *German* universities would have been fully justified. The question is what does the US today more closely resemble? It's not clear to me that even if the US totally cut off aid to Israel that Israel would stop what it's doing (I can easily imagine it going the other way: feeling suddenly embattled, Israelis might double-down on attacking perceived enemies with all the force they have, and possibly using more destructive means (to save their own soldiers, i.e. bombing from above indiscriminately, less dangerous to Israeli soldiers than invasion)), so I think we are a long way from Germany (even if one assumes there is a morally reasonable analogy to be made between what Israel's doing & what Germany did, which I very much don't). Now I think the US probably bears (no pun intended) more responsibility in general for however you characterize what Israel's doing than the US did for the Holocaust... but it's tricky.
Another way of putting point 2: it's quite reasonable to argue that most people who either wear clothes or own a smartphone are to some modest degree complicit in slavery, given corporate production practices. Would it be reasonable to block the normal functioning of universities over this? What if one of the demands were that no one who owned a smartphone could be enrolled/employed by the university, nor could anyone who owned clothes that had any chance of being slave-made, so practically no one who didn't make their own clothing?
Third: I think you are underestimating the value of institutional neutrality here. You say it's impossible. But that's only true from the point of view of their being some fact of the matter about who is right here, that we could in principle discover. If you see what is going on as a clash of values, which are ultimately "making propaganda for a way of life" (to paraphrase Wittgenstein, possibly badly, it's been a while) than the pursuit of neutrality is worthwhile. There was a book a while ago titled (if memory serves) "Democracy May Not Exist But We're Going To Miss It When It's Gone". I think I would say about institutional neutrality that "institutional neutrality may not exist but we're going to miss it when it's gone". I think we have in fact discovered post-October 7, when pro-Palestine voices (quite rightly!) reached for now degraded and disregarded arguments for free speech, or when university presidents hauled before Congress use arguments about nuance and context that are correct but which they themselves had not used in other circumstances, that we already *do* so miss it.
Another way to put point three: there is a difference between a clash of rights and a question of a single right. I think there is moral value in having institutional neutrality, *especially* for universities which are supposed to be the sites of intellectual contestation and development. So it's not a question of whether or not the need is urgent enough to override practical considerations, but which moral right takes precedence—which is always hard.
Finally, (and going hastily because real life calls) I think that your argument is based on establishing a right in principle apart from possible utility, admitting that most of the time the utility isn't there. I think this is a wrong approach. First of all, I don't think utility can be distinguished from right that easily—I think that what makes something right is too entangled with whether it works. I would say instead there is a right to revolution if and ONLY if it has a reasonable chance of suceess, and in other cases it is not just unwise but immoral. Further, arguing for such things can cause immoral acts, because (like the "nuclear bomb" arguments for torture common circa 2003) they tend to encourage the idea that something isn't THAT bad, and then get people to do it in cases very, very far removed from the hypotheticals that persuaded.
I enjoyed the post and, so far, your blog. I look forward to reading more.,
I'm so torn by this post. On the one hand, I find the incessant removing of all notions of practicality to focus on the central moral dilemma quite refreshing. On the other hand, the argument becomes so abstract that it resembles the philosophical version of spherical cows - models of reality that are preferred because they are easier to work with, not because they are realistic.
You acknowledge yourself that no state that has ever existed clears the bar that would prevent citizens from justifiably rebelling against it. And yet you also acknowledge that in most real-world scenarios rebelling against states is unwise. (And, I would add, the more egregious a state's human rights violations get, the more unwise it is to rebel against that state - however brave you think these students are, it would be a thousand times braver to perform similar acts of rebellion in North Korea.)
Therefore I feel that your conclusions are at once correct, and useless. The purpose of ethics should be moral instruction of individuals - if your ethics only apply in a perfect world, and you also believe we are unbelievably far from that world, then I don't think any conclusions can be drawn on what the correct course of action is.
Without any applicable guidance on what a good moral path is for those in the right, all that is left is a judgement of who is right on the issue being protested. But even that doesn't get you anything, because the assertion that the students are right and the university is wrong is explicitly an assumption made at the beginning of the argument. You have to make that assumption because you reject the liberal notion of moral neutrality in ethical arbitration. So once you take out the bits that depend on the simplifying assumption that ignores the distinction between rebellion being righteous and wise, you've only got a circular argument left.
(FWIW on the actual issue, since as you say we can't be viewpoint-neutral - I think the actions of the Israeli government are deeply immoral and probably constitute war crimes; I would hesitate to use the g-word only because that word has a very precise meaning, but I hope you would agree that there is plenty of space which falls short of the strict definition which is still morally reprehensible and requires international condemnation. That said, I think to then jump to "the US government is complicit", and then from that to "a specific US university is complict" - in my view every degree of separation substantially lessens culpability. Ultimately you have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise you could implicate just about everyone in Israel's war crimes through sufficiently circuitous reasoning, eg - if you've ever bought any product with fireproofing in it, those flame retardants probably contain bromine, and most bromine is extracted from the Dead Sea by the Israeli government and its corporate associates, often centring its occupations from illegally occupied Palestine. So the only ethical thing to do is buy a laptop which is prone to catching fire, or you're culpable for genocide...)
Columbia administrators don't have to make a moral judgement about the protesters' grievances, only that the protesters are obliged to pursue their politics a different fashion.
Democratic liberalism is a set of procedures designed to adjudicate, among other things, whether a given conflict even has moral status, much less making determinations about the conflict itself.
I think the problem is, as another commenter observed, that your argument assumes unattainable levels of certainty among all parties. Therefore, it exists in different universe than liberalism, which is structured by epistemic humility and conceptually disjoint from talk of self-evident grave moral offenses.
I think the actual "neutral" position is that the student protestors should be removed because doing so upholds norms/processes that prevent small groups from having the heckler's veto. If every claim of institutional depravity has to be treated as if the institution might actually be morally responsible, then it quickly becomes impossible to do anything without litigating the morality of all the institution's actions (which is what the protestors presumably would want). But determining the morality of any action is fraught and controversial, so an institution's default stance is that its agent's actions are moral, unless it receives information otherwise. How do they get that info that the institution or its agents are acting immorally? - "legitimate" protests, board/trustee meetings, op-eds, etc. Yes, these things are often slow and less effectual, but the changes made via them are given more legitimacy because the "process" was followed.
Of course, such an argument depends on a functioning but "immoral" institution being better than a nonfunctional but moral one. That's a bullet I'll easily bite though, since then adjudicating the legitimacy of different tactics depends on analyzing the tradeoff between the loss of function in the institution and the amount of harm done by the institution's continuing on the status quo.
'Very quick to claim that the morality of students' position needs to be assessed before taking action against them, but why not also of the governors? To what extent were the views of the university (vis-a-vis their perpetrating mass murder etc.) fairly taken into consideration, before resorting to these desperate, disruptive disturbances contravening the university's neutral policies, that are purportedly "so pressing"? Wouldn't it be appropriate, assuming the university has a clear conscience (rightly or not), for it to say to the people who chose to be educated there: if THAT'S what you think of us... if THAT'S how you understand things... if THAT'S how you see us - then it's not appropriate that you study here; - lesser still that you choose to disrupt our resources. To argue that it is wrong for universities to shut down (all manner?) of "demonstration" just in case what's being demonstrated against might turn out to be reprehensible and therefore just about any outrage would retroactively have been be laudable, or even "heroic", is to ignore what may very well be the perfectly reasonable, tried-and-true techniques of raising complaints, protests and demonstrations... of that very institution. Sure: maybe you DO 'know better' though. MAYBE. Maybe not! Why does the university not also have the "right" to "protest" against those vivifying such practices and attitudes - quite possibly interfering with the terminating of mass murder and Genocide that is ACTUALLY taking place in Israel/Gaza. Perhaps the "protesters" are gaslighting: playing the heroic victims... in order to attack those quite welcoming of free, open, fair, peaceful debate. Shouldn't the universities be allowed to be activist about that, too?
This part at least I agree with, but it leads me to interpret Frey very differently.
In practice, states have recognised something like a generic right to protest, one that renders even some things ordinarily illegal for non-power-preserving reasons tolerated in the context of protest. For example, if you want to block a major street, you need a government-approved cause - or, your protest permitted. And they are at least somewhat impartial about this. Not too long ago, a protest against NATO and russian sanctions got to walk through main street here.
From the perspective of a government presumably considering itself in the right, these things should if anything be more illegal when done to promote bad political goals, yet this toleration is there, and people to some degree demand it. Theres a significant fraction of liberals who, also unwilling to depend on the object level, will object to actions of the government/university here, regardless of content (unless maybe its some nazi stuff). These are the people I think Frey is talking to, on the background assumption that *actual agreement* with the students claims against the university is pretty niche, and objections to their treatment come mostly from such people.
In your three responses to MLK, in my experience, your own (3) polls strongly ahead of (1), with (2) a Libertarian-Party-distant third place. I find it ludicrous that you would call (2) "common" while claiming contrarian cred for (3). Unless you're talking about public attitudes in 1964, not 2024?
Frey's argument falls at the first hurdle. The Columbia president made it clear in her craven appearance in Congress that the restrictions are all about content, and specifically about criticism of Israel. She applied this not just to protests but to speech of all kinds that Republicans regard as unacceptable.
Unlawful actions against unjust behavior of a state/organization are only vindicated when either
A)the law should have never been enforced in first place, the law _itself_ is unjust;
or
B)there is good consequence from disobedience, such as saved lives or somesuch.
Neither is true in case of such protests - but, in particular, Frey seems to argue that A is false, and this is an argument you can make without checking whether B is true or false.
And when the unlawful actions are not vindicated, law enforcement against them is thus vindicated on consequentialist ground: a law is to be shown to have teeth, a law not enforced will lose its power.
I think it would help if more people were familiar with the strategic thinking of MLK, and the Civil Rights movement in general, rather than the caricature that's often made of it. These were fundamentally in-system reformers, who were doing a very careful political trade-off between poking parts of the system, while simultaneously trying to appeal to other parts of the system. It was not the simplistic take-punishment that's retold as a fairy-tale. Plus they did have in-group philosophical critics, basically others who quite reasonably asked "If a racist tries to bash my head in because I want to vote, why should I let them bash my head in?"
Great article. It does, however, in my view lose track of a distinction I think is important.
Your article is a defense of the students’ right to protest and to encamp, written in response to Frey. The distinction I think you lose track of is the difference between the legitimacy of the students’ protest and the legitimacy of enforcing the rules against them.
In her thread, Frey did not argue for or against the first element of that distinction. She in fact stated that “[s]tudents who feel very strongly about divestment are free to choose how much they are willing to put on the line for their cause.” What she did argue for was the college’s right to partially limit students’ protest “rights” (college campuses aren’t full public forums with 1st amendment protections, hence my scare quotes.) I think this is justified for epistemic reasons.
From the point of view of a student, it can often be very justified to protest. Even if you assign a 60% credence to your belief in the college’s injustice, it can still be worth it to protest. But this bar is far lower than it is for the college.
From the college’s point of view, though, this looks a little different. The central goal of a college/university is to make students learn. Thus, colleges have to balance that goal with other considerations, such as students’ right to protest. If they did what you are advocating, and set out to determinate the legitimacy of every single protest and every single complex ethical/political indictment behind those protests, they would be sluggish, wasting time, and spending a lot of time on determine the legitimacy of ethical/political issues that people have been arguing about for hundreds of years. This would distract and even hinder their educational mission. Effectively, they would only be able to clear or positively permit encampments if they were able to be almost entirely sure in their judgment, which would be unusual given the complexity of said issues.
Colleges simply don’t have the time to form complete judgments on every single issue causing their students to protest against them. And, even if they did, could we really expect them to consistently arrive at the right answer? No. Thus, the only feasible way forward is a neutral approach of the likes advocated for by Frey, an approach that permits some sorts of political protest for all issues (peaceful non-permanent protests) and outlaws some sorts of protests for all issues (violence, encampments).
TLDR: I support peaceful protests but not encampments. It is far easier for a student to epistemically justify protest than it is for a college to be epistemically pass judgment on that protest. Colleges cannot be expected to either spend the requisite time on adjudicating each issue nor can they be expected to routinely arrive at the truth. Thus, a Frey-esque neutral way forward is the right answer.
Frey is right; moreover, protesting has always been the easy way out.
Protesting has always been a way of saying, "look how upset I am! I'm doing something about it!" while literally not doing anything whatsoever about anything. It's a form of attention-whoring; real action begins at things like boycotts and strikes. But those involve putting something substantial on the line, and precisely what the students aren't ready to do is put things on the line...this is evidenced by their, "oh, I'm being forcibly removed from property that isn't mine! This is unjust!" disposition.
The only thing that gives protest even a modicum of legitimacy is the willingness of the protestors to accept whatever punishments may come - but even so, it's an action of passivity and pleading for attention.
If the students really gave a shit, they'd simply leave. "Oh, but we just can't give up our educations and our career plans!" Well, clearly ye are of little faith and/or simply don't really care all that much about what you are not-at-all "up in arms" about.
A few not-very-coherent thoughts in reply (having found your blog via Scott Alexander's link to your survey).
First, I want to focus in on this sentence: "Suppose twenty years from now, it is widely agreed that Israel engaged in war crimes, and/or genocide against the Palestinians and that American universities played a modest role in that." I want to push back that "how things are viewed in twenty years" is a good proxy for "whether it was actually good or bad" (which it seems like you're using it for). Remember that twenty years after the end of reconstruction, it was quite widely agreed that it was a disastrously wrongheaded experiment in giving democratic rights to those who didn't deserve them (so thought only among whites, but they were such a strong majority of the population that it counts as "widely agreed", at least numerically); nowadays it is widely understood as a noble but unfinished attempt at full equality. (I agree with the latter, but then I *would*—I'm from today, not 1896!). Twenty years after Woodrow Wilson's Presidency, he was held to be in the high second tier of US presidents, and Ulysses S Grant was taken to be one of the worst; today those judgments are close to reversed. And so on. It's easy to imagine a case where 20 years from now Israel is widely held to have been justified but 100 years from now it's not... or vice-versa! It all depends, and there's no "judgment of history" substitute for making our own judgments.
Second, staying with that same sentence, I want to focus on the term "modest". I think it really matters,. You could argue that the US played a "modest" role in the Holocaust (by refusing to accept Jewish refugees), but I think that shutting down US universities in protest would have been so useless and counterproductive so as to be wrong (more on this in point four). On the other hand, shutting down *German* universities would have been fully justified. The question is what does the US today more closely resemble? It's not clear to me that even if the US totally cut off aid to Israel that Israel would stop what it's doing (I can easily imagine it going the other way: feeling suddenly embattled, Israelis might double-down on attacking perceived enemies with all the force they have, and possibly using more destructive means (to save their own soldiers, i.e. bombing from above indiscriminately, less dangerous to Israeli soldiers than invasion)), so I think we are a long way from Germany (even if one assumes there is a morally reasonable analogy to be made between what Israel's doing & what Germany did, which I very much don't). Now I think the US probably bears (no pun intended) more responsibility in general for however you characterize what Israel's doing than the US did for the Holocaust... but it's tricky.
Another way of putting point 2: it's quite reasonable to argue that most people who either wear clothes or own a smartphone are to some modest degree complicit in slavery, given corporate production practices. Would it be reasonable to block the normal functioning of universities over this? What if one of the demands were that no one who owned a smartphone could be enrolled/employed by the university, nor could anyone who owned clothes that had any chance of being slave-made, so practically no one who didn't make their own clothing?
Third: I think you are underestimating the value of institutional neutrality here. You say it's impossible. But that's only true from the point of view of their being some fact of the matter about who is right here, that we could in principle discover. If you see what is going on as a clash of values, which are ultimately "making propaganda for a way of life" (to paraphrase Wittgenstein, possibly badly, it's been a while) than the pursuit of neutrality is worthwhile. There was a book a while ago titled (if memory serves) "Democracy May Not Exist But We're Going To Miss It When It's Gone". I think I would say about institutional neutrality that "institutional neutrality may not exist but we're going to miss it when it's gone". I think we have in fact discovered post-October 7, when pro-Palestine voices (quite rightly!) reached for now degraded and disregarded arguments for free speech, or when university presidents hauled before Congress use arguments about nuance and context that are correct but which they themselves had not used in other circumstances, that we already *do* so miss it.
Another way to put point three: there is a difference between a clash of rights and a question of a single right. I think there is moral value in having institutional neutrality, *especially* for universities which are supposed to be the sites of intellectual contestation and development. So it's not a question of whether or not the need is urgent enough to override practical considerations, but which moral right takes precedence—which is always hard.
Finally, (and going hastily because real life calls) I think that your argument is based on establishing a right in principle apart from possible utility, admitting that most of the time the utility isn't there. I think this is a wrong approach. First of all, I don't think utility can be distinguished from right that easily—I think that what makes something right is too entangled with whether it works. I would say instead there is a right to revolution if and ONLY if it has a reasonable chance of suceess, and in other cases it is not just unwise but immoral. Further, arguing for such things can cause immoral acts, because (like the "nuclear bomb" arguments for torture common circa 2003) they tend to encourage the idea that something isn't THAT bad, and then get people to do it in cases very, very far removed from the hypotheticals that persuaded.
I enjoyed the post and, so far, your blog. I look forward to reading more.,
I'm so torn by this post. On the one hand, I find the incessant removing of all notions of practicality to focus on the central moral dilemma quite refreshing. On the other hand, the argument becomes so abstract that it resembles the philosophical version of spherical cows - models of reality that are preferred because they are easier to work with, not because they are realistic.
You acknowledge yourself that no state that has ever existed clears the bar that would prevent citizens from justifiably rebelling against it. And yet you also acknowledge that in most real-world scenarios rebelling against states is unwise. (And, I would add, the more egregious a state's human rights violations get, the more unwise it is to rebel against that state - however brave you think these students are, it would be a thousand times braver to perform similar acts of rebellion in North Korea.)
Therefore I feel that your conclusions are at once correct, and useless. The purpose of ethics should be moral instruction of individuals - if your ethics only apply in a perfect world, and you also believe we are unbelievably far from that world, then I don't think any conclusions can be drawn on what the correct course of action is.
Without any applicable guidance on what a good moral path is for those in the right, all that is left is a judgement of who is right on the issue being protested. But even that doesn't get you anything, because the assertion that the students are right and the university is wrong is explicitly an assumption made at the beginning of the argument. You have to make that assumption because you reject the liberal notion of moral neutrality in ethical arbitration. So once you take out the bits that depend on the simplifying assumption that ignores the distinction between rebellion being righteous and wise, you've only got a circular argument left.
(FWIW on the actual issue, since as you say we can't be viewpoint-neutral - I think the actions of the Israeli government are deeply immoral and probably constitute war crimes; I would hesitate to use the g-word only because that word has a very precise meaning, but I hope you would agree that there is plenty of space which falls short of the strict definition which is still morally reprehensible and requires international condemnation. That said, I think to then jump to "the US government is complicit", and then from that to "a specific US university is complict" - in my view every degree of separation substantially lessens culpability. Ultimately you have to draw the line somewhere, otherwise you could implicate just about everyone in Israel's war crimes through sufficiently circuitous reasoning, eg - if you've ever bought any product with fireproofing in it, those flame retardants probably contain bromine, and most bromine is extracted from the Dead Sea by the Israeli government and its corporate associates, often centring its occupations from illegally occupied Palestine. So the only ethical thing to do is buy a laptop which is prone to catching fire, or you're culpable for genocide...)
Columbia administrators don't have to make a moral judgement about the protesters' grievances, only that the protesters are obliged to pursue their politics a different fashion.
Democratic liberalism is a set of procedures designed to adjudicate, among other things, whether a given conflict even has moral status, much less making determinations about the conflict itself.
I think the problem is, as another commenter observed, that your argument assumes unattainable levels of certainty among all parties. Therefore, it exists in different universe than liberalism, which is structured by epistemic humility and conceptually disjoint from talk of self-evident grave moral offenses.
I think the actual "neutral" position is that the student protestors should be removed because doing so upholds norms/processes that prevent small groups from having the heckler's veto. If every claim of institutional depravity has to be treated as if the institution might actually be morally responsible, then it quickly becomes impossible to do anything without litigating the morality of all the institution's actions (which is what the protestors presumably would want). But determining the morality of any action is fraught and controversial, so an institution's default stance is that its agent's actions are moral, unless it receives information otherwise. How do they get that info that the institution or its agents are acting immorally? - "legitimate" protests, board/trustee meetings, op-eds, etc. Yes, these things are often slow and less effectual, but the changes made via them are given more legitimacy because the "process" was followed.
Of course, such an argument depends on a functioning but "immoral" institution being better than a nonfunctional but moral one. That's a bullet I'll easily bite though, since then adjudicating the legitimacy of different tactics depends on analyzing the tradeoff between the loss of function in the institution and the amount of harm done by the institution's continuing on the status quo.
It might here be useful to distinguish between war and war crimes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Hamas-led_attack_on_Israel
'Very quick to claim that the morality of students' position needs to be assessed before taking action against them, but why not also of the governors? To what extent were the views of the university (vis-a-vis their perpetrating mass murder etc.) fairly taken into consideration, before resorting to these desperate, disruptive disturbances contravening the university's neutral policies, that are purportedly "so pressing"? Wouldn't it be appropriate, assuming the university has a clear conscience (rightly or not), for it to say to the people who chose to be educated there: if THAT'S what you think of us... if THAT'S how you understand things... if THAT'S how you see us - then it's not appropriate that you study here; - lesser still that you choose to disrupt our resources. To argue that it is wrong for universities to shut down (all manner?) of "demonstration" just in case what's being demonstrated against might turn out to be reprehensible and therefore just about any outrage would retroactively have been be laudable, or even "heroic", is to ignore what may very well be the perfectly reasonable, tried-and-true techniques of raising complaints, protests and demonstrations... of that very institution. Sure: maybe you DO 'know better' though. MAYBE. Maybe not! Why does the university not also have the "right" to "protest" against those vivifying such practices and attitudes - quite possibly interfering with the terminating of mass murder and Genocide that is ACTUALLY taking place in Israel/Gaza. Perhaps the "protesters" are gaslighting: playing the heroic victims... in order to attack those quite welcoming of free, open, fair, peaceful debate. Shouldn't the universities be allowed to be activist about that, too?
>I don’t like the concept of civil disobedience.
This part at least I agree with, but it leads me to interpret Frey very differently.
In practice, states have recognised something like a generic right to protest, one that renders even some things ordinarily illegal for non-power-preserving reasons tolerated in the context of protest. For example, if you want to block a major street, you need a government-approved cause - or, your protest permitted. And they are at least somewhat impartial about this. Not too long ago, a protest against NATO and russian sanctions got to walk through main street here.
From the perspective of a government presumably considering itself in the right, these things should if anything be more illegal when done to promote bad political goals, yet this toleration is there, and people to some degree demand it. Theres a significant fraction of liberals who, also unwilling to depend on the object level, will object to actions of the government/university here, regardless of content (unless maybe its some nazi stuff). These are the people I think Frey is talking to, on the background assumption that *actual agreement* with the students claims against the university is pretty niche, and objections to their treatment come mostly from such people.
In your three responses to MLK, in my experience, your own (3) polls strongly ahead of (1), with (2) a Libertarian-Party-distant third place. I find it ludicrous that you would call (2) "common" while claiming contrarian cred for (3). Unless you're talking about public attitudes in 1964, not 2024?
Frey's argument falls at the first hurdle. The Columbia president made it clear in her craven appearance in Congress that the restrictions are all about content, and specifically about criticism of Israel. She applied this not just to protests but to speech of all kinds that Republicans regard as unacceptable.
Unlawful actions against unjust behavior of a state/organization are only vindicated when either
A)the law should have never been enforced in first place, the law _itself_ is unjust;
or
B)there is good consequence from disobedience, such as saved lives or somesuch.
Neither is true in case of such protests - but, in particular, Frey seems to argue that A is false, and this is an argument you can make without checking whether B is true or false.
And when the unlawful actions are not vindicated, law enforcement against them is thus vindicated on consequentialist ground: a law is to be shown to have teeth, a law not enforced will lose its power.