Free Speech on Campus: Bridging Divides in Polarized Times

By Rachel Gurevich ’26
In the United States, the tradition of campus protest is older than the country itself. In 1638, just two years after the founding of Harvard College, students protested against President Nathaniel Eaton over his abusive disciplinary tactics. A century later, in 1766, Harvard suspended half of its students during protests over the quality of dining hall butter.
As is well known, in the 1960s, campuses were the epicenter of the anti-war and civil rights movements. One of the most pivotal moments took place at Columbia University in May of 1968 when students occupied Hamilton Hall, an academic building, to protest against segregation and the Vietnam War. While many protests of this era remained peaceful, some devolved into violence, involving students burning down buildings, rioting, and raiding university files. At Kent State, campus unrest culminated in local National Guard troops shooting unarmed protesters, killing four and wounding nine. During the 1980s, students protested apartheid in South Africa, with demands of divestment and disclosure, similar to the demands of the pro-Palestinian protests of last spring.
For Gen Z, the right to protest has been a regular part of their formative years. From the Women’s March and March for Our Lives, to Greta Thunberg’s climate activism and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, college protests, led by many compassionate and motivated young people, have helped bring about change. But in the fall of 2023, the renewed war in the Middle East revealed a bitter undertone to campus protests and left universities bewildered on how to react.
The Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard’s Kennedy School notes that since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, protests occurred at about 525 American educational institutions, with approximately 3,645 arrests. Last year, encampments accounted for roughly 44% of these protests. The mounting tensions were also associated with an increase in hate speech. The University of Chicago Project on Security and Threats reported that between December 2023 and January 2024, about 56% of Jewish and 52% of Muslim college students felt unsafe due to their position on the Israel-Palestinian conflict. The Jewish campus organization Hillel found that 56% of Jewish students reported having “directly encountered antisemitism,” while a November 2024 survey from the Council on American-Islamic Relations suggests that nearly 50% of Muslim students experienced harassment or discrimination on campus during the 2023-24 academic year.
Campus protests might be older than the nation itself, but the intensity that followed October 7th felt out of character with what the spirit of American protest is supposed to be. Rather than uniting, the demonstrations pitted many Gen Z protesters against one another.
Political polarization is largely to blame.
The Polarization Problem
According to the PEW Research Center, polarization has reached a two-decade peak, particularly among the politically engaged. Within each political party, partisan animosity toward the other side has more than doubled since 1994, leading to political echo chambers and heightened tensions. While both parties have clashed over the Israel-Palestinian conflict, political infighting has also persisted.
Zachary Lockman, a professor at New York University who teaches on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, explains that students have adopted an “either with us or against us” mindset, leading to a lack of understanding of other perspectives.
Polarization has contributed to a decline in free expression on college campuses. In certain instances, students have been less willing than before to listen to speakers with whom they disagree. A 2019 Gallup poll indicated that 37% of college students said it was acceptable to shout down offensive speakers, while 10% condoned the use of violence to do so. A 2024 poll by Nate Silver and the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression revealed that only about 29% of students said a speaker who viewed transgender people as having a mental disorder or who viewed BLM as a hate group should be allowed to speak. A majority of students indicated that disfavored views should be rejected.
But offense can be subjective. As ideological lines blur, so too can perceptions of hate speech. Concerning the Israel-Palestinian conflict, this is evident in the different interpretations of campus slogans. Sixty-six percent of Jewish students perceive the slogan “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” as a call for the expulsion and genocide of Jews, but only 26% of all college students share that view.
Such a slogan has sparked no shortage of debate over its historical significance and context. However, as polarization deepens, opportunities for meaningful dialogue and intellectual deliberation diminish. This only undermines the university’s role as a marketplace of ideas and a space for fostering respectful debate.
The University’s Role
Administrative response to the Israel-Palestinian protests was intense, involving the use of police, suspensions, and in some cases, expulsions. At Columbia University, a large-scale encampment not only caused tremendous strain across campus but led to the arrests of more than 100 participants who broke into and vandalized Hamilton Halls. Universities and their leadership were especially criticized for their stance, or lack thereof, on the conflict in the Middle East.
But do universities have an obligation to comment on divisive issues? Much of history tells us no.
In 1967, during the Vietnam War protests, the University of Chicago named a committee under the leadership of the late Harry Kalven Jr., a revered professor of Constitutional law, to define the university’s “role in political and social action.” The Kalven Report affirmed that 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.” In other words, universities should combat polarization by embracing intellectual freedom.
The report also stated that universities are “a community which cannot take collective action on the issues of the day without endangering the conditions for its existence and effectiveness.” In other words, if an administration takes a position on a critical issue, it risks censoring contradictory opinions, whether explicitly by introducing speech restrictions or implicitly by encouraging self-censorship.
The Path Forward
One of the most coveted roles of Free Speech is to encourage reflection and discussion. John Stuart Mill wrote to this effect in “On Liberty,” stating “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility.”
The First Amendment has been interpreted to affirm the overlap in Free Speech and education, with the Supreme Court declaring in 1957 in Sweezy v. New Hampshire that “teachers and students must always remain free to inquire, to study and to evaluate, to gain new maturity and understanding; otherwise our civilization will stagnate and die.”
Universities adhering to neutrality does not mean they should blindly permit unlawful or violent protests, nor does it mean enabling hate speech at the expense of student safety. Speech codes are a common and constitutionally protected practice, and universities have a profound duty to protect their students from Islamophobia, antisemitism, racism, homophobia, and other forms of hate. Institutional neutrality means equally enforcing Free Speech protocols with everyone’s benefit in mind.
As the bedrock of inquiry, universities have helped catalyze change and ignited vital movements in the name of civil rights and the greater good. As we adapt to this era of protests, the best path universities can take to enhance campus protests will be to abate polarization and encourage more dialogue.