Alex Gourevitch is right that student protesters are currently being disciplined based on nothing other than the subjective reports of those who feel targeted or threatened by the call for Palestinian freedom. He also correctly identifies a therapeutic culture, nurtured by neoliberalism, that casts education as a service to be tailored to customer’s expectations.

But when it comes to solutions, Gourevitch falls back on a nostalgic set of liberal assumptions—most notably, the ideal of “institutional neutrality” which universities have allegedly “forsaken.” No such neutrality has ever existed, nor could it ever exist. As institutions embedded in a larger social and political context, universities must make decisions about questions of political conflict, and they do so in a myriad of ways.

Consider Gourevitch’s discussion of student protest in the 1960s. While the Free Speech Movement in Berkeley has been memorialized as establishing the right to protest, most student activism revolved around far more specific demands—that is, demands that went beyond mere protections of their speech and their right to assemble on campus. They called for a university that took an active role in addressing and rejecting the legacies of injustice and exploitation, criticizing the California Master Plan for reproducing hierarchies of race and class. Their wins were limited, to be sure, and as we’ve seen, they have been distorted by an administrative apparatus that offers only token and usually rhetorical nods to inclusion and diversity. But these movements did succeed in creating entirely new academic departments, including Black Studies and Chicano Studies. The creation of these departments represents a political choice—not a neutral action—on the part of the universities that house them, and it was made for a substantial, not neutral, reason: these fields of study examine foundational injustices of American history marginalized by the dominant curriculum. 

Free speech absolutists, by contrast, attempt to de-link formal protections of rights from substantive political visions. Gourevitch thus seeks a “consensus” around a basic “principle” about which he says we must be “uncompromising,” “regardless of everything else we might disagree about.” The goal is portrayed as minimal and procedural, something everyone should rationally consent to: institutional neutrality and tolerance, conceived as an all-or-nothing proposition. If you refuse to tolerate one group or perspective, the argument goes, eventually tolerance will be revoked for you. So in the interest of protecting our own freedom, we must defend the freedom to promote even the most horrifying of dystopias. Anything less will be vulnerable to co-optation by our political enemies and used against us.

There are multiple problems with this view. First is the assumption that rights are protected by rational appeals to consistent logic. To cast doubt on such an assumption is not to say that rational argument does not matter or cannot persuade (indeed, it can), but that academics and intellectuals chronically overestimate its impact. Even if the argument sketched above were convincing—and for reasons I will give below, I don’t think it is—actually existing political actors simply don’t behave this way in general: they are moved more by passion or power than by unwavering commitment to principle in all circumstances. There is little evidence that good arguments win out in the arrangement of our societies simply by dint of the force of their coherence and consistency. Gourevitch is thus closer to the mark when he acknowledges that “vigorous protest itself” will be a key tactic for changing how our universities behave. We should have much less faith than he does that administrators will be reasoned into his ideal.

A related problem is the underlying idea that absolute tolerance best protects the long-term survival of tolerance. As the paradox of tolerance goes, excessive tolerance—too much tolerating of the intolerant—can be self-undermining.

But the problems run deeper than this. The fundamental weakness in the free speech absolutist position is that it refuses to directly answer the key question: Tolerance for what? Protests for what? Every movement in history that has fought for freedom of speech and dissent—from the Industrial Workers of the World campaigns to the civil rights movement—has been attached to a larger vision of the good society. People fight for the right to protest in order to accomplish something other than the expression of dissent itself. That larger goal is what makes dissent valuable: it has no inherent virtue in a vacuum.

Yet this is what free speech absolutism—and political liberalism more broadly—fails to acknowledge. Tolerance is an important value in a good society, but it is always balanced against others just as essential. When tolerance trumps all, the creation of communities that have any meaning beyond a shallow contract become impossible. If we cannot make political commitments, we forfeit a fight for communities and institutions that genuinely reflect what we believe to be good, and beautiful, and true. Instead, we have institutions riven with hypocrisy and contradiction, predictably producing alienation, confusion, and aimlessness. The center will not hold—not if the supreme rule remains that we must always allow the promotion of that which we consider the most destructive assaults on human rights and happiness. 

But if we are going to have limits to toleration, how should these limits be determined? Who is going to be entrusted with that power? In a word, everyone. At the level of the university, limits on speech should be the collective decision of faculty, students, and staff. (Administration, for its part, should return to their proper role of implementing policy, not creating it.) This model of a participatory, democratic university was one larger goal that the protesters of the 1960s fought for, reflected most memorably in Mario Savio’s refusal to be regarded as merely a product. To be sure, this amounts to calling for a radical reconstruction of how most public universities in the country are run.

Just as crucially, what standard ought to be used in these democratic procedures to determine what speech falls outside generous limits? In any discussion of the impact of speech, reality should be front and center—the total body of facts about the societies we live in and the way power is actually arranged in them in the present. In the current context, this means facing the reality of the ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, as well facts about who is genuinely unsafe and marginalized on campus (and society more broadly), at the same time that it means treating genuinely antisemitic speech as unacceptable whenever it does appear. Similarly, it means recognizing that a Klan or Nazi rally on an integrated campus should not be tolerated. Gourevitch apparently thinks that the only basis for being intolerant of such rallies is a subjective feeling of unsafety, which he thinks doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. But we don’t have to be complete relativists in order to acknowledge that feelings are subjective. We can still make reasoned distinctions between disagreement and the rejection of democratic values altogether.

No doubt, this would be a political discussion, with all the complexity that politics invites. But politics can never be avoided, and certainly not by an appeal to the fiction of a neutral playing field. Confronting these issues openly allows for a level of honesty sorely lacking in contemporary political culture, which instead strenuously seeks to cordon off and compartmentalize politics to an ever-smaller range of times, places, and manners. When our institutions are not supposed to choose a side and are forced, therefore, into bad-faith arguments and hypocrisy, civic life as a whole suffers. Who can believe in the values of democracy when we restrict acting on them to a narrow set of contexts? Indeed, this is one reason that subjective appeals to safety became so common. Because students could not expect universities to respond on the basis of politics, they had to resort to a decontextualized claim of injury—part and parcel of the neoliberal depoliticization that Gourevitch rightly criticizes.

The democratic alternative to Gourevitch’s vision provides no guarantee that limits on speech will not be unjustly imposed or abused. But neither does the free speech absolutist approach, as we have seen. The democratic approach has the advantage that it allows for the possibility of genuine communities worth fighting for, ones that give us a chance to weave our values into the institutions that we build. And should the worst-case scenario ensue, with a power bloc denying legitimate freedom of expression and dissent, what would have to result is simply political struggle—a reality that no system can ever protect against absolutely. This should not be cause for despair. What should be is the illusory and status quo–serving quest to repress politics in the name of tolerance and neutrality.