Canceling Liz Magill Will Be Bad News for Free Speech

In 2021, after Harvard dropped her from an advisory committee, Representative Elise Stefanik gave an interview decrying “cancel culture” on American campuses. 

“This is how cancel culture works,” the New York Republican complained, noting that she had been the only Trump supporter on the committee. “Now they have a total monoculture approach, and the people that hurts the most are the students, the students who come from different backgrounds, who have a different perspective and deserve that robust debate to hear different sides and to foster critical thinking.”

Stefanik was correct: cancel culture in higher education is real. And now, she has become an expert canceler in her own right, successfully pressing to remove an educator who said the wrong words.

I speak, of course, of University of Pennsylvania President Elizabeth Magill, who resigned last week following a disastrous appearance before a Congressional hearing about antisemitism on American campuses. Pressed by Stefanik to say whether calling for the genocide of Jews would violate Penn’s code of conduct, Magill answered that it would depend on the “context” of the statement.

I understand why so many people were offended by Magill’s reply. Instead of responding emotionally, she answered like a lawyer by conveying the facts. Hateful speech is indeed protected—under the Constitution and Penn’s own rules—so long as it doesn’t pose an immediate threat of violence, harassment, or intimidation. Magill simply repeated that fact without conveying her outrage about genocide and antisemitism.

Then cancel culture exacted its revenge. Over 70 members of Congress signed a letter calling upon Magill and the two other presidents who testified—Claudine Gay of Harvard and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth—to resign. President Joe Biden, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, and the state’s two U.S. senators all blasted the Magill’s comments. And over 20,000 people signed a petition demanding that Penn replace the former law school dean with “a leader who will create a safe haven for all students, regardless of their background, where they can feel safe, supported, and valued.”

And make no mistake: that means new restrictions on speech. In New York, Governor Kathy Hochul sent a letter to state university officials threatening to pull funding from schools that “fail to clearly and unequivocally denounce antisemitism and calls for genocide.” At Penn, the board of advisors of the Wharton business school proposed revising the university’s code of conduct to declare that faculty, students, and staff may not “celebrate or advocate for the murder, killing, or genocide, or annihilation of any individual classmate or any group of individuals in our community.”

All of this sounds great, in theory. Why let anyone advocate for genocide? Shouldn’t we prohibit such speech, lest anyone on campus feel unsafe?

But here’s the problem: we disagree about what words mean. For example, millions of Americans believe that abortion is murder. If we prohibit advocacy for genocide, then a school run by pro-life leaders might also bar people from campaigning for reproductive rights.

Or consider the ongoing Israeli attack on Gaza, which some critics label genocide. The same pro-Israel voices demanding restrictions on speech might find themselves on the wrong side of don’t-mention-genocide rule if they continue to support the war.

Once you start censoring, you never know where it will lead. In 1988, the University of Michigan enacted a speech code barring “any behavior, verbal or physical, that stigmatizes or victimizes an individual on the basis of race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual orientation, creed, national origin, ancestry, age, marital status, handicap, or Vietnam-era status.” Over the next 18 months, whites charged Blacks with violating the code in 20 cases. One African-American student was punished for using the term ‘white trash.'”

A federal court struck down the Michigan code, ruling that “what one individual might find victimizing or stigmatizing, another individual might not.” Under the law, private institutions like Penn have more leeway in restricting speech than state schools like Michigan. But if they ban genocidal speech, universities must decide what falls under it. Will “From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be Free” be prohibited? How about “Globalize the Intifada“?

Penn already went down this road in the 1990s when it attempted to discipline an Israeli student for calling an African-American sorority sister a “water buffalo.” (The sorority was having a loud party, and the student was trying to get some sleep.) Charged with violating Penn’s rules against racist speech, the student defended the term, saying it simply meant a rowdy person in his native Hebrew. Following a tsunami of negative press, Penn dropped the charges against him, and two years later, it got rid of its speech code, too.

But now, I fear, the codes are coming back. “There will be more attempts, whether those are by campuses or boards of regents or boards of trustees, to more tightly define the boundaries of protected speech,” American Council of Education president Ted Mitchell said in an interview last week. So, get ready to repeat some very ugly history. Declaring our opposition to hate and discrimination, we will enact new prohibitions on speech. But eventually, we will rescind these bans once we realize—yet again—that almost any kind of speech can be banned under them.

I understand—and share—the frustration of many Jewish groups, who claim that universities have protected arguably antisemitic speech even as they censored other kinds. At Penn, for example, the university has been trying to fire law professor Amy Wax for making racist comments in and out of class. Why should “From the River to the Sea” get a pass while Wax is asked to walk the plank?

But the answer to the double standard isn’t to erect yet more speech rules. It’s to double down on a single standard: free speech itself. That’s what I thought Representative Stefanik supported back when she was railing against cancel culture. But now it turns out that she simply wants to protect the speech she likes and cancel the kind she doesn’t.

That spells very bad news for our universities. Now that Magill is gone, everyone on campus will wonder what they can and can’t say. “One down. Two to go,” Stefanik tweeted, demanding that the Harvard and MIT presidents resign. When will it stop?

Full disclosure: I met Liz Magill twice—at informal university functions—during her single year as president of Penn. She struck me as kind, good-humored, and unpretentious—no fancy clothes or windy jargon, just a decent, straightforward human being. I can see why some felt she did not demonstrate sufficient empathy for the victims of antisemitism during the Congressional hearing. But how much empathy has anyone shown to Liz Magill?

None, of course. Cancel culture means never having to say you’re sorry.

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