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Joe Cohn
Heterodox Academy
Excerpt: When protesters took over Columbia University’s Butler Library on May 7, prevented others from using the library for their studies, vandalized the building, and apparently assaulted university staff, they were not just violating the university's rules. They were also engaged in criminal activity.
As HxA has previously stated, the right to protest from any point of view on any topic is an essential aspect of freedom of speech vital to the health of college campuses. But the right does not extend to occupying buildings, excluding others from shared spaces, vandalism, violence, or any other attempt to disrupt the functioning of an institution of higher education. Those activities prevent others from engaging in open inquiry (including research and studying) and can—as they did at Butler Library—also endanger people.
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The protests that greeted Department of Homeland Security General Counsel James Percival a UCLA School of Law in April were not surprising. Law students, especially at highly ranked schools like UCLA, have become notoriously intolerant of disfavored speakers coming to campus — and few institutions are quite as polarizing as DHS in the “Abolish ICE” era. It was striking, however, that the students who organized the interruptions of Percival’s presentation — with heckling, hacking coughs, cellphones, and the occasional profanity — did exactly what “snowflake” students have been ridiculed and denounced for doing when encountering someone they don’t agree with.
What happens when an entire profession can’t see what’s hiding in plain sight in its own data? That puzzle animated Stony Brook University sociologist Musa al-Gharbi’s keynote at the Heterodox Academy 2026 West Coast Regional Conference, held recently at UC Berkeley.
The deeper problem, he contends, is not bad-faith activism but a structural one: peer review, editing, and committee deliberation only correct for bias when the people doing the correcting actually differ from one another, and the academy and the press increasingly do not. His full speech is transcribed below.
Two years after protests over the Israel-Hamas war roiled college campuses, resulting in the arrests of more than 3,000 students and faculty, a new study finds that students generally oppose punishing “objectionable speech,” unless they consider it “highly harmful.”
The study, conducted by researchers from the Universities of Pennsylvania and Colorado and Stanford and Columbia Universities and published in April in Science Advances, also found that students’ views of objectionable speech depend largely on whom it is targeted at.
