This week, the presidents of Harvard, Penn, and MIT were dressed down by lawmakers for their refusal to unequivocally condemn expressions of antisemitism on their universities’ campuses.

Critics lambasted pro-Palestinian student demonstrators as antisemitic for chanting phrases such as “globalize the intifada” and “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”—both of which have been used by supporters of Hamas to call for the eradication of Israel—arguing that they are calls for the genocide of Jews.

The university leaders said, correctly in my opinion, that context was required to determine whether such statements constituted acts of harassment or calls to violence.

In other words, their argument was essentially that nuance was needed in interpretations of controversial speech, that we shouldn’t immediately ascribe the worst motivations to the speakers of such speech, and that Jewish students who felt unsafe by such expressions should accept that this is all part of the robust debate that should rightly occur in places of higher learning.

As a civil libertarian and near-absolutist on free speech, this is music to my ears.

The problem is that it flies completely in the face of long-standing campus policies surrounding speech codes and microaggressions. And it isolates Jews as a singular identity group for whom the rules and protections of campus safetyism don’t apply.

For much of the past two decades, colleges (and, increasingly, other institutions and workplaces beyond academia) have developed systems where people could anonymously make documented complaints against others for microaggressions—which as the name implies, were not overt acts of bigotry or harassment, but smaller offenses, some of which could be unintended. In a great many schools, the accused could be disciplined without having even heard the evidence against them.

This system was considered a righteous step on the path to social justice, despite being actively hostile to the principle of due process—where the guilty and the innocent are afforded the same rights to defend themselves. Freedom of speech, likewise, was framed as a “tool of oppression.”

Particularly after the social justice revolutions of 2020, the de facto policy in many arenas was that hurtful speech was “violence,” intent does not matter, the aggrieved party’s lived experience (or their identity group’s lived experience) is paramount, and if they say they were hurt by anything someone said, then that person was wrong and must be punished.

Safety first—nuance and context last.

Confoundingly, during a period of social upheaval following the police murder of an unarmed man, zero tolerance was adopted as the progressive path—the only way to fix society’s ills and bigotries.

But now that it’s Jewish students and faculty saying they feel unsafe by aggressive demonstrations on campus, ultra-wealthy donors are pulling their funds from universities—and some pro-Palestinian voices and groups have been silenced or shut down entirely—nuance is making a comeback among the left.

There’s an inherent contradiction here.

Either microaggressions, lived experience, and deference to the offended party are the modes by which campus justice is adjudicated, or they’re not.

If university presidents want to foster a culture of free speech and tolerance for even “offensive” or “wrong” speech (subjective judgments), I’m all for it.

But if there’s an exception for the feelings and safety of Jews—because they are supposedly not an identity group that has historically faced rank bigotry and persecution and continues to be, by far, the religious group most targeted for hate crimes—well, there’s a word for that.

When Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7, it deliberately targeted civilians, engaged in savage acts of wanton cruelty, and took hostages including women, children, and the elderly. It was the most devastating pogrom on Jewish people since the Holocaust, with........

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