Subject: Glenn Reynolds on the Poison Ivies
Just nails it on the appearance of the 3 university Presidents this week in front of Congress:

https://instapundit.substack.c...

So the shocking pro-genocide/pro-Palestinian marches at top Ivy League schools have put their administrations into a pretty pickle. They want to escape responsibility for student speech, but their efforts to plead “free speech” ring hollow, when they’ve been eagerly policing student – and faculty – speech for years.
...

As much as I enjoy seeing these people stew in the juices of their hypocrisy -- and believe me, enjoy it I do -- it is nonetheless true, as Eugene Volokh cogently points out, that free speech principles, and the First Amendment where it applies, prevent things like a selective ban on anti-semitism, or on "advocacy of genocide" or whatever.
But think how much easier the life of these administrators would be if they and their institutions had just had some principles. If they had a record of allowing student and faculty speech on everything without punishment, they could point to that record and say, sure, some of our students are saying monstrous things, but we believe in free speech and that the best way to deal with monstrous ideas is by discussing, and refuting, them in the open.

Of course, they can't say that, because it isn't true -- and, more importantly, it obviously isn't true. Top universities have for years been denying the value of free speech, and even suggesting it is some sort of questionable relic of white supremacy, or Christian Nationalism, or something. They've been centers for the belief that the way to deal with ideas you don't like isn't to refute them, but to ruthlessly suppress them.

Well, when that's your stance -- and we all know that it largely has been theirs -- suddenly appearing before Congress and parsing free speech doctrine to a nicety isn't very convincing. When you censor any speech, you make yourself responsible for whatever you allow.

And that is where the Poison Ivies find themselves today.
Go to Harvard, Penn or MIT today and intentionally misgender someone, or say that climate change is a natural thing we must adapt to or better yet...go say you think Donald Trump got some things right. You'll either be disciplined immediate or ushered off of campus forthwith.

So by policing speech to the degrees they have they've set the stage for an environment where only 1 viewpoint is allowed...and that viewpoint isn't a nice one.