Hamas University: A Brief Overview

Hamas is running Columbia University.

That appears to be the way things are at America’s top universities, where students who openly back terrorist groups are now violating place and manner restrictions. They’re violating their student codes. They’re sitting out in the middle of the campus, obstructing other people from getting to class, shouting genocidal slogans at them.

At Columbia, because the administration is filled with cowards, they are doing nothing about it.

It is important to break down the free speech concerns that people justifiably have about what is happening on these college campuses. To understand the concerns, first you have to understand that there are various factors that go into the actual legal obligations that various universities have with regard to their students.

On the one hand, there’s the First Amendment, which applies differently at private universities and public universities. The First Amendment suggests you cannot have viewpoint discrimination on college campuses, but that only applies in full at public universities. For example, if I wanted to speak at UC Berkeley and the student group properly invited me, cleared it through all the procedures, and fulfilled the time, place, and manner restrictions, then I would have a legal right to speak at UC Berkeley.

The same does not hold true when I go to speak at a private university such as DePaul University. That actually happened when I showed up at DePaul University, which is a private Jesuit university. When I showed up there, they didn’t want me there. They threatened to arrest me if I set foot on the campus.

And they had the legal right to do that. Not only that, they also got the Cook County Sheriff out there to arrest me if I set foot on the campus. Was that morally correct? Of course not; it was absurd. It was a restriction on the principles of free speech.

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But was it a legal violation of my rights? No.

That is why I could not sue them; they are a private university. Public universities and private universities have different legal obligations with regard to viewpoint discrimination on campuses.

You can see why. Let’s say that you have a Christian university. They have no obligation to bring in a professor or speaker who is wildly pro-abortion or plans to teach Judaism or Islam. It’s a Christian university.

To take another example, a private Jewish university in New York has no obligation to have professors who are teaching radical Islam.

But in public universities, there’s the question of time, place, and manner restrictions, which, legally speaking, suggest you can have neutral laws that basically say you’re allowed to protest only during certain particular hours.

By the way, this doesn’t just apply to universities. This applies in cities. This is why it’s illegal for protesters to walk onto a highway and block it. You must have a permit in order to protest at certain times in certain places.

There are certain places in the United States where you have very broad leeway for speech. If you walk into a public park and start shouting about politics, there’s a good shot you’re protected. But even in public parks, if you’re going to have a mass rally, there are time, place, and manner restrictions. You don’t want that happening at 2:00 in the morning with a loudspeaker.

Another concern with regard to college campuses is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

I have long argued that the Civil Rights Act, while obviously excellent in its intent, goes too far in many areas of American law, from applying to private accommodations to its restrictions on speech at universities.

It’s an anti-discrimination law. It was designed to allow black people to live fulsome lives in the United States, a well-intended law. If I’d been around in 1964, I likely would have voted for the Civil Rights Act, despite all of my mitigating problems with the actual legal language of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it does go too far in a lot of areas when it comes to Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which guarantees that college students have a right to a place that is free of a harassing environment on the basis of sex, race, and ethnicity.

This creates some kind of fraught situations with regard to free speech because there could be a situation in which a university tried to claim that particular types of speech could violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. That is one of the things that all of these universities are now being slammed for because they have created massive speech codes that are theoretically designed to quash violations of the Civil Rights Act on campus. Many of them go too far, which FIRE, the free speech group, has pointed out. Many of these speech codes are not actually designed to avoid violations of the Civil Rights Act.

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But it is the case that if you have a bunch of pro-terrorist students on campus harassing Jews as they get to class by spitting on them, who shout about the extermination of Jews between the river and the sea, who are suggesting that they want to “globalize the intifada,” a violent, incendiary attempt to kill Jews in Israel and elsewhere, that kind of speech would violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

You can make the case that some of the speech is borderline in how it interplays between the Civil Rights Act and free speech, and I’d be sympathetic to that case. But on a legal level, the reality is that these universities cannot receive federal funding if they are acting in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The Biden administration has made this clear. They put out a letter in November 2023 which addressed this specifically, calling it a “Dear Colleague” letter and reminding “schools that receive federal financial assistance of their legal obligation under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and its implementing regulations (Title VI) to provide all students with a school environment free from discrimination based on race, color, or national origin, including shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

Columbia University, now the epicenter of the anti-Semitic pro-Hamas movement, has a student code of conduct; they’re a private university.

In the Columbia University Student Code of Conduct, the Statement of Ethical Conduct reads:

1. Be honest, ethical and truthful.
2. Obey the law.

These demonstrators are violating the law. They are trespassing. They’re in violation of the law.

Columbia University’s Standards of Discipline & Policy state:

As members of the Columbia University community, all students are expected to uphold the highest standards of respect, integrity, and civility. These core values are key components of the Columbia University experience and reflect the community’s expectations of its students. Students are expected to conduct themselves in an honest, civil, and respectful manner in all aspects of their lives.

I didn’t realize spitting on Jews, threatening Israel with extermination, and acting at the behest of terror groups and terror supporters was acting within that purview.

A private university like Columbia University has no obligation whatsoever to tolerate pro-Hamas students chanting anti-Semitic slogans on their campus. They likely have a Title VI Civil Rights Act obligation not to allow that to happen on their campus because it creates harassing, discriminatory incitement.

If there were a group of white supremacists at Columbia University in the middle of campus chanting, “Blacks should not replace us,” that would not last one hot second before the police were called in.

Columbia, however, has been bending over backwards because they don’t want to tick off their faculty and students. The ideological capture of these universities happened decades ago during the late 1960s with student protest movements that decided to take over campuses and threaten actual deans; then, the deans did nothing because their liberal mindset back in the 1960s was that they had to respect what the students were saying, even if those students were violating the law.

For two full generations, college administrations have been completely captured by the radicals. All those student radicals ended up as the administrators at these universities, and then they hired like-minded professors. That’s why professors are joining in all of this mayhem.

People keep asking, why are these universities doing this? Why are they allowing this?

The universities are allowing this because they are completely staffed by people who agree with the demonstrators.