Opinion: UC Berkeley student groups’ new bylaws reveal Left’s antisemitism

In Reason, Eugene Volokh breaks down that universities can’t reasonably police student orgs’ ideological exclusions (even including nine Berkeley Law groups’ blatantly anti-Zionist bylaws). However, this latest UC Berkeley controversy uncovers an anti-Israel tilt among extreme progressives, says Volokh, one that should inform how local Californians view cogent conversations on race.

But I don't think that a university can implement that judgment into a constitutionally permissible rule, precisely because it's a fundamentally viewpoint-based judgment: some viewpoints are so bad (or so inconsistent with a group's purpose) that it's fine for groups to exclude speakers who hold them, but others aren't.

We legitimately make such viewpoint-based judgments in various situations in our daily lives. (I hope we wouldn't cut out friends from our lives, for instance, just because we disagree with them on various subjects, but we well might if they start talking about how we should kill Jews or capitalists or gays or police officers.) Yet a public university can't implement such a viewpoint-based rule. It would either have to ban all viewpoint-based exclusion of speakers (regardless of the speakers' viewpoint), or allow groups to engage in such exclusions.

[4.] So what's the remedy? I think we're seeing it, and it's publicity. It's important for Jewish students, and for Jews more broadly, to understand the breadth and shape of opposition to Israel among various other groups—including groups that many of those Jews might otherwise see as potential political allies. That a group is willing to exclude a vast range of American Jews as speakers, including many who are on the Left (even far Left) and may well agree with the great bulk of the group's agenda, is an important data point that people should know about the group. (Here, those groups are Berkeley Law Muslim Students Association, Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, Womxn of Color Collective, Asian Pacific American Law Student Association, Queer Caucus, Community Defense Project, Women of Berkeley Law, and Law Students of African Descent.) Of course, those groups don't necessarily speak for all students whose identities they invoke, or even for all their members. But they do speak, presumably, for their leaders, and if the project gains steam, there'll be other groups whose leaders' positions will thus become clear. …

Sometimes "the fitting remedy for evil counsels is good ones" (to quote a famous Jew) because good ideas are the best way (however imperfect it may be) to rebut bad ideas. But sometimes the good counsel can consist of exposing the evil counsel, and giving us a better sense of what the evil counsel's advocates really think, so we can more effectively decide what is needed to protect ourselves and those we care about.

This article originally appeared in Reason. Read the whole thing here.

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