F. Scott Fitzgerald once quipped that the “test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”
The protests over the war between Israel and Hamas that have roiled university campuses across the nation are testing our collective intelligence when it comes to the First Amendment.
Americans today enjoy a remarkable degree of freedom to communicate their ideas and beliefs. That freedom is a legacy of careful cultivation of social and legal norms that hold government has no business telling citizens what to say or believe, an ethos captured by Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s famous statement, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Running alongside this deep-seated commitment to freedom, however, is a complementary understanding that, to…
