It’s an old, old saw: the freedom of speech does not protect you if you yell, “Fire!” in a crowded theater. Simply put, the freedom of speech does not protect anyone from the consequences of their speech.

The Biden Administration certainly agreed with that, hating the idea that the riff-raff could challenge the Accepted Wisdom — which means: the government’s position — on the COVID-19 vaccines:

Two months after President Biden took office, his top digital adviser emailed officials at Facebook urging them to do more to limit the spread of “vaccine hesitancy” on the social media platform.

At the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, officials held “weekly sync” meetings with Facebook, once emailing the company 16 “misinformation” posts. And in the summer of 2021, the surgeon general’s top aide repeatedly urged Google, Facebook and Twitter to do more to combat disinformation.

The examples are among dozens of interactions described in a 155-page ruling by a federal judge in Louisiana, who on Tuesday imposed temporary but far-reaching limits on how members of Mr. Biden’s administration can engage with social media companies. The government appealed the ruling on Wednesday.

It wasn’t even a case of someone yelling, “Fire!”, but the government thought that speech could, and should, be censored, using private companies to do it. And we have previously covered how the Biden Administration wanted to set up a Ministry of Truth Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Fatherland Homeland Security, with free speech hating Nine Jankowicz running it.

But Tuesday’s Philadelphia Inquirer brought us columnist Jonathan Zimmerman telling us that people ought not to be held accountable for the consequences of their speech, either!

It’s not the job of Penn and other universities to affirm our beliefs

All meaningful speech will hurt somebody’s feelings. A university’s job isn’t to protect us from that. It’s to educate us by exposing us to different points of view.

by Jonathan Zimmerman | Hallowe’en, October 31, 2023 | 6:00 AM EDT

How are you feeling today?

And how did you feel about your university’s statement on Israel-Palestine? Did it make you feel seen, affirmed, and recognized? Did it acknowledge your pain? Or did it cause yet more hurt and anger?

Welcome to the “therapeutic university,” which has assumed responsibility for the emotional management of our students. But that’s not what universities like mine are for — our primary duty is to make people think, not to make them well. And when we substitute therapy for education, we lose our minds.

That’s the only way to understand what has happened on college campuses since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel. Universities released statements that left everyone wounded and unhappy: Jewish and conservative groups said the statements failed to sufficiently condemn Hamas, while Arab and left-leaning students faulted them for neglecting Palestinian suffering.

Up to this point, I have no disagreement with Dr Zimmerman. But then he veers off into the weeds:

Then wealthy alumni got in on the act, pledging to stop giving money unless universities said the words they wanted to hear. At Penn, donors also called on president Elizabeth Magill to resign.

Dr Zimmerman then gives us several more paragraphs telling us how awful it is that the University of Pennsylvania’s donors were “using their wallets to constrict free expression.” He seemingly forgot that Penn’s donors have been giving money to the University voluntarily. Marc Rowan, a Wharton graduate and CEO of Apollo Global Management based in New York, gave $50 million to Penn’s Wharton School in 2018, the largest gift to the Ivy League school in its up-to-then history. Mr Rowan did not have to give Penn that money; his wife Carolyn and he chose to do it.

“Let us be clear: academic freedom is an essential component of a world-class university and is not a commodity that can be bought or sold by those who seek to use their pocketbooks to shape our mission,” declared a statement from the chairs of Penn’s faculty senate.

Really? Do the faculty senate believe that Mr Rowan, or any of the university’s other donors, have no choice but to contribute?

No one would have thought anything wrong with donors closing their checkbooks had Penn been sponsoring a conference debating a question of whether blacks were somehow inferior to whites, even though such would fall under “academic freedom (being) an essential component of a world-class university”, though perhaps the faculty senate didn’t consider that part. Yet the question on today’s campuses has pretty much devolved into whether Jews are allowed to have their own, small, home country. We have literally seen anti-Semites who have said that Jews need to have their throats slit and that Jewish women need to be raped and killed before they give birth to more Jewish babies, on college campuses here in the United States. We have seen people saying that the world needs to be cleansed of Jews, people saying that those who attend fund-raisers for Jews should “burn in Hell,” and professors publicly trumpeting typical anti-Semitic tropes. When The New York Times hires a ‘journalist’ with a documented history of praising Adolf Hitler, is it any surprise that American Jews might see this as the beginning of an existential threat?

Well, the faculty senate are right about one thing: they can pursue their academic paths without the approval of donors, but the University of Pennsylvania is a private college, with the school estimating a cost of attendance, not including housing — it’s listed as ‘living with family’ — of $73,494 per academic year, so perhaps, just perhaps, the university actually does need those donors.

Professor Zimmerman continues to note that Penn actually has a poor record for allowing speech from conservatives, and tells us that that is a bad thing as well. He’s right about that, but the freedom of speech also includes people’s right to choose for what speech they are willing to pay. That part he just doesn’t get.