As you are certainly aware, in recent weeks a series of troubling incidents has occurred on your respective campuses. While the events in question were distinct, they all shared a common impulse by groups on your campuses who believe that they, and they alone, are able to set standards for free speech—in these particular cases, involving the debate about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict and how Jewish students and other Israel supporters are treated as part of the university community.
As you well know, the notion that a vocal minority of self-important ideologues can determine what views may or may not be expressed on a particular campus is not only antithetical to the purpose of a university, but is vaguely fascistic by purposely or carelessly relinquishing power to a few to decide what can be said and what speech is allowed and what must be suppressed; it is what former Yale University president Bartlett Giamatti characterized as the “tyranny of group self-righteousness.”