Campus officials anxious to identify and address hate crimes should begin by recognizing the difference between physical assaults and verbal offensiveness, which your article “Campuses looking at hate crimes’’ (Page A1, Dec. 29) does not discuss.

Bigoted speech, including the posting of white supremacist fliers, is not a crime, no matter how many people are profoundly offended or frightened by it. Spray-painting swastikas or white supremacist slogans on campus buildings is a crime. It’s vandalism, not because the swastikas and slogans are hateful, but because neither the First Amendment nor underlying principles of free speech protect the right to deface someone else’s property.

Advocates of censoring presumptively hateful speech will condemn this argument as favoring property rights over people’s feelings, but it reflects and preserves the essential distinction between words and actions. This distinction protects the right to protest bigotry, angrily and even offensively, as well as the right to express it.

Wendy Kaminer

Boston