Elite Universities Suddenly (and Selectively) Recall Value of Free Expression
The Public Dance of Evading Real Questions
A few weeks back, when I wrote about the Hamas’ attack on Israel this past fall, I mentioned a chilling Facebook post that I had seen from someone I once worked with and am still friends with on the platform. I didn’t respond to the post (this was the correct move), but in addition to offering his support for Palestinians, he included this chilling sentence: “Fuck Israel.” This after more than a thousand their civilians were slaughtered in cold blood.
My one views on Israel and Palestinians shift here and there as my own knowledge of the conflict does, but in general I’m pretty sympathetic about the material conditions of Palestinians, though it isn’t at all clear to me that the people who are elevated to power in their ranks are that interested in the kind of responsibility that governing a country requires, and I have no sympathy whatsoever for the idea that we should just sort of, you know, get rid of Israel.
Meanwhile, I noticed something else on social media. Another of my friends, a woman who is older, and I knew to be Jewish (she works as an administrator in K-12 eduction) began posting impassioned pleas for understanding and language around her own people’s humanity. One of her simpler posts was simply an Israeli flag and its Star of David. I don’t know if I was as taken back by the public expression of her own fear as I was by the post by my other friend, but if I was surprised by the support for Israel it was because I had known her to be (or at least understood her to be) socially-progressive. And I knew that in that crowd of people, defenses for the nation of Israel are typically hard to come by.
My friend is not the only one recently to become more public in her support for Israel, just as my other friend is not the only person to let his disdain for the country be known. In a recent Nate Silver’s Substack post, “Why Liberalism and Leftism are Increasingly at Odd,” he explores how Israel and Palestinians are one of those issues that divides Democrats, and/or people who understand themselves to be on the left (though sometimes for different reasons). I think there are more factions and interests than Silver represents in the post, though of course we’re almost always over-simplifying in order to understand (or move on with our life), and his overall point about how this line-in-the-sand issue (for some people, anyway) can sometimes divide folks who might otherwise be working together is well within the ballpark of what has unfolded in the past couple months.
Two months after the initial attack, and with a war now ensuing, we are still dealing with the fallout of October 7, even in the United States. The term antisemitism is getting thrown around with increasing frequency, and I’m sure it fits in some circumstances and not so much in others. If you pay attention to things like Congressional hearings or major headlines (I try to avoid at least the former, when I can help it) you probably know already that universities presidents Elizabeth Magill (University of Pennsylvania), Sally Kornbluth (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), and Claudine Gay (Harvard) were recently grilled by New York Republican Elise Stefanik from the House Committee on Education and Workforce about this very issue, and that the responses more than garnered their share of attention and blowback, even among political liberals (including President Biden’s administration). Magill has since resigned, and pressure has been mounting in a similar direction for Gay, who’s record of not-so-subtle academic plagiarism has also been brought into the mix, though she has thus far avoided a total axing after issuing a legal-eze apology for her apparently-harmful words before Congress.
The question-and-response between Stefanik and the administrators’ that has gone somewhat-viral is basically whether or not calls for genocide against Jews violate university code of conduct policies regarding harassment. None of the three could give a straight yes, which was apparently a surprise for large swaths of the public (though less so for someone like me who has spent a good time in and around universities). At the their best, the responses attempted to draw some sort of distinction between generic, public speech and targeted action against an individual. Speech is not violence after all, at least for Jews, even in lands that might otherwise be dominated by concerns about “microagressions” and literal “safe spaces” on campus, all the while harassing and doxxing and interrupting speakers guilty of wrongthink.
In a The Weekly Dish post called “The Day The Empress’s Clothes Fell Off,” Andrew Sullivan argues that this sudden interest in free expression on college campus that seemingly goes against the last decade of momentum on campuses is not actually a contradiction or hypocrisy, but rather a logical (though somewhat gross and misguided) extension of a worldview that creates a good-and-evil hierarchy (sometimes called intersectionality) based on group identities across characteristics of race, gender and sexual preference. It just so happens to be that Jews don’t score very highly in sympathy points on this pyramid, so we are to err on the side of allowing detestable words and thoughts to be expressed, whereas if it were a group that had more moral cred we would step in and take steps not only to protect the targeted person or group but perhaps even to find a way to shame or banish or expel the said “oppressive” person or group that is making the mean arguments. I think Sullivan is largely correct in his understanding of the ideology from which this sort of rhetorical and political dance comes from, though of course I’m always wondering why, you know, the Holocaust doesn’t register very much in our recent memory about oppression. Pronouns yes, gas chambers no. Well, one recent The Economist poll suggests one way the problem is getting sorted out in people’s heads: apparently Holocaust denial among American students is growing, up to as many as one in five. This in and of itself ought to be seen as one of the most powerful markers of a dangerous dogma: if a historical event doesn't fit in with your simplistic explanation for life, just pretended it didn't happen.
The administrators in the Congressional hearing did not, though I think it would have been intelligent of them to do so, ask for specific examples of what Stefanik was talking about in the first place. Thus, Shadhi Hamid, who is a Brookings Institution fellow, Fuller Seminary professor, and contributing writer to The Atlantic, parsed out a bit what the word “intifada” (a word that tends to come up at demonstrations in the streets of major cities, and at, well, universities) actually means and where it comes from. In “The Rise and Fall of Claudine Gay” at Wisdom of Crowds, Hamid argues that the word in question means something like rebellion and not genocide at all. Okay, fair enough, now we’re getting somewhere.
In a Substack reflection regarding his conversation with Bill Maher, attorney, author (one of his books is the important The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas are Setting Up a Generation for Failure), and President of Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) Greg Lukianoff did some similar analysis regarding the commonly-used protest phrase “from the river to the sea.” In his estimation, that phrase does not-so-subtly hint at wiping Israel off the map, but he also points to a Wall Street Journal survey that shows that few students actually know what the phrase means, and when they are shown a map that includes the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River, and explained the appropriate context, support for use of the phrase drops significantly.
It’s almost like part of the job of universities could be this education of details, of the facts on the ground in the present and historically, and discussions of the many relevant, qualitative, and complicated disagreements on this issue and so many others. In order to get there, leadership in these settings might want to pay close attention to a couple bullet points from Steven Pinker’s “five-point plan” (published in The Boston Globe) to save Harvard and other universities. Universities are about as likely to start listening to Pinker (whose public persona I actually find a bit annoying, though I do take him seriously as a thinker and scholar) as I am to play in the NBA, but one can hope. One of his recommendations is that universities stop moral posturing with public “statements.” Say nothing (as an institution, publicly) about the latest war or natural disaster or election. These statements don’t really accomplish much anyway, but there are other, bigger reasons why they should stop with this behavior.
Here’s Pinker, in his own words:
“A university…is a forum for debate, not a protagonist in debates. When a university takes a public stand, it either puts words in the mouths of faculty and students who can speak for themselves or unfairly pits them against their own employer. It’s even worse when individual departments take positions, because it sets up a conflict of interest with any dissenting students and faculty whose fates they control.”
These stances, in other words, are often power moves. Ways to silence people. The alternative would be to allow for, and encourage, classrooms and publications to let the damn arguments happen. Allow students to wrestle in the midst of their own confusion and discomfort with the complexity of life. In this vein, universities would surely have to implement another of Pinker’s points. He uses the phrase viewpoint diversity, which is fine I guess, but what he’s getting at is that universities need to stop filtering out conservatives from their faculty and staff. Statistics on this are widely available, but one that Pinker mentions is that 77% of Harvard’s Arts and Sciences faculty describe themselves as liberal; 3% consider themselves conservative. This in a country where the two major political party—knowing, again, that there are plenty of evolving factions within the parties—tend to be fairly split in terms of election success.
I am not arguing that universities are or ought to be amoral entities, of course, and no human being is either. But the opportunity to express morality is mostly through practices, and that's who you are, rather than by all the supposedly-virtuous things you say. You value inclusion? Great, set up an admissions structure that aims for access and make sure your resources are prioritized in a way that supports those students—even the ones who struggle the most—throughout the process of their formal educations. Finding that your idealism is outpacing your resources? Sounds like something worth reflecting on. While you’re at it, think hard about the morality of burdening often-poor, just-getting-by undergraduates with tens of thousands of dollars worth of student loans just in time for the beginning of their adult lives. Often while administrators like Magill, Gay, and Kornbluth are making huge amounts of money.
Access and intellectual freedom are not really opposites, in spite of the way people act and what gets said. The distribution of resources is, however, difficult to get right, and it invites all kinds of opportunity for, you know, good-faith disagreement.