I found the tweet below, reflecting the views of a few dozen faculty of Swarthmore, one of the wokest colleges in the U.S. The profs, in their op-ed in the college paper, apparently are demanding that the college abandon any institutional neutrality and become politicized.
The text of the statement appears below in the Phoenix, the Swarthmore College student newspaper. Go down and click on the headline below (or here) to see it. While the 41 sweating professors cry loudly for free speech, what becomes clear quickly is that they want the freedom for their professors to proselytize for Palestine in the classrooms, take their students to pro-Palestinian demonstrations, and for Swarthmore to either make official statements supporting Palestine and Swarthmore’s “complicity with U.S. militarism”, or to at least encourage the expression of that sentiment. They further argue that it’s impossible for any college to be ideologically neutral, even though at least one of them is—mine.
The tweet (the text is below):
NEW: Statement on “academic freedom” by 41 @swarthmore faculty quickly goes off the rails:
The idea that “the classroom is not a political space or that the College is a neutral institution” is a “fantasy” that “obscures the College’s ongoing complicity with U.S. militarism.” pic.twitter.com/XitgPPKmN7
— Steve McGuire (@sfmcguire79) December 18, 2023
Click to read (the list of faculty signing this is also at the link). Bolding is mine.
Drafted: December 11, 2023
As faculty members at Swarthmore College, we are deeply concerned about the erosion of academic freedom in the United States, particularly in regards to the ongoing crisis in Gaza. Over the past few weeks, we have learned that our administration has made several attempts to discourage, intimidate, and/or silence pro-Palestine speech on campus. According to reports by students and faculty, college officials have warned specific students about their activism via personally-directed emails; they have selectively enforced rules concerning flyering, postering, and/or demonstrating on campus; they have privately requested that specific instructors refrain from moving their classes to the site of an ongoing sit-in, even if they do so at the request and/or with the unanimous consent of their students; and they have reassured alumni that the college will pursue “counter-programming” in response to support for Palestine. These deterrence measures have the effect of frightening faculty and students alike from engaging in legitimate and non-violent freedom of expression, and they have set a worrying precedent for future events and conflicts.
We are alarmed by the use of such tactics at a time when academic institutions should reaffirm their commitment to free speech. Speaking to the renewed debates about academic freedom since Oct. 7, Princeton professor Keith Whittington has recently suggested that colleges may either “reaffirm their core principles on free speech and academic freedom,” or “bow to political pressure and double down on an ethos of safetyism and a machinery of speech surveillance and suppression.” In its latest statement, the American Association of University Professors has similarly insisted that college officials “resist demands from politicians, trustees, donors, students and their parents, alumni, or other parties to punish faculty members for exercising [their academic] freedom.” We therefore urge our administration to refrain from joining a nationwide campaign, reminiscent of McCarthyism, against colleges and universities that aims to crack down on thought, speech, and actions that are critical of Israel.
All members of our campus community must be able to freely express themselves during such a pivotal moment in history. The suggestion that the classroom is not a political space or that the College is a neutral institution that is in some way hermetically sealed from our broader geopolitical context contradicts the College’s commitment to rigorous scholarship that engages with the most pressing contemporary issues. This fantasy also obscures the College’s ongoing complicity with U.S. militarism. Public protests and sit-ins can be generative spaces for deliberating about issues of justice, ethics, and policy, and for reminding us that our pedagogy is inextricably embedded in a wider material reality. In the present context, they are particularly important for giving students room to voice their sincere concerns regarding the Israeli military assault on Gaza and their desire for better understanding this world-historical event.
(Note that they don’t argue that public protests should also give students the right to voice their sincere concerns about the brutality of Hamas and the oppressive way it rules Gaza.)
This moment calls for moral and intellectual courage. The scale of destruction and human suffering that is currently unfolding in Gaza has almost no precedent in Palestine/Israel. According to U.S. military historian Robert Pape, Gaza will “go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.” An investigation by +972 magazine has found that Israel’s use of both artificial intelligence and unrestrained airstrikes on civilian targets have turned Gaza into a “mass assassination factory” that has resulted in “one of the deadliest military campaigns against Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948.”
This gets history completely wrong. First of all, the “Nakba of 1948” referred to the defeat of 5 Arab armies who invaded Israel on the day it became independent. Israel, by some miracle, defeated all five armies, and the “Nakba”, which means “catastrophe” in Arabic, was the humiliating defeat of those armies. Many Arabs fled Israel at the time, thinking that Israel would lose within a week and they’d be able to return home in a country that was Judenrein. They didn’t and now they can’t because most of those who fled are dead. Their descendants have no “right of return”.
Second, there were no “Palestinians” in 1948: there were Arabs. There was no state containing people called “Palestinians”. (That wasn’t until the Sixties.) The Naqba was against the inhabitants of Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. None of these countries were part of the British Mandate of Palestine, and so the inhabitants of that mandate did not invade Israel. There was not a “Palestinian invasion of Israel.”
I’ll add that the sweating professors neglect the huge and deadly campaign of Bashar al-Assad against the inhabitants of his own country of Syria, with a death toll estimated now to be over 400,000. But those are Muslim deaths inflicted by a despotic Muslim ruler. It’s only when the Jews cause Muslim death when defending themselves that they get demonized this way. But let’s proceed:
An Israeli newspaper found that the ratio of civilians killed in Gaza is “significantly higher than the average civilian toll in all the conflicts around the world during the 20th century.” More children have been killed in Gaza than the annual totals for children killed in all of the world’s conflict zones for the past three years. These realities and the justifications presented for them by Israeli leaders have led hundreds of scholars, lawyers, and U.N. experts to warn about the Israeli government’s intent to commit genocide against the Palestinian people. All of this has unfolded with unconditional support from the Biden administration, which recently stood alone in vetoing a ceasefire resolution at the U.N. Security Council that was backed by more than 100 countries around the world.
In light of these catastrophic circumstances, we urge the college administration to protect the academic freedom of both students and faculty and to abstain from any intimidation or threats of disciplinary action against them. The statements from administration and faculty alike constitute an archive that, in the years to come, will reflect our institution’s stance in this pivotal moment. It is our conviction that Palestine cannot be an exception to academic freedom.
While this screed pretends to be a call for free speech, it’s really an ideological statement about the perfidy of Israel in the ongoing war with Hamas. Indeed, if Swarthmore is really violating the rights of students favoring Palestine, then that should be called out. So should any assurance that Swarthmore will do any “counter-programming in response to support for Palestine. It’s just that, knowing Swarthmore, I highly doubt it. While Googling “Swarthmore demonstrations”, the only things I could find were notices of pro-Palestinian demonstrations by the students, with no sign that they’re being censored. I found no notices of pro-Israeli demonstrations, though perhaps they happened and I missed them. (Note: Swarthmore and Haverford are in a three-college consortium together with Bryn Mawr).
For example, the Philadelphia Inquirer, reporting on one demonstration on December 8 (a week before the statement above), says this:
Students at Swarthmore and Haverford Colleges are preparing for finals, but some supporters of Palestinians are also spending the final days of their semester holding antiwar demonstrations in their school administration buildings.
More than 50 Swarthmore students were occupying a building that’s home to the office of college president Valerie Smith on Thursday afternoon. At Haverford College — another liberal arts school that joins Swarthmore in a consortium with Bryn Mawr — around 30 students sprawled throughout the lobby of Founders Hall on Friday as a large “Ceasefire Now” sign hung above the building’s entryway.
The protests come after students demanded that campus leaders speak out against Israel’s ongoing strikes in Gaza following Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack. Gaza health officials estimate that since the war’s outbreak, over 17,000 Palestinians have died in the conflict.
Palestinian-aligned student groups at both schools estimate that more than 100 students have attended each sit-in this week.Both groups say they intend to remain until university administrators meet their demands.
. . . At Swarthmore, students urged administrators to release a statement condemning “Israeli aggression in Gaza,” and to drop disciplinary warnings against pro-Palestinian student organizers.
Students also called on the school to divest portions of its $2.7 billion endowment from companies they believe are involved in the military-industrial complex, and to remove hummus made by Sabra, a company owned in part by an Israeli conglomerate that’s connected to the country’smilitary, from student cafés.
There’s also an article in the Phoenix about a student sit-in in Parrish Hall (the oldest building at Swarthmore, which contains the President’s office) supporting Palestine:
Posters, banners, and sleeping bags line the walls of Parrish Hall as students in support of Palestinian freedom, led by the Swarthmore Palestine Coalition (SPC), continue a now four-day sit-in. SPC — composed of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and 28 other member organizations — plans to continue the sit-in until the semester’s end; a culmination of two months of student protest calling for SJP-written demands.
These demands include a statement from President Valerie Smith condemning “Israeli aggression in the Gaza strip,” college divestment from companies funding Israel, and a boycott of Sabra and HP products which support the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). According to SJP, a petition with these demands and over 1000 signatures has been refused by the administration throughout November. The overnight sit-in averages 40 or more participants, according to SPC, and general meetings have had an attendance of 80 or more students, according to daily updates from Voices, a member organization of SPC.
These sit-ins are against University regulations, of course, so, in an archived article in the Inquirer, we learn that Haverford students abandoned their sit-in when threatened with discipline by the administration (nobody was arrested or charged), while, on the day of the petition, Swarthmore students continued to sit in, and I have no update. The college should remove them should they continue their illegal sit-in.
Tensions rose at Haverford and Swarthmore colleges this week after administrators warned that students could face disciplinary action for holding demonstrations that protested the war in Gaza.
At Haverford, those calls effectively ended a weeklong sit-in that saw around 100 students occupy Founders Hall, a main administration building in the heart of campus.
Some Swarthmore students were continuing their sit-in on Thursday, though talks between organizers and administrators could soon bring the demonstration to a close, a school spokesperson said.
Students at both colleges began their demonstrations last week, refusing to leave until administrators publicly called for a cease-fire. Swarthmore students also urged their school to divest portions of its $2.7 billion endowment from companies that are shareholders in defense contractors, among other demands.
It’s not suppression of free speech to enforce college regulations against trespassing, and I strongly suspect that this threat is what the sweating professors describe as “attempts to discourage, intimidate, and/or silence pro-Palestine speech on campus.” I’m also guessing that none of this happened to Jewish students because, like at the University of Chicago, Jewish groups don’t engage in activities that violate University rules.
What’s also interesting is that the University is indeed trying to support academic freedom and free speech by trying to discourage faculty from taking their classes to “ongoing sit-ins” (you can bet they’re not pro-Israel sit ins). In my view, moving a class to a sit-in is a way of not only supporting that sit-in, but of suppressing the views of students who may oppose what the sit-in is for. I don’t care if the class gives “unanimous consent,” for that could well be coercion: what student is going to oppose the professor’s call that the class move to a sit-in?
Finally, there’s this statement from the professors’ screed:
The suggestion that the classroom is not a political space or that the College is a neutral institution that is in some way hermetically sealed from our broader geopolitical context contradicts the College’s commitment to rigorous scholarship that engages with the most pressing contemporary issues.
Of course the classroom is not “hermetically sealed” from geopolitical events, but that doesn’t mean those events have to intrude into the classroom, or that professors should constantly bring them up, not withholding, perhaps, their own point of view.
And yes, a college can be a politically and ideologically neutral institution. The University of Chicago is one! That’s because we’ve adopted the Kalven principles of institutional neutrality. So although students may demand divestment, and professors may demand that Chicago take stands and issue statements about political issues, our administration and departments don’t do that stuff. (Individuals, of course, are free to say what they want so long as their statements are not presented as official views of the University or its constituent units. Saying that “the personal is political”—something that’s never made sense to me—doesn’t work for classrooms, either. These sweating professors are all heated up about Israel winning the war in Gaza, and they want Swarthmore on their side.
Swarthmore would be better off (as would Harvard, MIT, Penn, and nearly every other college in the U.S.) to adopt principles of institutional neutrality. Then students would get disciplined not for free speech, but only when they violate college regulations about the time and place of speech so that they don’t impede the business of the university.
Note at the original site just two of the signers are in STEM fields: Cohen in Physics & Astronomy and Thornton in Mathematics & Statistics. In contrast, 13 signers are in “studies” departments and nearly all the rest are in various humanities departments like English, History, and Philosophy. I don’t think that there’s equity here: surely more than 4.8% of Swarthmore faculty are in STEM fields! Of course this imbalance may simply reflect who the petition was passed around to, but may also show that it’s the humanities people are the ones who want their university to get political and support Palestine.
Centuries ago, humanities brought mankind out of the Dark Ages. Now, however, they eagerly try to do the opposite.
Noticed the same red flag here as Jerry. An intelligent person familiar with the way social pressure works should know better than to talk about the “unanimous consent” of a diverse group of young adults placed in a volatile political and social situation.
What, do the professors seriously expect that any student who disagreed with the theme of the protest would raise their hand? Doing that takes either numbers or a singleton with unusual emotional strength coupled with a willingness to become a pariah. The professors are coming at this issue from a position of privilege— and we can see how they use it.
Exactly. And even the idea of taking the class to a demonstration would be forcing the students to support a political position, imposed on them by the professor. That is not education, it is indoctrination.
My own group, the Haverford Liberation Front for Goodness and Virtue (HLFGV), will next occupy the college cafeteria to dramatize its three demands: (1) that the college denounce the white supremacist colonialism of the UN for Resolution 181 in 1947, that authorized formation of the state of Israel; (2), that the college denounce US militarism for not declaring a unilateral ceasefire with Al Qaeda on 9/12/01; (3) and denounce US militarism for not declaring a unilateral ceasefire with the Empire of Japan on 12/8/41.
Right Joe.
I was here on 9/11 and I don’t remember any sympathy for Al Qaida marches.
People older than me don’t remember pro-Khomeini marches when, similarly, US hostages were taken by Islamists (in Tehran, for 444 days).
More distressing than the stupidity of ill-informed youth is the entire DEI edifice that caused this disaster.
D.A.
NYC
And (historical note) the entire DEI edifice was “demanded” in a wave of student organization resolutions, including the student gov of USC, in 2015-16 (see
https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-usc-racism-20151020-story.html ).
The elaborate USC resolutions contain all the terminology of DEI, word for word. This hints that these nominally student outfits had simply been captured by the Diversity Consultant cottage industry, and were functioning as its lobby.
Since these professors have created their own history, why should we trust anything they say?
It’ll be interesting to see how or if the administration responds to the letter. If they bend to it, they put themselves in the middle of a morass. Do they really want the college to have an official position on Hamas and Israel? Probably not. But will they have the courage to resist? We’ll see.
Many, probably most, colleges and universities have faculty governance. But what happens when a faculty is overrun by political activists in grievance studies departments?
In addition to creating their own history, the professors create word salad.
They write, “… we urge the college administration to protect the academic freedom of both students and faculty ….”
Professors have academic freedom, students don’t.
The search for scientists among the signatories of such letters is a sad “Where’s Waldo?” spandrel to the Hamas atrocity.
SOOooo sick of these tick tok Palestine kids. Who seem to know almost nothing about history or ethics.
I’d like to say if they knew the story (https://themoderatevoice.com/worst-houseguests-ever-the-palestinians/) about Palestine they’d change their tune, but the more I think about it the more I think they’re there for the “moral aesthetics”.
D.A.
NYC
Thank you for this link. I ‘enjoyed’ your piece “There are no “Two Sides” in Gaza” in Democracy Chronicles 17 Oct. 2023 even more (linked from the link above).
Thanks for the link.
Best,
Jean (John)
Haverford Coillege also enjoyed exciting performances by another student group: “Rethink Incarceration is a student organization dedicated to abolishing the police and prisons”. In 2020, the group demanded that Haverford “must use its institutional power to fight against the Prison–Industrial Complex”. The group explained that a college with Quaker roots had a historical responsibility to do so because: “as Angela Davis has noted in Are Prisons Obsolete?, Quakers, specifically those in Philadelphia, were responsible for creating and promoting methods of incarceration”.
“The Naqba was against the inhabitants of Transjordan, Iraq, Lebanon, Syria, and Egypt. None of these countries were part of the British Mandate of Palestine…”
While some argue that the creation of Trans-Jordan was somehow not part of the Mandate system, I believe that is technically incorrect. What became Trans-Jordan was indeed part of the original Mandate for Palestine territory, in fact it represented 78% of the original MfP territory, as seen here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96198796@N05/51223772057/in/album-72157707143215584/
That Britain intended to cut out Trans-Jordan from the start is evident from the peculiar rectangular section on the east, which was needed for a railway for Trans-Jordan. Trans-Jordan was (shockingly) created Judenrein, and its population was 99%+ Arab, from Palestine as well as the Levant countries. Before this happened, eastern Palestine was known as Trans-Jordania and what was to become Israel was known as Cis-Jordania. Where the two shared a border was subject to several schemes hashed out by the Mandate for Palestine committee, finally settling on the center of the Jordan River.
The document creating Trans-Jordan itself indicates it was part of the Mandate for Palestine:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96198796@N05/51225247549/in/album-72157707143215584/
The final borders of Trans-Jordan and proto-Israel were determined in the early ’20’s and were subject to the vote of the League of Nations. these borders are shown here:
https://www.flickr.com/photos/96198796@N05/48523696221/in/album-72157707143215584/
So, Trans-Jordan (Jordan) was created via the Mandate process in 1921 via vote of the League of Nations, its population was extensively Palestinian Arab, and it invaded Israel in 1948.
I’m sorry but you’re wrong. Well, you were right originally, but Transjordan, formerly a British Mandate, became independent on 25 May 1946. Therefore, when this country attacked Israel in 1948, it was not as a part of the Palestine Mandate but as an independent state.
So you agree with my statement, then, that Jordan was an independent state when it attacked Israel?
“So you agree with my statement, then, that Jordan was an independent state when it attacked Israel?”
Absolutely, it was an independent state, a state created with the same valid auspices as Israel.
My reply was geared toward those, and there are many, who try to argue that Jordan was never a part of the Mandate for Palestine; that Jordan is not a Palestinian state in Palestine; that “Palestine” refers only to what we call Israel or to the area within the 1948 borders of Israel that are now somehow claimed by the Palestinians as their own rightful territory.
I have met people online who argue each of these points. Indeed, there are a lot of people who believe that Israel was created without specified borders at all (!), and that the 1947 UNGA Resolution created an actual Palestinian nation. The Palestinian narrative relies on all of these points of confusion. What it steadfastly refuses to countenance is that Jordan is an Arab state in Palestine, and that Israel had valid borders which were from the river to the sea in 1948.
I always appreciate how these things try to give the impression that what is happening is Bad, without precedent, but, on examination, carefully qualify their statements:
— “. . . a nationwide campaign, reminiscent of McCarthyism”. So not MaCarthyism, then.
— “The scale of destruction and human suffering that is currently unfolding in Gaza has almost no precedent in Palestine/Israel.” It’s not the worst. Where does it actually rank? And notice that has “almost no precedent” only in the context of Israel and Palestine.
— “According to U.S. military historian Robert Pape, Gaza will ‘go down as a place name denoting one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns.’ Unfortunately, the cited article is pay-walled, so I can’t see Pape’s logic, but I am sure the people of Britain, Germany, Japan, and Laos, among others, would dispute this.
Also, the reference to “the College’s ongoing complicity with U.S. militarism” refers to a program, not for developing biological weapons, but one “that seeks to pair well-qualified retired or retiring military officers with liberal arts colleges and universities to teach two courses, mentor students, and engage in the life of the campus during an academic year.”
Free speech for these professors is undoubtedly, a case of speech for me, but not for thee. And it seems that, despite the weight of Swarthmore’s frown of disapproval, they are getting their message out.
There’s an archived copy of the Financial Times piece citing Pape here: https://archive.ph/1YA7E
I note that he’s comparing buildings destroyed rather than deaths resulting from the bombings.
If you copy and paste the url of a paywalled article into the same website you can usually find an already archived version or archive it yourself.
Thanks, Jez. I see that the author is basing his comparison on the bombing of discrete cities and the percentage of buildings damaged. I think that to say that “the destruction of northern Gaza in less than seven weeks has approached that caused by the years-long carpet-bombing of German cities during the second world war” is misleading, since, while the bomber offensive lasted for years, cities such as Dresden were only attacked on a few days.
Indeed!
It’s stunning to me that this public statement on the Israel-Hamas war says not one word about the fact that Hamas started the war with the biggest slaughter of Jews since the Nazi Holocaust. In fact, the word “Hamas” appears nowhere in their statement.
An unpopular point I make to those denouncing Israel’s response is that the Hamas leadership surely knew what Israel’s response would be when they planned and executed the attack. Any expectation that Israel not retaliate would have been beyond unrealistic. My guess is that Hamas wanted exactly what’s happening, to gain worldwide sympathy for their cause, knowing full well that thousands of Palestinians would pay the price.
Agreed.
Does anyone else tune out whenever encountering “our pedagogy”?
They mean critical pedagogy, i.e. Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, and “our” means it has to be yours because they say so, because they are Marxists, and the only thing that matters is The Revolution.
The Current Thing Did Not Take Place (borrowed from Baudrillard).
Readers may be interested in what is referred to as the ongoing complicity of the College with US militarism. This appears to be a reference to the participation of the College in the Chamberlain Project, in which retired members of the military engage in some teaching within the College. The objections to the program go back to 2021, and reflect a kind of knee-jerk hostility to having people with a military background being invited to serve as teachers for a limited period, in various ways which would remain controlled by departmental faculty.
Sit-ins are a form of civil disobedience. Such civil disobedience is a legitimate form of protest — as it was during the American civil rights movement in the mid-20th century and as it was in the independence movement in India earlier in the century — only to the extent that the protestors are prepared to accept the consequences of their unlawful, but nonviolent behavior (although they are, of course, entitled to raise any legitimate defenses they may have if prosecuted).
It does not qualify as legitimate civil disobedience where the protestors demand immunity from the consequences of their actions.
It looks like Swarthmore is on the path to become the new Evergreen State College.
I’ve never heard of Swarthmore. Should I have? Asking as a Brit transposed to Canada.
“I’ve never heard of Swarthmore.”
Neither has the average American.
I don’t mean that as a sneer. In any direction.
Mamas and the Papas, “California Dreaming”:
“Cass was a sophomore, planned to go to Swarthmore”
And there you have the limit of my knowledge.
Swarthmore has traditionally been one of the better American liberal arts colleges.
So was Oberlin, which has had its own recent bad press.
Swarthmore has been for many years one of the best liberal arts colleges in America. It was originally founded by Quakers, and maintained the Quaker connection for many years. It is highly selective, and has a very substantial endowment.
Yes, and it’s highly woke.
I graduated there, and Swarthmore students have always been like that. With that said, there are many students who are not interested in activism and just want to learn. But yes, now the math department has a course called “Math for Social Justice,” they want to hire people who foster DEI, etc.
Noting the remarks of a poster here about Jordan/Transjordan being an independent state when it attacked Israel, at the moment I am reading a 2018 book ‘Crusade and Jihad’ by William Polk. I bought it just after it came out, but neglected to complete it. Seems quite authoritative — have only got up to the start of the 20th C. The author is old enough to have visited Baghdad in 1951, and to have interviewed President Nasser of Egypt a couple of times. Flipping ahead, later chapters do seem to delve in detail with Mandatory Palestine.
As to the ways in which 700k Palestinians /Arabs were displaced from their homes in 1948, the author quotes Israeli historian Benny Morris’s Israeli archive researches into ‘Plan D’ or ‘Plan Dalet’. On the same page [ pg 383 ] Polk writes ‘Even before their exodus, the Palestinians had never developed a national identity. Like people throughout the [ Global ] South, they identified with the villages where they lived. It was the watan that was their nation… From roughly 1936, there were no recognised national leaders among the Palestinians, and indeed no nation’.
I have just finished ‘the Rule of the Clan’ by Mark S Weiner, that I heartily recommend. It compares clan-based societies in Medieval Iceland, Dark Age England, the historic and current Middle East, South and East Asia.