Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
The University of Chicago doesn’t like to publicize protests about the Middle East war, as they make the school look bad. And the University is even more secretive about punishing protestors—like these—who violate the University “Protest and Demonstration Policy” by shouting down speakers (also see the President’s statement here). I have been unable to find out, in several cases, whether local punishments have been applied to disruptive students. This is kept a secret for reasons best known to the University.
These violations of University policy, involving disruptions of other people’s speech, are not protected by the University’s free expression policy, which hews very close to the First Amendment of the Constitution. But despite their illegality, they continue. And they invariably involve pro-Palestinian demonstrators, some of whom have vowed not to respect the protest and demonstration policy.
So far the University has either failed to punish violators, or has given them only a slap on the wrist, like writing an essay on “my demonstration experience.” It’s not rocket science to figure out that if demonstrators violate University regulations but aren’t punished seriously, and there’s no record of a violation on their transcript, then the illegal protests will continue. A regulation that’s not enforced is a regulation without teeth.
Below is are two short videos from Instagram showing a protest at the Medical School that occurred last month. The speaker (or “attempted speaker”) is Jesse Menachem Ehrenfeld, the new President of the prestigious American Medical Association (AMA). He is accomplished, Jewish, and gay.
The last two traits caused the protest that occurred when he was invited to speak to his alma mater, for he got his MD here. Despite his being a liberal and an honored physician, and despite his attempt to present a “Grand Rounds” talk on LGBTQ+ equity in medicine to the the Alpha Omega Alpha medical honor society, the students still harassed him.
You can see the “issues” by listening to the angry and loud protests below (note that the cowardly speakers donned masks to hide their identities). Ehrenfeld is accused of Israeli “pinkwashing” (the crazy claim that Israel only pretends to support LGBTQ+ rights to distract people from the country’s supposed crimes); accused of the AMA not having formally called for a ceasefire in Israel; and accused of being complicit in the deaths of Palestinian civilians because of Israel’s supposed war crimes.
As the Instagram post says below, “Security escorted protestors out of the lecture hall.” That’s a step in the right direction, since the University has failed to do even that during other protests. But are these protestors medical or other students at the University? If so, then they must be punished. If they’re not from the University community, then they’re likely guilty of trespassing and can be banned from campus. Whatever the University does about this, it must involve more than simply removing disruptive protestors from the venue, as that’s not really a deterrent, much less a punishment.
These protests invariably involve only pro-Palestinian students, simply because the pro-Israeli ones aren’t into this kind of disruption. And this has led pro-Palestinian demonstrators to ask why they’re being singled out by the University. But that’s a dumb question with an easy answer: “Because they’re the only group that holds these types of angry and disruptive protests with respect to the war.”
I wonder whether after Israel is victorious, as I think it will be, these protests will continue. I think they will, because the anger will only be intensified.
Here’s another post sponsored by the Students for Justice in Palestine, a registered student organization. Some of the video overlaps with that above, but they also have the temerity to tell Ehrenfeld what his ethical responsibility is:
On 2/20, Healthcare workers and medical students led disruptions and a banner drop during American Medical Association President Jesse Ehrenfeld’s talk at UChicago Medicine. AMA stop the hypocrisy, you have an ethical obligation to stand against genocide. You have an ethical obligation to stand with life, in solidarity with Palestine. Ehrenfeld, history is watching! Med Students say: Ceasefire Now!
Repost from @hcw4palichi
The students apparently disagree with the restriction that there is a time and place for free expression—times and places where it doesn’t disrupt University activity. This video also shows security asking students to leave, but they persist in a “silent protest,” holding up a banner in the classroom. I am not sure if that’s a violation of University regulations, but it should be, because it is disruptive, particularly when there are many signs held by many students. I would say, “no signs in the lecture hall.”
You’ll remember that Claudine Gay, the ex-President of Harvard, was grilled, along with the Presidents of MIT and Penn, in a House hearing on antisemitism. And all three Presidents were correct in saying that, if they applied the First Amendment on their campuses, calling for the genocide of Jews would often be considered free speech, but in some situations it wouldn’t. (One example of impermissible speech would be shouting “Gas the Jews” in front of a crowd of Jews if it would lead to predictable “imminent lawless action.)
Nevertheless, the professors were damned by the largely Republican panel—mainly because they spoke the truth, but there were two problems. First, the campuses didn’t explicitly have a speech code that comported with the First Amendment (they’re all private schools, too, so they aren’t required to). Further, they applied what speech codes they had unevenly, punishing much less serious offenses. In other words they were guilty of speech hypocrisy.
After the House debacle, Penn President Liz Magill resigned, while Gay, desperate to make amends, issued two statements plus a video explanation and apology. That might have saved her job, but in the end she was brought down by numerous and credible examples of plagiarism in her scholarly work. An interim President, Alan Garber, was appointed to replace Gay, and the search is on for a long-term replacement.
Now, six Jewish students at Harvard have filed a federal Title VI lawsuit against the school, alleging that it was a “bastion of anti-Jewish hatred.” In other words, the school had by its behavior created a climate of antisemitism. The suit will take a while before it works its way through the courts. but Harvard is clearly on notice that it has to do something about its speech hypocrisy. In a Boston Globe op-ed, Steve Pinker suggested five actions that Harvard could take to “save itself,” including adopting institutional neutrality and disempowering DEI.
Unfortunately, Harvard can’t seem to stop disseminating antisemitic tropes, and incidents like this one (click the NY Post linke below to read) will only contribute to finding Harvard culpable in the lawsuit.
An excerpt:
The Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine reposted the cartoon Monday after it was shared by two student groups, the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the Africa and African American Resistance Organization, according to the student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson.
It shows a hand with a dollar sign inside a Star of David holding nooses around what appear to be Muhammad Ali and former Egyptian President Gamal Nasser — with “third world” printed around a black arm swinging a machete with the words “liberation movement” on it.
Note that faculty are participating here.
The groups said they shared the poster, which is originally from 1967, to show how “African people have a profound understanding of apartheid and occupation.”
Instead, it added to accusations that the Ivy League school fails to protect Jewish students from hate.
More:
“The cartoon is despicably, inarguably antisemitic,” Rabbi David Wolpe, a Harvard Divinity School scholar who resigned from the school’s antisemitism advisory committee in December, posted to X.
“Is there no limit?”
[Alexander] Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Divinity School student who is suing the university for discrimination, also shared outrage at the offensive poster being reshared.
“Harvard *faculty* just posted an explicitly antisemitic poster depicting a Jewish hand controlling the black mind,” he wrote.
“With professors like these, it’s easy to see why Jewish students don’t feel safe in class.”
So here’s the cartoon at issue, which undeniably uses antisemitic tropes. Look at the Jewish hand (with a $ sign inside the Star of David) being a puppeteer. The cartoon was ultimately withdrawn with apologies by the issuing groups, but it was too late.
Now if you ask me, this is free speech, although of course bigoted and hateful speech. Were this to happen at the University of Chicago, it’s likely that no official statement would have been issued. But, under the gun, Harvard’s interim President issued this statement yesterday; I got it as an alum. There was also a short Harvard Press release condemning the cartoon and its antisemitism.
Dear Members of the Harvard Community,
A few groups purporting to speak on behalf of Harvard affiliates recently circulated a flagrantly antisemitic cartoon in a post on social media channels. The cartoon, included in a longer post, depicted what appeared to be an Arab man and a Black man with nooses around their necks. The nooses are held by a hand imprinted with the Star of David, and a dollar sign appears in the middle of the star. Online condemnation of this trope-filled image was swift, and Harvard promptly issued a statement condemning the posted cartoon. While the groups associated with the posting or sharing of the cartoon have since sought to distance themselves from it in various ways, the damage remains, and our condemnation stands.
Perpetuating vile and hateful antisemitic tropes, or otherwise engaging in inflammatory rhetoric or sharing images that demean people on the basis of their identity, is precisely the opposite of what this moment demands of us. As members of an academic community, we can and we will disagree, sometimes vehemently, on matters of public concern and controversy, including hotly contested issues relating to the war in Israel and Gaza, and the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But it is grossly irresponsible and profoundly offensive when that disagreement devolves into forms of expression that demonize individuals because of their religion, race, nationality, or other aspects of their identity.
The members of the Corporation join me in unequivocally condemning the posting and sharing of the cartoon in question. The University will review the situation to better understand who was responsible for the posting and to determine what further steps are warranted.
Reckless provocation draws attention without advancing understanding. Jewish, Israeli, Muslim, Palestinian, and Arab members of our community have reported feeling targeted, rejected, and ostracized. The war and its effects on the lives of people directly affected by the conflict demand our profound concern and sympathy. We must approach one another with compassion, open minds, and mutual respect, our discourse grounded in facts and supported by reasoned argument.
Harvard University | Massachusetts Hall | Cambridge, MA 02138
Taking an official stand against this stuff would violate Chicago’s institutional neutrality mandated by the Kalven Report, but Harvard doesn’t adhere to that. Ergo, to save its reputation, the school could hardly have done other than issue such a long screed, though I think the short press release is sufficient.
Note two things about the statement. First, it looks as if Harvard’s going to sniff out the perps with an eye to punishing them. Punishment for free speech! Notice further that besides condemning antisemitism, Harvard also has to condemn bigotry against Muslims, Palestinians, and Arabs. This “both sideism” is somewhat offensive to me: if you’re going to condemn an incident of antisemitism, you don’t have to throw in stuff about the other “side” as well. After all, Harvard isn’t being sued for creating an “Islamophobic atmosphere”. And I, for one, find it difficult to approach loud and aggressive pro-Palestinian demonstrators with “compassion and mutual respect”, so that part of the letter seems patronizing. As for “discourse grounded in facts,” fuggedaboutit!
In my view, Harvard should adopt Pinker’s “Fivefold Way” immediately, or it will be issuing statements like the one above every time there’s an incident involving people’s politics and identities. And you can see that it’s still violating the First Amendment, threatening punishment for flyers like the one above.
Andrew Sullivan’s statement, “We are all on campus now” has become pretty famous, and it’s proven true for wokeness, DEI, and other stuff that first shows up at universities and then spreads to other institutions and people. The latest on-campus phenomenon, though it’s already appearing other places, is antisemitism. And antisemitism is how I interpret this latest bit of college news published by Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe (and reprinted on his website. Jacoby’s take on the latest happening (at Columbia University, of course) is mirrored in a piece by free-expression lawyer Popehat (Ken White).
Click below to read Jacoby’s piece:
Jacoby’s piece begins with Marie-Alice Legrand, a Columbia law student “of French Caribbean descent.” I don’t think she’s Jewish, as the piece doesn’t mention that. But she grew up with Jews and with knowledge about pogroms and the Holocaust, and so when she got to Columbia she decided, in the face of campus antisemitism, to found a group to counter Jew hatred. The rest is is the story:
Legrand was shocked when the Columbia campus erupted in “blatant antisemitism and hate,” as she wrote on LinkedIn. Anti-Israel throngs publicly cheered the Hamas atrocities and marched behind banners bearing Palestinian flags and the words “By Any Means Necessary.” A tenured Columbia professor waxed ecstatic over the murders, rapes, and abductions of Israelis, which he called “astounding,” “awesome,” and “victories of the resistance.” More than 140 other faculty members signed a letter defending the barbaric assault as a legitimate “military action” against the Jewish state.
The callousness of what she was seeing scandalized Legrand. She knew students at Columbia who had lost friends or relatives in the Oct. 7 pogrom, she told me, but “there was not one ounce of sympathy or compassion extended to my Jewish and Israeli friends.” She reached out on social media. “You are not alone,” she posted. “I unequivocally support and stand with you.”
She decided to offer more than comfort. Over the next few months, Legrand assembled a group of students, Jews and non-Jews alike, to create a new campus club, Law Students Against Antisemitism. They drafted a charter laying out their objectives: to raise awareness of historical and contemporary antisemitism, to foster dialogue, and to provide support for students targeted by antisemitism.
On Jan. 23, Legrand and the group’s other officers appeared before the law school student senate to request official recognition for their club. Such recognition, which is needed to reserve space on campus and be assigned a Columbia email address, is normally a routine formality. Eight other clubs requested approval last month; all eight were rubber-stamped in a few minutes.
Before the vote was held, a delegation of progressive students showed up to demand that Legrand’s group be rejected on the grounds that it would “silence pro-Palestine activists on campus and brand their political speech as antisemitic.” It would do so, they claimed, by adopting the standard definition of antisemitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance [IHRA]. The accusation was ridiculous on multiple grounds. First and most obviously, no voluntary student group has the power to silence anyone, on campus or off. Second, as recent months have made plain, there has been no shortage of pro-Palestine expression on Columbia’s campus.
“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”
The Globe story continues:
Above all, it is beyond surreal to denounce an organization opposed to antisemitism for adopting the most widely used definition of the term. The IHRA formulation has been accepted by 42 countries — including the United States — and by well over 1,000 states, provinces, cities, nongovernmental organizations, and corporations. In fact, it is the definition relied on by the federal government in its enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
Read the definition again. Wouldn’t you write something similar if you were trying to define hatred of blacks? And is using that definition of antisemitism likely to “silence pro-Palestinian activists”? You’d have to be insane to think that; the activists are already out there, very loud and aggressive. No, the vote of the Law School’s student senate reflects only one thing: an attempt to make Jews and their allies shut up, while approving of groups, like pro-Palestinian ones, giving them all the benefits that come with official approval. The senate vote was also anonymous, as Popehat reports.
Popehat begins his article with a criticism of those who themselves go after students for generally being censorious and “politically correct”. Popehat thinks that there is far more danger from government leaders who think “that dissent is illegitimate and un-American” (he uses the GOP and Florida in particular as examples). And he’s probably right. But you fight fires where you can. So although Popehat’s not one of those who take a dim view of “woke” students, he nevertheless decries what the Columbia law-student senate did. Click to read his site.
But Columbia Law’s Student Senate is being fuzzy-headed at best, and acting at bad faith at worst, to say that a student group shouldn’t be approved if its values and viewpoints could lead to censorship if widely accepted, or that its definition of racism is wrong. A newly formed Law Students Against Antisemitism would only be able to add one additional voice — a student voice — into the incendiary debate about Israel. Their definition of antisemitism is subject to critique, like everybody else’s. They would have no official power to enforce it, only the power to associate with each other and speak their views. Their power to argue that some criticism of Israel is antisemitic is no more powerful — and no less a legitimate part of the debate — than Students for Justice In Palestine saying that it isn’t.
I also question whether the supposed logic is sincere. Would the Columbia Law Student Senate deny recognition to, say, the Black Law Students Association, on the basis that students from that group have sometimes called for the punishment of speech they perceive as bigoted? Somehow I think not; nor should they.
So does the Columbia Law Student Senate think that it’s necessary to stop speech to save it? Possibly. It’s the sort of philosophical fatuity that students have always eructed. Realistically, though, it’s more likely that these particular students think that when they don’t agree with speech, it’s legitimate to suppress that speech by any means at their disposal, including official and quasi-official means. It’s more likely that they think they have some kind of right not to be exposed to speech they hate. They see no value in the utterance of things unless they agree with those things, and don’t share the value that they should respond to speech rather than preventing it. I feel no obligation whatsoever to respect that sentiment or the students who hold it, as I’ve made clearbefore. And I am perfectly capable of regarding them as censorial dipshits while recognizing that they are also mostly insignificant censorial dipshits, compared to our nation’s leaders.
The fact that Columbia Law is private, and not bound by the First Amendment, does not change this analysis. Columbia advertises itself as a haven for free expression. If Columbia law wants to be free for expression that its Student Senate agrees with, maybe it should say that on the package. The belief “there is only one correct way to view the conflict in Gaza and we will not recognize student organizations who disagree” is loathsome and un-American whether or not it violates the First Amendment.
I think the students could do better. In fact I expect it of them. I expect students at one of America’s best law schools to say “I think your definition of antisemitism is overbroad and wrong, but you get to advocate it just like other groups do.” I hope that age and experience will rub the censorial dipshittery off of them. But all of this may mark me as naive. Has the America of this century provided a good example of the value of liberty? Have these students’ local and national leaders modeled a mature and civically responsible approach to encountering speech they don’t like? Likely no.
It’s not only ridiculous to assume that Legrand’s group would silence students in pro-Palestinian groups, but even more ridiculous to reject her group because it espouses a definition of antisemitism that is accepted by the U.S. government and used as a standard to enforce Title VI violations (see page 13 of the Biden-Harris initiative to counter antisemitism). Read the definition again. Do you think a group formed to fight antisemitism should be rejected because it uses the IHRA’s definition of antisemitism? And does the precise definition even matter so long as it captures the sense of Jew hatred?
Fortunately, Ms. Legrand has guts (from the Globe):
Legrand knows only too well how tenacious antisemitism can be. She said she was “heartbroken” by the student senate vote and by the moral perversity of those who would mobilize to kill an organization like hers. But she is not giving up. She hasn’t forgotten the view from her childhood bedroom window. And she knows that in the fight against antisemitism, surrender can be fatal.
We’re all on campus now, and the antisemitism spreading among colleges will simply infect the wider population—or hearten hidden antisemites to come into the open. For now there appears to be little penalty for hating Jews.
Nineteen undergraduates at Brown University are fasting to help Palestine, but, as noted in the tweet below, the school’s President, Christina Paxson, refuses to meet their demands. (The tweet includes an inevitable chant, but it’s a new one). Because the students say their hunger strike is “indefinite,” and because the President won’t pass on their demands to the relevant investing body, this looks to me like a standoff, ergo a “fast unto death.”
The difference between this fast and the famous fasts of Gandhi is that these students will not come close to death (I’ll make anybody a bet), and in that way are different from Gandhi’s hunger strikes, which laid him low (he once fasted for 21 days) and often worked when the British saw that Gandhi was (pardon the pun) dead serious, and they’d better give in lest India riot. However, even Gandhi’s fasts failed more often than they succeeded.
And here we have a President with a spine, who’s simply not going to give in to the student demands, which of course require that she abandon institutional neutrality in favor of a political position.
UPDATE: Brown President Christina Paxson has informed the hunger strikers that she will not meet their demands.
An earlier report from the Brown Daily Herald, the student newspaper, gives the reason for the hunger strike, which involves 19 students:
The Students announced the hunger strike during a Friday afternoon “rally for divestment” organized by the Palestine Solidarity Caucus and Jews for Ceasefire Now on the Main Green, at which approximately 350 were in attendance. Rally attendees flooded the campus center shortly after the announcement. Protestors also called on Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Senator Jack Reed (D-R.I.) to support a ceasefire in Gaza.
The divestment resolution, the strikers say, should mirror the 2020 report released by the University’s Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Practices that recommended divestment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.” The committee has since been renamed the Advisory Committee on University Resources Management.
. . .The hunger strike — led by “students from several allied affinity and organizing (campus) groups” — is set to be the United States’ largest since Oct. 7, according to the strikers. Upon review of previous hunger strikes related to the Israel-Palestine war, The Herald corroborated this claim.
Students are also calling for the University to promote an “immediate ceasefire in Gaza” and fully divest its endowment “from specified companies enabling and profiting from Israel’s genocide.” But they will only refuse to accept food until the Corporation hears their resolution.
And from the latest Daily Herald, (click to read):
The President’s refusal:
On Sunday, 19 student protestors entered the third day of their hunger strike, despite the refusal of President Christina Paxson P’19 P’MD’20 to meet their demand that the Corporation, the University’s highest governing body, “hears and considers a divestment resolution,” during its meetings that begin this week.
The protestors demand that any divestment resolution be consistent with the 2020 report compiled by the Advisory Committee on Corporate Responsibility in Investment Policies, which recommended the University divest its endowment from “companies which profit from human rights abuses in Palestine.”
This advisory committee comprised faculty, staff, alumni, and both undergraduate and graduate students.
Paxson previously refused to adhere to the report, saying that “the recommendation did not adequately address the requirements for rigorous analysis and research as laid out in ACCRIP’s charge, nor was there the requisite level of specificity in regard to divestment.”
In her recent letter to the protestors, Paxson wrote that the first step toward requesting divestment “is not a Corporation resolution, but rather to submit a proposal to the Advisory Committee on University Resource Management” — the successor to ACCRIP.
Paxson also wrote that she will “not commit to bring a resolution to the February 2024 Corporation meeting or any future meeting of the Corporation.”
This the corportation will not hear the students’ demands, ergo they have to keep fasting. But it’s weird, because they could submit a proposal but refuse to do so. It’s confusing, but perhaps the protestors are demanding not just that the proposal be seen but be voted on.
The strikers have not submitted a proposal to ACURM, nor do they plan to do so, according to strike spokesperson Sam Stewart ’24.
The protesting students also wrote that they “will continue (the) hunger strike as long as President Paxson refuses to engage with our demands.”
In response to the students’ continuation of the strike, University Spokesperson Brian Clark reiterated that the 2020 proposal will not be brought forward for a vote, but that student protesters can submit a divestment proposal through ACURM.
One issue is if the students really continue fasting until their lives are in danger, the university, to avoid liability, will disenroll them (see my bolding below), or perhaps arrest them. This has happened before:
In a December sit-in, Paxson refused to revisit her decision not to adhere to a 2020 report compiled by ACCRIP. During this demonstration, 41 students demanded full divestment from “Israeli military occupation” and were subsequently arrested on trespassing charges and referred to ACURM.
In Friday’s letter, Paxson encouraged the protestors to look after their mental and physical well-being throughout the duration of the strike and shared University health resources available to students. She added that “protest is also unacceptable if it creates a substantial threat to personal safety of any member of the community.”
The University previously disenrolled four students participating in a hunger strike protesting the University’s partial divestment policy of South African apartheid in the 1980s. The then-administration cited health and liability concerns for the disenrollment, according to a 1986 article by The Herald.
I suspect nobody died in this one.
Two questions. First, does the University really invest in companies that “profit from human rights abuses in Palestine”? That itself is a slippery notion; does it mean any Israeli companies? The article says this:
The University is not directly invested in any weapons manufacturing companies, but a substantial portion of its endowment is invested through manager portfolios, The Herald previously reported. The University is contractually obligated not to disclose the companies in these portfolios, but told students that none have a focus in the defense industry.
“We are confident that our external managers have the highest level of ethics and share the values of the Brown community,” Clark wrote in a Sunday email to The Herald, “including the rejection of violence.”
The University of Chicago wouldn’t even go that far, but would simply say that the contents of its portfolio are confidential. I’m not sure whether the statement above will satisfy the students, but it apparently has not, for it’s not specific enough for the students.
Second, are the students really determined to fast unto death? I doubt it, for they’d be disenrolled (and that would be soon), and that would go on their record. Also, do they really want to die on this hill? Readers can speculate how long they’ll go without food before they give up.
At any rate, it’s good news that the Brown President will not accede to the students’ demands. If she did, there would be no limit to what students could demand in the future.
The litany of college wokeness, and especially the harm it causes, is now being discussed by the mainstream media, including the Atlantic and the Washington Post. Here, the Chronicle of Higher Education, the most respected venue for discussing college affairs, published a long piece (ca. 6000 words) discussing how “a decade of ideological transformation”—and that means “wokeness”—is no longer off limits to criticism.
The most obvious sign of this is the congressional hearing that led to the resignation of the President of Penn, the weakening of Harvard’s President Claudine Gay, and a general tendency for donors to pull their money out of colleges because of their hypocrisy—a hypocrisy that led colleges to punish minor speech transgressions (like misgendering and “microaggressions”) but to suddenly raise the banner of free speech when it came to calling for genocide of the Jews.
As I’ve said, a decent college free-speech code—one that adheres to the First Amendment—would allow for calls to kill Jews, but only under certain conditions (you can’t, for example, do it to harass someone or create a climate that impedes education). In that sense all three Presidents were right—context does matters. But what rankled many people, including me, was that these colleges did not have decent speech codes, and what codes they had were applied unevenly. This created a kind of hypocrisy that led to the downfall of Penn’s President Elizabeth Magill, who didn’t know how to handle the issue thoughtfully and humanely, and walked back her free-speech advocacy the very next day.
The problem is how to maintain free speech, which allows students to say really offensive things, including “From the River to the Sea. . ” (a disguised call to eliminate Israel and Jews), while at the same time preserving a campus climate that is conducive to discussion and learning. That’s a hard problem, one that I’m dealing with now and trying to solve in my own way (more on that later).
After giving lots of examples and offering potential causes of the last decade’s illiberal campus climate, author Len Gutkin offers a solution, which turns out to be colleges’ adoption of the principle of “insitutional neutrality”: there should be no official statements by administrations or departments about ideology, politics, or morality. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
I’ll give (indented) quotes from the article in three sections, which I’ve arbitrarily constructed.
1.) THE PROBLEM
Author Gutkin dates the problem as really beginning with the demonization of Nicholas and Erika Christakis at Yale after a dust-up about Halloween costumes. This took place in October of 2015, when Erika wrote a note to the students in her residential “house” saying that the administration’s policy of specifying politically correct Halloween costumes should be regarded with some critical judgement. The students didn’t like that, as you can see from the video below, in which they go after Nicholas like gangbusters for what his wife did. Watch the students going wild as Christakis kept his cool. (For background information, go here or read the part on “Yale Halloween Controversy” at Nicholas Christakis’s Wikipedia page.)
The result: Nicholas and Erika resigned as heads of Silliman House, and Erika left Yale permanently.
Whether or not that marks the formal beginning of a tide of wokeness, a lot of reprehensible behavior ensued, exacerbated by the death of George Floyd in 2020 (see next post). A few examples:
An almost-random sampling from June 2020: The Rutgers University English department released a letter detailing its “actions in solidarity with Black Lives Matter”; these included a “Racism in Education Reading Group” as well as workshops on “how to have an antiracist classroom.” The latter would be “mandatory for all tenure-track, tenured, non-tenure-track, part-time, and graduate instructors — everyone.” The Harvard College Office of Admissions and Financial Aid issued a statement promising, among other things, to “commit to engaging more deeply in antiracism work to support our work in admissions and financial aid and in hiring, professional development, and promotions within our office.” Cornell University’s Office of Student and Campus Life issued a statement explaining that “the institution of higher education is founded on and continues to function with intentional systemic barriers in place for marginalized people, especially our Black community members.” The president of Brandeis University promised to “transform our campus and address systemic racism” via a series of “action plans”: “We must go further than dialogue and understanding. We must rapidly move toward concrete change.”
In July 2020, an open faculty letter circulated at Princeton and signed by several hundred faculty members likewise asked that the university take “immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive” on campus. The suggested steps were many and heterogeneous, including “implement administration- and facultywide training that is specifically antiracist,” “acknowledge on the home page that the university is sited on Indigenous land,” and “fund a chaired professorship in Indigenous studies for a scholar who decenters white frames of reference.”
. . .Indeed, in the two years following the murder of George Floyd, it became apparent that academic freedom and activist demands — even some demands backed by administrators — were sometimes in severe tension. Almost every week seemed to bring a fresh incident. Some of the cases are farcical: In 2020, a white professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California, Greg Patton, used the Mandarin word “nèige,” which means “that,” in a lesson on filler words (nèige can be used similarly to “um” in English but sounds vaguely like the N-word). A joint letter signed by “Black MBA students” referred to the “emotional exhaustion of carrying on with an instructor that disregards cultural diversity and sensitivities and by extension creates an unwelcoming environment for us.” Patton was removed from the course. Other cases fundamentally threaten academic freedom as it pertains to classroom teaching: At the University of Michigan, Bright Sheng, a composer from China who teaches in the music school, showed a 1965 film version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appears in blackface. Students were upset; Sheng apologized and agreed not to finish screening the film. That response was felt to be unsatisfactory. Sheng was removed from the course. His dean, David Gier, explained that Sheng’s misdeeds “do not align with our school’s commitment to antiracist action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
And then there was the affair of the Yale Law School trap house. , ,
You may have heard about most of this, and the article gives more examples. But we already know about this tsunamis of wokeness, and how it’s inhibited students from speaking their minds. Gilken has a psychological diagnosis of the problem which aligns with the one Haidt and Lukianoff offered in their excellent book The Coddling of the American Mind:
2.) WHAT CAUSED ALL THIS?
Gutkin sees one main cause of this atmosphere: the entitlement of students created by a new atmosphere of “safetyism”, itself promoted by the desire of students to have colleges act in loco parentis. Earlier students didn’t want that, but simply wanted independence. This atmosphere is discussed thoroughly in Haidt and Lukianoff’s book. A few quotes from the Chronicle piece:
When Erika [Christakis] asked her Sillimanders whether they should be more skeptical about “bureaucratic and administrative” power over college students, she put her finger on a generational rift between baby boomers like herself and the millennials she was superintending. She simply couldn’t fathom that many students welcomed the guiding hand offered by administrators at the Intercultural Affairs Council. Her own generation, after all, had demanded that college students be emancipated from the in loco parentis oversight of their elders on campus. “Whose business is it,” Erika had asked in her letter, “to control the forms of costumes of young people? It’s not mine, I know that.” Students disagreed.
. . .The last decade’s protest culture, with its emphasis on harm and care, abandons one of the central goals of an earlier age of student activism: the nullification of colleges’ in loco parentis controls. Instead, Gersen observed in 2015, students approach college administrations with a kind of “family feeling” hard to imagine in an earlier era. Of the Yale Halloween protests, she writes: “The world in which it’s not bizarre for a young person to rebuke someone for failing to ‘create a place of comfort and home,’ or to yell, ‘Be quiet … You’re disgusting!’ and storm away, is the world of family, where a child in pain desperately desires empathy and understanding from a parent.”
These psychodynamics are crossed with other, older traditions of campus protest, including the rhetoric of the left in the ‘60s. The result is an oddly psychologized species of militancy, a blend of personal insult, wounded outcries, radical political prescription — and demands that offenders be punished. Indeed, Gersen’s observation about students’ desire for familial protection from administrators should be supplemented with a complementary account of punishment. Families, after all, are where children are trained and corrected. The last decade has been marked by a decided willingness on the part of campus activists to ask administrators to train and correct both wayward faculty members and fellow students — and a decided willingness on the part of administrators to oblige them. Although the term “cancel culture” has become tainted by partisan political bickering, it gets at the broadly punitive atmosphere of campus life now.
And I like this explanation, which comes from Lukianoff and Haidt:
In 2015, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff identified a disposition they termed “vindictive protectiveness,” which combines a neurotic fixation on one’s own vulnerability with a thirst for punishing others: “The ultimate aim, it seems, is to turn campuses into ‘safe spaces’ where young adults are shielded from words and ideas that make some uncomfortable [and] to punish anyone who interferes with that aim, even accidentally.” The sociologists Henrique Carvalho and Anastasia Chamberlen can help us understand how that disposition sometimes becomes the glue holding student activists together. In a 2017 paper, “Why Punishment Pleases,” Carvalho and Chamberlen coined the concept of “hostile solidarity,” whereby punitive rituals bind groups together at the expense of the punished. This concept, they note, might “assist an analysis of why the deployment of what can be deemed a punitive logic has become particularly appealing in contemporary liberal social settings” — like colleges. As one protesting student told Nicholas Christakis back in 2015, “Now I want your job to be taken from you.”
“Vindictive protectiveness”! Yes, the combination of fragility and aggressiveness is not something I’ve seen on campuses before. Aggressiveness, yes, especially during the Vietnam War and civil rights protests of the Sixties. But not the fragility, also explained by Haidt and Lukianoff as a result of overparenting and other factors.
But Gutkin skims but lightly another cause of campus unrest: the proliferation of DEI bureaucracies, which promote identitarianism and the oppressor/victim narrative (“fragility”) as well as divisiveness (“aggression”). It’s mentioned only two or three times in the article; and, indeed, Gutkin may see DEI as simply another outgrowth of the safetyism dsecribed above. But the DEI intrusion into academia began well before the Yale incident, and is somewhat independent of it (the Bakke case was in 1978). And there’s evidence that DEI, by creating divisiveness, self-segregation, and inhibition of free expression, is contributing to this problem. Bolding in the excerpt below is mine:
Still, there is some evidence that the proliferation of administrative bureaucracies like the Intercultural Affairs Council stimulates student protest against certain kinds of speech, especially conservative speech or speech, like the Christakises’, taken by student activists to be conservative. A recent study by Kevin Wallsten, a political scientist at California State University at Long Beach, finds that student tolerance toward conservative speakers is negatively correlated with the number of diversity, equity, and inclusion administrators, but it finds no such effect for tolerance toward liberal speakers. By the same token, Wallsten found, the student bodies at campuses with a high number of DEI administrators are more likely than those at campuses with lower numbers of DEI administrators to support disruptions of controversial speech. The perception that some administrators are soft sponsors of student protests has, in the last year, invited intense scrutiny and even official policy revisions. In a memo issued in March 2023, for instance, Jenny Martinez, then dean of Stanford Law, included a section called “Academic Freedom, Free Speech, DEI, and the Role of University Administrators,” in which she specifically focused on the troubled relationship between free speech and DEI.
Getting rid of DEI would, I think, help reduce this kind of campus tension, for DEI sets group against group and inculcates the “privileged” with guilt and the “oppressed” with resentment and fragility.
3.) WHAT CAN WE DO ABOUT THIS?
This is the hard part. If you maintain a campus policy of free expression, people are going to get offended, and, without due care, it could create a climate of fear and safetyism on campus. The sole solution offered by Gutkin—a good one, to be sure—is to adopt a policy of institutional neutrality like our Kalven Report. We’ve had far less trouble in Chicago than at places like Harvard (which bought striking pro-Palestinian students BURRITOS, for crying out loud), and although we have demands for the administration to take stands on issues or divest from some corporations, the students know that this is useless, and their hearts aren’t really in it. So yes, adopt institutional neutrality. (It’s worth noting that unlike the Ivies, which lost big donors after the House hearing, this hasn’t happened at Chicago.)
What will they do now? One possibility: Commit to the institutional neutrality enshrined in the University of Chicago’s 1967 Kalven Report, which calls for “a heavy presumption against the university taking collective action or expressing opinions on the political or social issues of the day.” No more statements from college presidents scolding the Supreme Court; no more declarations of solidarity with Ukraine. One leader adopting this approach is Maud Mandel, president of Williams College, in Massachusetts. “Our most important mission,” she wrote to her campus, “is to teach students how to think, and empower them to do so for themselves — not to tell them what to think.” Danielle Allen, the Harvard political scientist, likewise told me that she thinks it would benefit colleges to “embrace” the Kalven Report. So did Ellen Cosgrove, the retired Yale law administrator who got ensnarled in the Trent Colbert case. Cosgrove predicts, too, that colleges will become much clearer in the future about the consequences of participating in disruptive protests.
Whatever neutrality’s intrinsic virtues, the intense scrutiny brought to bear on campus politics by Republican politicians makes it politically expedient, too. Colleges are under pressure to reverse the appearance of a political double standard on campus, and a policy of neutrality might not only remove a provocation to politicians but give colleges a tool with which to resist the imposition of a conservative orthodoxy by state legislatures.
But of course this raises the problem, recognized by Gutkin, that such neutrality doesn’t do much to dispel either the psychological tendency of students to be fragile nor the DEI-promoted rivalry between identity groups. All Gutkins can offer here is the idea that adopting the Kalven principle (so far embraced by only two schools beside Chicago) will let the air out of protestors’ tires:
If neutrality is a negative doctrine of restraint, pluralism is its positive consequence, the fruit it allows to grow. It is not conducive to “family feeling” — families tend toward consensus or else, à la the students screaming and weeping at Nicholas Christakis in the courtyard of Silliman, embittered antagonism. Perhaps, as happened after the explosive campus protests of the late 1960s, we are entering a new period of quiescence, all passion spent. Or perhaps not.
To be sure, this is not an easy problem to resolve. But I think there are other things to do, like encouraging discourse between groups and ensuring that although speech remains free, there may be a few tiny curbs on the First Amendment that would facilitate interaction. One of these would be to prohibit shouting down speakers or deplatforming them. That is allowed by the First Amendment but is not salubrious for campuses. And it’s important that although free expression should be encouraged, students who violate campus rules via sit-ins, deplatforming, and disrupting classes with chants, be punished, and that those punishments be known to students. For without punishment there is no deterrence, and no way to curb disruption.
And that means no free burritos for those who violate campus rules!
On his Substack site “After Babel,” social psychologist Jon Haidt, most of you know of, explains the rapid rise of antisemitism on American campuses. The piece is long and a bit repetitious, but well worth reading of a Christmas Eve.
Click to read:
I’ll just summarize his thesis and give some quotes. First, the problem:
Why is the culture of elite higher education so fertile for antisemitism, and why are our defenses against it so weak? Don’t we have the world’s most advanced academic concepts and bureaucratic innovations for identifying hatred of all kinds, even expressions of hatred so small, veiled, and unconscious that we call them “micro-aggressions” and “implicit biases”?
Yes, we do, but it turns out that they don’t apply when Jews are the targets,1 and this was the shocking hypocrisy on display in that Congressional hearing room on December 5. Congresswoman Elise Stefanik asked the President of the University of Pennsylvania “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?” President Magill was unable to say yes. When the question was asked in various ways to all three presidents, none could say yes. All said variations of “it depends on the context.”
The question, then, is this: given that persecuted minorities are at the top of progressive’s “admiration pile”, why are the Jews, perhaps the most persecuted group in history, at the bottom? Part of the answer lies in one of the three “great untruths” presented in Lukianoff and Haid’s book The Coddling of the American Mind:
“life is a battle between good people and evil people”
And this came from the increase among the young in “safetyism”, described by Wikipedia this way: “a culture or belief system in which safety (which includes ’emotional safety’) has become a sacred value, which means that people become unwilling to make trade-offs demanded by other practical and moral concerns.”
And so this form of Manichaeism developed:
The new morality driving these reforms was antithetical to the traditional virtues of academic life: truthfulness, free inquiry, persuasion via reasoned argument, equal opportunity, judgment by merit, and the pursuit of excellence. A subset of students had learned this new morality in some of their courses, which trained them to view everyone as either an oppressor or a victim. Students were taught to use identity as the primary lens through which everything is to be understood, not just in their coursework but in their personal and political lives. When students are taught to use a single lens for everything, we noted, their education is harming them, rather than improving their ability to think critically.
This leads to what Haidt calls “common enemy identity politics” (opposed to its virtuous twin, “common humanity identity politics):
[Common enemy identity politics] teaches students to develop the oppressor/victim mindset and then change their societies by uniting disparate constituencies against a specific group of oppressors. This mindset spreads easily and rapidly because human minds evolved for tribalism. The mindset is hyper-activated on social media platforms that reward simple, moralistic, andsensationalcontent with rapid sharing and high visibility. This mindset has long been evident in antisemitism emanating from the far right. In recent years it is increasingly driving antisemitism on the left, too.
And the oppressor/victim mentality, says Haidt, comes from evolution: it’s a way of thinking that was presumably adaptive competition between the small groups of our ancestors. In those groups, “us-versus-them” thinking presumably led to greater reproduction of those who were wary of “the other.” (This hypothesis makes sense to me, though it’s very hard to test. But the universality of tribalism demands some kind of explanation. Fortunately, one of the increases in morality emphasized by Pinker involves the disappearance of this tribalism, which is maladaptive in a modern world of widespread interaction.)
Still, why the Jews? Because they fit neatly into the slot of “oppressor.” (I’d add that Jews, as well as Asians, have done quite well compared to other minorities, which makes them less likely to be seen as oppressed. Jews, like Asians, are considered “white adjacent”!)
So, how well does our analysis from 2018 hold up in 2023? Does chapter 3 help us to understand the recent explosion of antisemitism on campus?
Unfortunately, the analysis works perfectly. Many students today talk about Israel as a “settler-colonialist” nation That is straight oppressor/victim terminology, from post-colonialist thinker Frantz Fanon. It treats Israel as if diaspora Jews were 19th century England or France sending colonists to take over an existing society, motivated by monetary greed. Once that frame is applied, students’ minds are closed to any other understanding of a complicated situation, such as the view that Jews are the original (or indigenous) inhabitants of the land, who had a continual presence there for 3,000 years, and whose exiled populations (many in Arab lands) had nowhere else to go after being decimated by Hitler’s version of common enemy identity politics.7 The French in Algeria could return to France, but if these students get their wish and Hamas gains control of all the territory “from the river to the sea,” it’s not clear where seven million Jews would go, other than into the sea.
Haidt then gives some polling data showing that members of generation Z (those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, making them 11 to 26 years old) are far more antisemitic than older folks. This is presumably because Gen Z has been subject more often to safetyism and the oppressor-victim narrative. Here are some data from Haidt’s paper:
As you can see below, all older generations favor disciplinary action as the proper response to students who publicly call for the mass killing of Jews. Only Gen Z does not.
The big difference between generations is thatonly Gen Z endorses this kind of identity politics. One survey item asks: “There is an ideology that white people are oppressors and nonwhite people and people of certain groups have been oppressed and as a result should be favored today at universities and for employment. Do you support or oppose this ideology?” [p. 56]
Gen Z, and only Gen Z, agrees with the “ideology that white people are oppressors.” The direct line linking this explicit form of common enemy identity politics to antisemitism is found in the responses to the next item: “Do you think that Jews as a class are oppressors and should be treated as oppressors or is that a false ideology?”
The summary (Haidt’s bolding):
In other words: While all generations agree that race-based identity politics now dominates on campus, only Gen Z leans toward (rather than away from ) endorsing such politics, applying it to Jews, and agreeing that we should treat Jews as oppressors—that is, treat them badly and not protect them from hate and harassment because they deserve what’s coming to them.
One of the noxious results of this trend, which of course is jumped on by the Right-wing media—Left-wing media barely touches the issue because they perpetuate the victim-oppressor narrative—is that it makes Americans lose trust in higher education; and the more Right-wing you are, the faster you lose trust. But even the Left is losing confidence in higher education, as seen in the graph below (caption from Haidt):
Figure 1. Percent of U.S. adults with “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education. Source: Gallup (2023).
It is in fact appropriate to lose faith in higher education given what is happening here. It’s not just antisemitism, but the rise of “studies” departments that are based on identity politics, the proliferation of DEI bureaucracy, increasing self-segregation in universities, the tendency of universities to make ideological statements that chill the speech of many (especially conservatives), and the infection of academic discourse with ideology. The consequence is that both Left and Right, who see Biden as the embodiment of “progressive” and elitist politics, are going to turn more towards Republicans, with the ultimate disastrous possibility that Trump will be re-elected. Universities are hoist with their own petard.
Haidt’s argument for the rise of antisemitism makes sense, and I do recommend you read The Coddling of the American Mind. But of course people like me who live on campus are more concerned with quelling this kind of hatred than understanding its philosophical roots. How can you preserve free speech and the First Amendment on campus while at the same time preventing speech (especially now) from creating at atmosphere of fear, mistrust, and self-censorship? That is a huge problem, and one that brought woe to those three university presidents who testified before a House committee, eroding their and their schools’ reputations through an inability to discuss this issue coherently.
Haidt gives some references to organizations “that can help universities” (i.e., FIRE, Heterodox Academy, and so on), and adds a list of books and essays that suggest reforms for colleges. Have a look at that list. As for me, I’m a hard-core free speecher, but I deplore the atmosphere of intimidation that’s arisen at the University of Chicago, particularly with the Jewish students strongly intimidated by aggressive and loud pro-Palestinian groups. I’m doing what I can to keep my principles but to try to dispel that atmosphere. But that’s something I’ll discuss another day.
I’ve read these, and, living on campus and hearing from friends elsewhere, it makes me ill to read about the sudden tsunami of hatred and turmoil on American campuses. There is no way that this is not going to disrupt education. Most of the turmoil, of course, is caused by pro-Hamas or pro-Palestinian students trying to disrupt university activities. That’s okay by me so long as they are exercising free speech and doing it in a way that doesn’t violate university regulations, but often that’s not the case. (Even at my own university, over 20 pro-Palestinian students and 2 faculty were arrested for blocking University facilities.) But the mishigass is widespread, and before I go off to eat, I proffer two articles for you to read. The first, from Commentary, is relatively short, but the second, from Legal Insurrection, is long.
Both show the ideological rot spreading in our universities. I don’t solely blame the students, because often college administrations and faculty promote this kind of stuff:
Read ’em if you want; click on the headlines to do so:
From Legal Insurrection. I realize that the title is a bit hyperbolic, but there’s a lot of intriguing stuff in this piece:
The video that inspired the title. This young Jewish student at Washington University has an epiphany, and I don’t think she’s far off. Imagine! Now the pro-Palestinians have the right to demonstrate, I presume, and even call for the deaths of Jews, but it’s still distressing to see stuff like this happening. It is, of course, because lots of students, inspired by the Zeitgeist and their ignorance, have lost their moral compass.
