I've been following the story this week of the three university presidents in the dock over their failure to crack down on anti-semitic protests on their campus. In case you've been avoiding the news because you're tired of all the downer news of Trump leading in the polls or his loyalists' success in shutting down government, you may have missed what's going on. If that's the case, let me urge you to tune back in. This story has implications far beyond the charges of wokism and political correctness that it appears to be about at first glance.
To start in the middle (because to start at the beginning of all the issues converging would require a review of the arguments in favor of First Amendment rights to free speech and the entire history of Palestine and of anti-semitism), three university presidents, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, Sally Kornbluth of MIT and Claudine Gay of Harvard, were called on the carpet this past week by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce and grilled in connection with protests of Israel's response to the attacks by Hamas on October 7th. In a nutshell, they were charged with failure to provide Jews on their campuses with safe haven from calls for genocide by the protesters.
What troubles me about this event is how any attempt at a nuanced analysis of what happened - and is still happening - seems to be beyond our grasp. It's a chaotic free-for-all, with right-wingers asking the questions and progressives not being able to provide their own acceptable framing of the problem. To jump to the bottom line, the questioners asked, in unabashed sophomoric gutsiness, "Are you in favor of genocide?" and the responders responded, in embarrassing evasive-sounding language, "It depends on the situation." Not cool. Not cool at all. If the two sides were your teenage kids, you'd want to lock them in a closet until they turned twenty. I squirmed - as I imagine most Americans did - at both the hostility of the questioners and the naiveté of the responders, who gave a legalistic response when a moral one was in order. The unsatisfying answer gave Elise Stefanik, the question, a chance to show justified outrage and lash out at what half the country now considers unduly privileged leaders of elitist institutions. Take that Harvard, Penn and MIT, you arrogant bastards. Magill has now resigned and Stefanik's response is "One down. Two to go." In case you missed the complexity of this congressional attempt to address the very real problem of anti-semitism on U.S. campuses, keep in mind that Sally Kornbluth of MIT is Jewish. Also keep in mind that Stefanik was not being honest here. Language is an important part of the problem. It should be common knowledge by now - it isn't, but it should be - that jihad has a broad range of meaning. In the mouth of Islamic radicals it means "all out war" against non-Muslims, but to speakers of Arabic generally, it means "struggle" and is mainly understood to mean "engage in the battle to do the morally right thing." Intifada, similarly, means uprising, and when used in the struggle against Israeli attempts to limit Palestinian rights (as Palestinians see them), the word means resistance. And the word genocide itself tends to be used as a shock term more frequently than an accurate description of behavior.
But that is a moot point in this case. Associated Press has pointed out that there was in fact no call for genocide, that the word appeared only in complaints that the revenge attacks on Hamas amounted to a genocide perpetrated by Israel, considering the number of deaths in Gaza number over 18,000 since the retaliation began. So Stefanik's insisting on a yes/no answer to the question of genocide should be considered a badgering of the witness. Stefanik, in fact, gives herself away. When questioning Kornbluth on the question of genocide, Kornbluth replied, "I have not heard calling for the genocide of Jews on our campus." To this, Stefanik responded, "But you've heard chants for intifada."
And next thing you know, the way the story gets told is that the presidents were so insensitive as to let protesters off the hook when calling for genocide, as if they were working in a Nazi framework. Some individuals may have gone that far, but I have yet to see evidence for it. I trust you will agree with me, however, that this automatic bait-and-switch of the word genocide for intifada, is manipulation on the part of Elise Stefanik.
These confrontations with the three presidents encapsulates the dilemma we're facing, in the U.S. and in the world, with the arrival of the internet and instant exposure to complex ideas which everyone, wise and foolish alike, feels they have the right - and often the duty - to chime in on. Nuance gets lost in the shuffle. And with it goes the argument postmodernists try to make that objective truth is elusive and we are better off accepting the notion that there are multiple truths, that everybody should just tell their story and we should let all the conflicting narratives just sit there side by side. You can hear this argument at work every time somebody speaks of "speaking your own truth."
But the hearings aggravate an already open wound in America, the inability to proceed with civility through agonizingly painful differences of opinion. We live in permanent "gotcha" mode, egged on by the media and its habit of reporting conflict, often with what seems like glee: "If it bleeds, it leads." It doesn't require a close look at the hearings to see that the Committee went at the three academics with righteous gusto. Jewish Americans, three-quarters of whom generally vote democratic, are finding a sympathetic ally in the Republican Party these days.
I am in no position to oppose hard grilling of the world's movers and shakers by Congress. I see it as their job to expose wrongdoing, and have enjoyed watching them go at people in the hot seat and make them squirm - automobile manufacturers, bankers, oil and gas executives, for example. One of my heroes is Katie Porter, with her whiteboard. An even bigger hero has been Liz Cheney and others on the Congressional January 6th committee. I watch what Congress does more closely these days than usual, frankly, out of a fear that the reelection of the 45th president of the United States and the Republicans riding his coattails would mean the end of democracy in America. Just so you know what my biases are and where I'm coming from.
I said at the start that the presidents-in-the-dock event needs to be understood in the larger history of the Israel/Palestine conflict. I cannot do that history justice, but let me give a quick summary in three or four paragraphs of how I understand it, also in order to expose my limitations and let you know where I'm coming from.
A little background
The larger battle between Israel and the Palestinians is one of the Western world's most frustrating battles of conflicting narratives, to use the postmodern term. Many have declared the problem insoluble, and indeed it has persisted since before the founding of the State of Israel in 1948, over seventy-five years ago now, still with no end in sight.
To risk oversimplification, the main Israeli narrative is that Palestine is the traditional Jewish homeland and Jews have a right to it. Religious Jews - and many biblical-literalist Christians as well - maintain that right was God-given, but even non-religious supporters of Israel claim that right is historical. When Palestinians tell the story, they usually insist that the Jewish right to emigrate to Palestine does not include the right to push the Palestinians out, and that that is the start and the heart of the problem. From there the conflict goes quickly to arguments over whether the Jews have a right to form a Jewish state, which includes preferential treatment for Jews, whether the Palestinians were pushed or chose to sell their land voluntarily and leave, whether, in the absence of a historical Palestinian state for Palestinians, there should be one now, and whether the Palestinian National Authority speaks for the Palestinians, or maybe Hamas of Hezbollah. The Palestinian National Authority has to face charges of widespread corruption; Hamas is the terrorist organization responsible for the aforementioned barbaric invasion, and Hezbollah is supported by Iran, a country that refers to Israel as "Little Satan" and has declared it to be an "enemy of Islam."
Also part of the context is the fact that Palestinians, regardless of whether they are responsible for their own fate and, if so, to what degree, have lived lives not of their own choosing as refugees for seventy-five years. Technically they are not refugees in the normal sense, i.e., people driven from their countries, but are "internally displaced," i.e., still living in Israel or under the Palestinian authority, and these children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those displaced in the late 1940s are considered refugees by the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA). Many have made decent lives outside Israel/Palestine throughout the Middle East, in Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere (including as far away as Chile) but resent not being able to return to the homes they fled or were otherwise forced to surrender subsequent to the foundation of Israel in 1948, which they refer to as "al-Nakba," or "The Catastrophe." Half, approximately one million, of these internally displaced Palestinians live in Gaza; 750,000 live in the West Bank and another 250,000 live in Israel proper and comprise 21% of the Israeli State. For the sake of comparison, 73.5% of the Israeli population, or 7.145 million, are Jews.
The Israeli-Occupied West Bank is governed by Fatah, a political party led by Mahmood Abbas. Jewish settlers, now numbering 750,000, supported by Israeli's President Benjamin Netanyahu and soldiers of the Israeli Defence Forces are now actively pushing them out of the Occupied West Bank. And, in this case, at least, the "pushing out" has more of a claim to objective truth than other parts of the conflicting narratives. Gazans, long before this current moment where they are dying under Israeli bombardment in large numbers as shields for their Hamas rulers, were described by supporters of Palestinian rights as living "the largest open-air prison in the world."
Hamas was elected to run Gaza in 2006 and there have been no elections since. For a brief period they ruled in accord with Fatah, but by 1997 were at odds with them and have been ever since. Since there is no way of identifying how much support Hamas gets from the citizens of Gaza, it is difficult to assess how much responsibility they should bear for the recent Hamas attack and how strong a case might be made justifying Israel's recent ruthless attacks on Gazan civilians as unavoidable "collateral damage," and what the Israelis can do, if anything, to go after Hamas without such killing of civilians. Clearly there is no shortage of debates all deriving from the main event, the attack.
Back to the presidents of Harvard, Penn and MIT
It appears to be virtually impossible to draw a clear line of separation between the attack by Hamas and the right of Palestinians to seek relief from their current political disadvantage in this conflict of narratives between them and Jewish Israelis. The blurring of the line is evident not just at Harvard, UPenn and MIT, where students sympathetic to the lot of the Palestinians have been protesting and where the presidents of these institutions are now on the carpet for failing to label their protests as anti-semitic hate speech. The Anti-Defamation League reports a 388% increase in anti-semitic incidents over last year. And anti-semitism seems to be on the rise elsewhere, including in Germany, despite strong efforts to draw a line between itself and its anti-semitic past.
Free Speech and Anti-Semitism
Suddenly, we're back at the task of defining just where the line is between free speech and hate speech. Supporters of the work of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce are quick to point out that the "woke" ideology of many, maybe most, of American campuses has been hard on free speech. Despite calls for DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), anybody insisting there are only two genders, or that the recent focus on trans rights is coming to the detriment of gays and lesbians, or that there should be consequences to those failing to use the right gender pronouns are having a hard time of it. Now, say the rightists, they suddenly want free speech?
You can see how these issues bleed into one another. What are we actually debating here, one might ask, Palestinian rights, hate speech, or the fragility of American democracy? For that matter, how are we defining anti-semitism and is anti-zionism the same thing as anti-semitism? In my view we need to hold fast to the freedom to criticize Israeli government policies without being labeled either of those things, but I understand that this involves a judgment call at times and clarity can be elusive.
While I'd like to keep these issues apart and deal with each of them separately, I don't know how to do that. I cannot pretend not to see right-wing American politics overshadowing the hate speech question. Watching the coverage of the protests, and of the grilling of the presidents, I find myself feeling a sense of despair. Presidents Magill, Kornbluth and Gay were not being allowed to give nuanced responses to people demanding a yes/no answer. The assumption behind the questions is that the pro-Palestinian protestors are calling for genocide. Do you approve of genocide, and are you failing to protect your Jewish students from hate speech by not shutting them down? Yes or no, please.
The three women try repeatedly to resist what they clearly believe to be a reductionist question, one requiring nuance. They tried to defend free speech by drawing a line between speech that stops there and speech that leads to action, the old "crying fire in a crowded theater" argument. And in doing so, they came across as duplicitous. A quick run-down of the commentary shows that probably a critical mass of the American public found their responses reprehensible.
I have to ask. Are the "bad answers" - I assume you'll agree with me that giving a legalistic response when a moral one is expected isn't smart - the fault of the presidents? Or were they simply "overly lawyered," as some have claimed. Were they so concerned about not getting into legal hot water that they saw no choice but to evade the pressure to give a yes/no answer?
On the one hand, anybody taking the Israeli, or Jewish, side in this polarized debate is likely to rejoice at this turn of events. When testifying before the Senate Committee, when she was asked by Representative Elise Stefanik (R-NY) if students "calling for the genocide of Jews" ran counter to her university's rules, she might have said, "You're asking a crudely insulting question, Congresswoman. And shame on you for even suggesting I would approve of genocide. No, of course I don't approve of genocide. But as President of the University of Pennsylvania, I have a duty to uphold free speech, however obnoxious it may get at times." Instead, she responded legalistically, trying to get at that line between "just speech" and "speech leading to action." What the students were saying must be allowed, she implied, unless it turns into conduct. Then it can be considered harassment and dealt with accordingly.
Stefanik apparently saw an opportunity to go for the throat and it was downhill from there for the university president. Stefanik repeatedly insisted the student protesters were calling for genocide and Magill continued to draw a line between speech and action - and allow for free speech. This testimony will no doubt serve future students of communication as a clear example of the importance of social context: it's not enough to speak truth; you've got to know how the audience is going to interpret that truth. Magill behaved as if she were in an ivory-tower environment where philosophical discussions require precision and nuanced distinctions are valued. She failed to account for the fact that Stefanik knew how to play to an audience of people now prone to dismiss ivory-tower intellectuals as duplicitous and elitist. Just answer yes or no, dammit! What we saw played out was a battle between "just us real folks" and "the despised elite" that characterizes polarized America these days.
There are other views on the topic and I want to mention one in particular because it is part of the full range of the intellectual scene. There is no shortage of hurt and outrage by defenders of Jews and others who believe the level of severity of anti-semitism is underrated, on American campuses and elsewhere, and argue that the main point ought to be not free speech but the lack of consistency in what speech is actually protected. That is the perspective of the Ayn Rand Institute, for example, whose spokespersons, Onkar Ghate and Israeli libertarian, Elan Journo, would put the central focus not on free speech issue at all but on the hypocrisy of a class of leftist elites. One can see in this attitude the Ayn Rand argument that what the left is after is taking from the best and the brightest and giving to the rest of us, not letting the successful have what they have earned but spreading the wealth to all the "losers" among us. Jews, says Ghate, are now "winners" and thus the left is going after them. They have lost their claim to being a protected class. This take on things brings home the frustration successful people often feel when they sigh and say, "I just can't win for losing." I don't give much credence to this view, but this is no place to take on the Ayn Rand philosophy.
Some background on the Committee
It's worth looking beneath the surface into who was running the House Committee on Education and the Workforce. For starters, was headed by Republican Virginia Foxx, representative of North Carolina's 5th Congressional District. I recognized Ms. Foxx as the person telling that ABC reporter to shut up and go away when the reporter asked House Speaker Mike Johnson the other day about his 2020 election denial efforts. I know her as an ardent homophobe, someone who once called efforts to remember Matthew Shepard, the gay kid left to die on a fence in Wyoming in 1998, a hoax to foster the spread of hate crimes bills, which she has also opposed. She later retracted the hoax charge. She opposes abortion, even when performed to save the life of the mother. She is also a signer of an amicus brief supporting an attempt before the Supreme Court to contest the 2020 election. A Trumpist through and through, right down to election denying.
But Foxx was not the main voice on the committee. That dubious honor goes to Elise Stefanik, who tried, with considerable success, to tie the word "intifada" with "genocide." But as the Guardian points out, this is political dishonesty:
The first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s consisted largely of non-violent forms of civil disobedience. The second intifada of the 1990s and early 2000s saw a wave of suicide bombings that killed more than 1,000 Israelis and maimed many others. While segments of Israeli society were left traumatised, it appeared to fall short of the legal definition of genocide.
And genocide expert Omer Bartov, and Israeli-American professor at Brown, makes the case that intifada simply means civil protest, and there is no reason to think and act as if the entire Palestinian protest movement is populated by extremists with genocidal intent. That's why I put into Magill's mouth the words I wish she had spoken instead of assuming her audience would follow her distinction between free speech and bad action, and accuse her of being evasive.
One has to wonder if this isn't a clear example of the political right's efforts to hit back at what they see as the center of "wokism"? Elise Stefanik demands a simple yes/no answer to her "genocide" question, and mocks the presidents' legalistic answers. While most people are agreeing Gay should have found a way to avoid answering a moral question with a legalistic response, anybody who knows Stefanik's background story of expulsion by the university for supporting Trump's claim that the 2020 election was stolen, can be expected to wonder how much of this attack on her alma mater through its president might be very personal indeed. I know, I know. I sound like I'm condemning with speculative innuendo, but listen to the distain in Stefanik's voice as she follows up her original question and tells Gay what her answer should have been.
I said earlier that the attack on Israel by Hamas has now blown up and sucked Americans polarized into right-wingers and lefties into the mix. To see that played out, listen first to the testimonies of Jewish students sponsored by the Republican right wing, then to the testimonies of two prominent Jewish scholars. The former are almost guaranteed to make you believe Jews are not safe on American campuses; the latter are almost guaranteed to make you believe to cast out the three presidents is tantamount to surrendering the free speech debate to those who would shut it down for good. If nothing else is true, the fact that truth is not likely to survive in a shouting match is. Somehow we need to get back to calmer discussions of differences.
This brings us to the question of whether Magill and her two president-colleagues should be punished for failure to understand when to use nuanced reasoning and when to cater to the need for plain speech - and to what degree. Do they really need to resign their jobs? I think not. God help us if we are all judged by our weakest moments. Ten years before being pushed out of UPenn, she was dean of the Stanford Law School. And I am happy to note I am hardly alone in this. Both the Harvard Crimson and the Harvard Corporation Board have come out in support of Claudine Gay. Ditto for MIT's support for Sally Kornbluth.
Ironically, there is a plus side to this kerfluffle. A quick glance down the commentary to the reports of this event will reveal all manner of anti-woman and homophobic attitudes alive and well in America to this day, but they cannot hide the fact that women are now breaking glass ceilings. Just as with Liz Cheney losing her seat in Congress as the representative for Wyoming because she went out on a limb to take down Trump, these women are paying a high price for not "doing the right thing" as many people see it.
Dig deeper into the story and you see the three presidents being attacked on a more personal level, particularly Gay, who is charged with plagiarism in her dissertation, a charge I won't go into here, but you can follow up by clicking on the highlighted word "charged" in this sentence. Questions were also raised about the degree to which their universities were pro-Palestinian because much of their research funding comes allegedly from places like Qatar, a country clearly on the side of the Palestinian claims. I won't go into that, either, but you can read about it here and consider whether Qatar is being given a bad rap by people failing to distinguish between its support of Palestine and its legitimate interest in fostering scientific research.
Alan Dershowitz, not a person whose opinions I value much any more, but he has pretty much trashed her and I think his charges need at least a proper airing. But this is not the proper time to go after her. This is a time for sticking to the free speech issue at hand and not piling on with old grievances. If Gay was the wrong person, as Dershowitz claims, for the job of Harvard president, that issue can be dealt with in another venue where she can get a full hearing and others get to come to her defence.
I understand, by taking this position sympathetic to the presidents, I am going to disappoint some of my Jewish friends, particularly those for whom the recent wave of anti-semitism in the U.S. and abroad is especially galling. And as I said, even in Germany, where they have worked so hard to stand by Israel in recent years and insist on ridding any suggestion they could ever again harbor anti-semitism, it makes one weak in the knees to see that resolve begin to crumble.
I understand why some might want to insist it's time to stop what they see as hair-splitting. And, as I pointed out, there is real anti-semitism on these and other campuses in the country, and so far it has not being adequately dealt with. But I also see in the attacks on these three presidents an overreaction, a pendulum swing from too little to too much. And I see the potential loss of democracy as a real possibility and I believe the need to support free speech is critical in shoring it up against those now willing to dismiss it as too much trouble to maintain.
It's time, I think, to stop bashing elite universities and remind ourselves of the scientific and intellectual gifts they routinely give not only to the United States, but to the whole world. And it's time to give the three presidents some space. It's not for me to determine the fate of the three presidents. The level of support MIT and Harvard are giving their presidents indicates their horrible gaffe (giving a legalistic-sounding response when a stronger show of sympathy for Jewish fears was called for) firing them would be throwing the baby out with the bathwater, especially since they have all three recognized their error and apologized for it. Listen to the House debate over Resolution 927 today on whether Congress should to call for the presidents' resignations today (seriously? Congress wants to dictate their will to private educational institutions???), particularly to the strong case against the resolution by Jamie Raskin, which begins at about minute 28:48. Jamie Raskin says it better than I can.
Their fate is not in my hands. It will probably be decided by big donors threatening to withhold donations if the presidents get out of line. If it were in my hands, I'd say, "You blew it, ladies.... And now can we all get back to work fighting anti-semitism more effectively, having learned from this experience? And to the business of being civil to each other?"
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