CONVULSIONS ON COLLEGE CAMPUSES AND THE UPSURGE OF ANTISEMITISM
The re-emergence of antisemitism after decades of latency is extremely troubling. Its presence on college campuses requires special explanation.
It is no surprise that the war between Israel and Hamas is politically being played out in the American context. Recently grabbing the headlines was a Congressional hearing that grilled the presidents of three of our most prestigious universities. The centerpiece of the hearings was the aggressive questioning by Representative Elise Stefanik, a Republican Representative of New York, of Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Elizabeth Magill, the presidents of Harvard, M.I.T., and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. Their responses received wide and fierce criticism, primarily for not standing up to antisemitism. Gay and Kornbluth retained their positions. Magill was pressured to resign.
This volatile incident speaks to multiple layers of complexity. In the widest context, such hearings are political theater. It was an opportunity for election denying, MAGA Republicans, such as Stefanik, who won her congressional seat in the defeat of Liz Cheney, to augment her profile and rally her base. Whatever the content of this hearing, getting at the truth of what is transpiring on college campuses is secondary to the partisan political combat Stefanik's polemics, gussied up as inquiry, were intended to mobilize. We should not lose sight of the supervening reality that the purpose of this hearing was not the search for truth. Stefanik is hardly a champion of Jewish interests. Quite the contrary. She has been an advocate of the “great replacement theory,” the deranged conspiratorial notion that Jews, behind the scenes, are enabling the influx of immigrants to overwhelm America's white population, a cause that rallies the hatred of white supremacists. Charges of conspiracy are a mainstay of antisemitism, and no one concerned about the current outbreak of antisemitism should count Stefanik as an ally. She and her Trump-worshiping colleagues pose a dire threat to democracy, and again, this is the governing reality that needs to concern us most.
But if we can bracket its partisan purpose and examine the hearing itself, it reveals a great deal about the culture of contemporary elite universities. The presidents were broadly condemned when asked whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” would violate school policies. Their responses were some versions of “it depends” or “context matters.” It was those answers, tepid and legalistic, that aroused the rancor of those who felt that they were giving a pass to raging antisemitism in their midst. It brought down the wrath of super-wealthy donors who withdrew their funding, and political leaders in both parties.
Yet, it is my opinion that the presidents' responses were correct. How speech is employed, especially whether it is legally expressed, is a matter of context. The United States does not have preemptive hate speech laws. The First Amendment does not prohibit calls for violence, though it does prohibit threats and incitement to violence, but such latter cases do depend on the context and parsing of the discrete scenarios in which such speech is expressed. Private universities are not bound by the First Amendment, but the purposes of universities, private or public, should be to reach for the expansion of knowledge, and the liberal worldview has long held that giving speech the widest berth is an essential foundation of the fulfillment of that purpose. However, private schools that receive federal funds are required to protect students from discriminatory harassment, and that provision needs to find a place in college policies.
None of this is to say that the call for the genocide of the Jews, or any other antisemitic proclamations by students, student groups engaging in demonstrations, faculty, or administrators, is not deserving of the deepest concern and strident response by university authorities. Such outcries are despicable, and have no place in the college environment, nor do any other manifestations of ethnic or racial hate. In that sense, the presidents' responses, while correct, were inadequate. There was little demonstrative recognition of the character and depth of antisemitism.
I found illuminating a recent editorial by David French in The New York Times (12/11). It is French's contention that the presidents' failing was not they were wrong. Rather, they were done in by hypocrisy, hypocrisy engendered by a college culture that manifests double standards.
In the last several decades, in a well-intentioned effort to overcome multiple forms of racist, sexist, and gender prejudice, colleges have developed prescriptions to preemptively censor speech that allegedly will bring harm to those groups understood to be on the short end of power inequities in society at large. These initiatives have become demonstrative and play a notable role in shaping campus culture. There is a felt sensitivity about uttering the wrong word or phrase, discussing a specific topic, or rendering an opinion, in the classroom or outside of it, that will bring offense or some variant of hurt to an identified minority. It bespeaks an atmosphere of fragility that evokes caution. Speakers are shouted down, and guests are disinvited for holding the “wrong” views. In the age of the cancel culture, academics have been fired from their positions for uttering a single word or invoking a reference that has issued complaints from minority students claiming hurt.
This sensitivity culture has valorized particular words, and fetishized concepts that inform it. As I have written of elsewhere, society has engendered an entrenched tribalism, wherein people, including students, increasingly define their political interests through their racial, ethnic, and gender identities. Even espoused truths are formed through group identity in what is referred to in academic circles as “standpoint epistemology.” This enhances separation and parochialism, which among other things undermines an appreciation for those universal attributes and interests that people have in common. What divides us becomes more important than what brings people together. Such a view precludes a yen for mutual understanding, dialogue, and a peaceful resolution of differences. It sets the stage for inter-group antagonism, blame, finger-pointing and virtue flaunting by those pointing the fingers.
It is a preoccupation that spawns reductionist ideologies, salient among them is a fetish with power inequities. There are groups that hold power at the expense of those who don't. For many, this binary disjunction frames their worldview. Several things flow from this identitarian template.
First, overlooked is the reality that inequalities of power are existential to human relations. They are present in every human relationship and every encounter, whether explicitly or subliminally. As such, power inequity is something that we all need to manage as we work our way through life. When this reality is applied to racial or ethnic conditions, it has morphed into an ideology, the ideology that defines American history and current relations between disparate groups. It creates thick lines between the oppressor and the oppressed. In the current moment, when applied to race, this ideology has become fetishishized and claims to exhaustively explain white-Black relations.
All ideologies are shorthand and reductionist of realities that, under the surface, are far more varied and complex: whites have held the power and Blacks are ideologically construed to be without it, and in the current political moment this is all that matters. Among what is lost is the more promising recognition of what people hold in common across lines of difference. Such an understanding opens the door to dialogue and cooperation in place of conflict. As noted, it is presumed that Blacks are powerless, which not only denies a complex reality but is an assault on the dignity of Blacks. As the Columbia linguist John McWhorter maintains, the need to excessively protect African-Americans from even slight hurts assessed as racism or microaggressions is to treat them as weak and powerless. It manifests, as McWhorter notes, citing George W. Bush, “the bigotry of low expectations.”
I am not Black, and, as such, need to speak with due humility. But as my mentor, Cornel West, wisely noted, all cultures (and we may assume all racial and ethnic groups) are products of “radical hybridity,” Assuredly, people comprising recognizable groups hold certain characteristics and values in common. But no less a reality is that individuals in each group are distinctive from one another and hold differing values. Consequentially, when an ostensibly offensive opinion or word is expressed in the classroom or on campus, different auditors may have different subjective responses. Some may be deeply hurt. Some may dismiss it as the utterance of a know-nothing or fool and, as such, not worthy of a response. For still others, it may deepen a realization of what she is up against, the world she inhabits, and thereby engender better-informed responses to speak out against or rectify the realities she confronts. It may speak to one's resources and empowerment more than it plays into feelings of oppression and weakness. To assume that the spoken word will create a uniform response in all alike is an exercise in ideological group-think, and it is false. Again, it reinforces tribal separation and antagonism, and closes avenues for the remediation of discord. Not all Blacks are alike. Nor Jews. Nor others.
Along with the fetishization of inequities has emerged the fetishization of associated words and concepts that reinforce unproductive social dynamics. Among them, I notice the following:
Victim and victimhood. The term victim had become au courant in contemporary political discourse. To claim that one is a “victim” in the current context attaches to it an element of authority that the term does not merit. To be a victim is a condition and not a virtue. As one who has devoted much of my life to the defense of human rights, I concur that the experiences of the victim deserve an initial hearing and respect. But victimhood has a shelf-life, and if overextended, almost inevitably engenders blowback and resentment. And it is certainly not unknown that victims can themselves become victimizers. Victims deserve our attention and our sympathy, but it is a mistaken step too far to assume that victims by necessity occupy the moral high ground.
Philosopher Susan Neiman, whom I have cited in a previous essay, has noted, "Where painful origins and persecutions, were once acknowledged as in Frederick Douglass's narratives, the pain was a prelude to overcoming it. Prevailing over victimhood, as Douglass did, could be a source of pride; victimhood itself was not...Critical understanding can arise from powerlessness, but does it always do so? Few champions of standpoint epistemology would argue that it does. And, if not, can we allow the experience of powerlessness to be elevated to an inevitable source of political authority?... I would prefer to return to a model in which your claims to authority are focused on what you have done to the world, not on what the world did to you.”
We live in a time of competitive victimhood as a political power grab. To say the least, it is neither progressive nor redemptive. It makes for contentious and grim politics.
“Trauma” is a term that, in my view, is overused and misapplied. Needless to say, words change with use. In a Freudian sense, trauma denoted an emotional wound so severe that conscious resources were incapable of managing it. As a result, the injury would be repressed into the unconscious to manifest itself in lasting and limiting ways for the person so affected. Today, its usage has become far more casual, suggesting that virtually any offense or disturbance can be counted as trauma. It's an exaggerated and histrionic employment that conveys the notion that non-extraordinary encounters that are unpleasant engender much greater harm than is truly the case. It implies that people are more fragile than they really are, and those causing the offense are disproportionately at fault.
Related is the call for “safety” and creating safe spaces for students. Clearly we all wish to be safe from harm. But this aspiration appears to me to be overwrought. Life is inherently risky, and to assert oneself in the world requires that one receive responses, both those that flatter the ego and those that bring hurt in a variety of ways. It seems that the current call for safety in the classroom is a misplaced effort to shield students from experiences that require coping in the service of maturation and fostering ego strength. Disputation, argumentation, and confronting views that foster disagreement ought not to be construed as exacerbating vulnerability, but as the grist out of which one expands one's knowledge and strengthens one's opinions and convictions. In my decades of experience as a student, I cannot recall a single incident that jeopardized my sense of security or safety in the academic environment. On the contrary, the campus served as a partial refuge away from the harshness of the world. The call for “safety” expresses concern more appropriate for adolescents and children than for those garnering the strength to manage the difficult realities of the adult world.
The relevant point is that preemptive efforts by colleges to protect students from speech that students find offensive, in a word, censorship, has led to the backlash as it pertains to the plight of Jews on campus. In David French's aforementioned essay in The New York Times the problems the college presidents confronted, again, was not that that they got the law wrong. It was their hypocrisy and double standards when it came to which groups were protected and which were not. As he notes, “For decades now, we've watched as campus administrators have constructed a web of policies and practices intended to suppress so-called hate speech and support students who find themselves distressed by speech they find offensive.”
“The result has been a network of speech codes, bias response teams, safe spaces, and glossaries of microaggressions that are all designed to protect students from alleged emotional harm. But not all students.” This is where Jewish concerns become relevant. As French notes, “The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes.”
Part of the issue, no doubt, is that Jews are construed as nothing other than white and privileged, and in our age of simplistic binaries, members of the oppressive cohort. The question of the complexities of Jewish identity and the legacy of antisemitism, including as it has pertained to colleges, needs to await a more extensive essay and another time.
French's response is that a more equitable employment of censorship is not the appropriate approach, and I agree. No doubt, the role of college administrations in this era of greater identitarian sensitivity is not an enviable or easy one. Administrators walk a tightrope in a volatile minefield. What are the limits of offensive speech? What speech is, in fact, offensive? How is this to be determined – the subjective complaint of a student or students? Or, are there more objective benchmarks? How are university authorities to respond?
I veer away from preemptive censorship and toward more open speech, however offensive. This is not to conclude that speech is anodyne or harmless. Speech is often inchoate action and free speech cannot be absolute. Speech that is a threat crosses a line, as does persistent speech that morphs into harassment. Or, speech that is a direct incitement to violence. And, on campus, raucous speech intended to drown out a speaker should not be permitted.
Times have changed, but with respect to this issue, I have not. I adhere to several principles that I have always endorsed. Among them is that to be offended is not the worst thing in the world. Inhabiting an environment in which authority arrogates the right to tell us what we can say or not is much worse. Life is hard, and reality requires of us that we develop the fortitude to emotionally negotiate the slings and arrows that are inevitably cast at us. We need all to strive to be kind. But we need to be prepared when others are not.
I also adhere to the adage that the antidote to bad speech is not to prohibit it. It is rather more and better speech.
What's needed is a change in the culture and the climate of the university as we now find it: less orthodoxy and more openness. What's required is that our universities and colleges restore themselves to their noble mission of free inquiry, the exchange of ideas, the possibility of progress through the expansion of knowledge, a commitment to pluralism, and respect for the dignity of all.
I concur with your recognition that Stepanek was baiting the three elite university presidents into making an egregious error no matter how they answered. If they had replied that calling for Jewish genocide violates their codes of conduct, her next question would be: “What specifically have you done to remedy this situation?” No matter their reply, she would have castigated them as taking insufficent steps. Instead, the presidents remarkably tried to answer legalistically with: “It depends on the context.” A worse answer because it misread the politics of the situation. Their similar answers sounded uncaring, even dismissive, of the dangers to Jewish students.
As you note, the congressional hearing was aimed squarely at destroying the credibility of our elite universities by claiming that they are “woke” leftist oriented. Another talking point for the 2024 presidential election.
As for free speech generally on college campuses, there will always be a tension between permitting extreme or novel opinions to be aired and preventing violence or a hostile atmosphere. I don’t envy college administrators. At my college, Rutgers, one of the best speakers we had was Amiri Baraka (leRoi Jones) who was extremely controversial in the 1960s. In that case, the sponsoring administration made a wise decision. I wonder if he would be allowed to speak on a college campus today.
Another well thought out essay.
"...overlooked is the reality that inequalities of power are existential to human relations." Hi Joe. I am curious about this assertion. I hope you will say more about it in a future post. Thank you.