Should University Administrations Do Politics?
Sometimes. But it isn't necessary to help students organize, or respond to every crisis by taking a stand
In today’s post, I try to offer a different way of thinking about what many of us have taken for granted for decades: that universities are, and should be, expressly political places. Do you know someone who is struggling with this? Then please:
Although I am now an emeritus professor, I still get emails in my .edu account from the various offices in charge of social justice at my former institution. These student affairs officers are in charge of a university function better known to the public as diversity, equity, and inclusion, or DEI. Since the Hamas attack on Israeli citizens launched from Gaza on October 7, followed by days of lethal retaliatory violence from Israel, messaging from such offices across the country has shifted from its normal role of mediating identity politics on campus to supporting pro-Palestinian politics on campus. And this has pointed up a serious issue with the actions university administrators take in a political crisis: in the guise of caring for students, and defining the moral stance of the university, they identify all of us with political positions we may not share.
This time last year I was part of the audience for these messages. Now I see them with fresh eyes as an outsider looking in, realizing that over the years I became more or less inured to university administrators sending out very political emails. These statements take moral positions, and make assumptions about who the community’s sympathies ought to be directed to. While they do not actively suppress dissent, they send not-so-veiled messages about what viewpoints will be privileged on campus and which will be discouraged.
Often, university messaging simply describes what anyone who is an empathetic human being would normally think. But as the conflict in Gaza grinds forward, there are few unambiguous moral stances, and it has revealed some ugly things: for example, that Harvard University supports over two dozen pro-Palestinian student organizations, and that those organizations decided to support the terrorist attack on Israeli citizens only hours after it happened. University presidents issued statements, which then had to be walked back or reformulated; or have been criticized for not issuing statements condemning their own students’ pro-Palestinian events and activism. Faculty at Harvard have called on President Claudine Gay to “publicly condemn” outside interests who are doxing their pro-Palestinian students.
My take? Students do what students do, but all university administrations might want to take this crisis as an opportunity to rethink why they are involved with crafting the political life of a campus at all.
I want to stipulate a few things. The first is that, while I would urge people to read and think deeply, it is not necessary for anyone to take a public position on what is going on in the Middle East. Be angry, by horrified, hold your friends close—but no one has to sign a letter, make a statement, or post on social media. Literally no one in either Gaza or Israel is helped by this, and it is only 15 years of political life driven by social media that fools anyone into thinking that articulating outrage is the equivalent of activism. Most of the time it is probably better to be curious, and to be cautious about spreading unproven information and attractive rumors, particularly those that cannot possibly be backed by hard evidence in the early days of a conflict.
It is important to remember that every war now has a social media front, skilled internet soldiers working hard to stoke your outrage.
And yet people do take positions based on the sludge being pumped out by committed partisans and news mills dedicated to clicks, and usually positions that support what everything they believed prior to the crisis. Take the hospital in Gaza that took a direct hit on October 17, tragically killing an unknown number of Palestinians sheltering there: if you tell me what your politics are, I’ll tell you who you think is responsible for it.
Academic administrators issue political statements, either in public forums or in their classrooms. They don’t bring that dynamic onto campus, but they do legitimate the internet logic that we are all responsible for telling everyone where we stand. By doing so, they risk filling a space that ought to belong to knowledge creation with partisanship that can inhibit knowledge creation by, on the one hand, motivating irresponsible and uninformed speech, and on the other hand, making otherwise responsible and informed speech acts that are unpopular dangerous or unspeakable.
To be clear, I don’t think knowledge itself can or should be nonpolitical, and teaching can be dynamic when it invites very political texts and ways of thinking into the room. But that is really different from politicizing the classroom, or the university, itself. As a faculty member and sometime chair, I have spent several decades mostly ignoring administrative moralizing and social justice activism, but I also resent being defined by institutional statements I have not been consulted about.
This is why I was drawn to an essay by New York Times opinion writer Ross Douthat yesterday, about why wealthy conservatives have intensified campus culture wars while leaving the dynamic I have described mostly unchanged. The wealthy should, Douthat argues, stop bankrolling lavish fees for controversial, ultra-right speakers like Ben Shapiro, Ann Coulter, and Chris Rufo, events that provoke progressive students to high-profile hissy fits that “reveal” the lack of ideological diversity on campus. Withholding money also changes little: while some schools will be hurt by losing a donor, billionaire universities don’t really need billionaires’ money and won’t be blackmailed by it.
Douthat notes that in the current moment, Jewish mega-donors should also not respond to identity politics with identity politics because “neither Israeli nor American Jewish interests have a strong position in the inverted hierarchy that dominates academic discourse.” Instead, he argues, “You want your money to support a system where ideological diversity increases with every round of tenuring, where heterodoxy reproduces itself rather than being frozen in tokenism.”
Now, as a lifetime inhabitant of these places, the truth is that universities are far more ideologically diverse than any conservative seems to want to know. Nevertheless, Douthat asks his own allies to do better than make statements and furious gestures that are as hysterical, reactive and polarizing in their own way as the campus social justice organizing they deplore. Perhaps Douthat’s best insight is that “that real influence requires working with the grain of academic culture, not just seeking confrontation,” something the campus left might also contemplate.
Now is not the time to demand reasoned debate: passions, and anxieties, are high. But we do need to take note that the current crisis in the Middle East has revealed a pro-Palestinian campus left that no longer even pretends to care about Israeli lives. This has also reframed the pressures on student life administrators to care for students, not on the basis of their identities, but on the basis of their politics. And it is producing statements and communications about the current crisis that condemn Israeli violence and are squishy and amnesiac when it comes to violence perpetrated by Hamas and Hezbollah.
When we are talking about little kids slingshotting rocks at Israeli soldiers armed with automatic weapons, and families who can’t get through the crossing points to work or get medical care, fine. But when the lives of nearly 200 Israeli civilian hostages are at stake, and Hamas terrorists have gone house-to-house, systematically murdering people, the calculus fails to address a more complex moral reality of what Hamas did, and how it triggered a human rights calamity in Gaza. Look at the death toll over two weeks: 1200 Israeli civilians were killed outright, and 3400 were injured. And while it is impossible to know exact death counts now, in Gaza, at least 3,000 Palestinians have been killed and over 12,500 injured. Hundreds of thousands of others are on the move, or have remained in place, denied food, water, and medical care.
Yet those who were already identified with the Palestinian cause prior to this crisis, often as part of broader radical commitments to decolonization, don’t seem to want to grapple with the one fact we do know: violence on such a massive scale did not commence until Hamas, deliberately embedded in civilian infrastructure, decided to launch a pogrom with accompanying rocket attacks. It also ignores something equally important: that Israel’s entire reason for being is not just to serve as an economic homeland, but as a place where Jews could be safe from this kind of indiscriminate, hateful violence. If you don’t take these things seriously, you don’t understand much.
Most importantly, while it is not immoral for any university administrator or faculty member to take up the Palestinian cause, it is immoral to make an ideological alliance with a terrorist organization that has specifically and deliberately called down death and destruction on the people whose interests it claims to represent.
And yet, a small number of university personnel and students have willingly become the face of Hamas and its strategies, in the name of supporting “the Palestinian people.” And this was predictable. When universities cultivate offices and communications strategies whose sole purpose is to elevate progressives with the loudest voices, they will find themselves in such positions. Just the other day, I received an email in which faculty were instructed to address student distress over the current crisis by affirming their “feelings” not elevating critical discussion or facts. A second missive, from a different office, attached a set of so-called reliable sources, none of which were American or Israeli, and all of whom seemed to be Palestinian or Middle Eastern.
And this, in a nutshell, is why universities should not take political positions or establish offices whose main function is to teach progressive students how to organize and elevate their own views. First, instructing faculty to presume their students are traumatized and then plan their classes around it, substituting reactive, political conversation over the subject students are there to learn and breeding contempt for the idea that formal knowledge matters. Second, it is exactly the role of classroom learning to elevate facts and critical thought, and to show students that problems great and small can be solved without violence. Third, when faculty and administrators co-opt the campus conversation by force of authority, not to mention elevate propaganda and misinformation in a situation where it is difficult to access facts, they teach students to do that too.
Hence, it didn’t surprise me that Students for Justice in Palestine distributed flyers that celebrated the hours of terror and hostage-taking inflicted on Israeli civilians. Nor was I surprised by the manifesto produced by 24 Harvard student groups that held "the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence, "stating categorically that "the apartheid regime is the only one to blame." To characterize this as a nasty response to the biggest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust is an understatement; it is also excellent evidence that none of these student groups care as much about understanding the muddy terrain of politics as much as they care about expressing their ideological commitments and intense distress at the human rights catastrophe unrolling in Gaza.
I suspect that most academics and administrators disagree with me: in a well-reported piece by Nick Anderson published today in The Washington Post, many of these campus leaders averred that they had a moral obligation to make a statement, and do so almost immediately. But do they? Maybe—but in fact, once college presidents start declaiming about important political matters, they are foreclosing the more open, and messier, discussions, based in fact, theory, and critical knowledge, that universities are supposed to foster.
Once we are past this crisis, I would advocate for reopening many of the things we take for granted about campus political life. Unlike Douthat, I don’t think conservative donors learning how to play the academic game is the ticket. Left thinking plays an important role in the intellectual projects that flower in universities. But these projects can only be successful when students and faculty commit to seeing the world with clear eyes that are alert to messiness of the human world and its most complex historical, intellectual, and material conditions.
Want to learn about the history of political media from I.F. Stone to Donald Trump? Well, here’s the deal. Through the end of October, taking out, renewing, or converting to an annual paid subscription ($50) will get you a free copy of my recent book, Political Junkies: From Talk Radio to Twitter, How Alternative Media Hooked Us on Politics and Broke Our Democracy (Basic Books, 2023.) That’s right, free. When I get the sign-up notification, I’ll write to thank you and get your mailing address, and you should have your book in a couple of days.
What I’m doing when you aren’t looking:
Yesterday we went to see Nyad, the biopic about swimmer Diana Nyad and her quest to swim from Havana to Key West, something she finally accomplished in 2013 after numerous failed attempts. Low points? There is only so much footage of someone swimming that can hold your attention. High points? Ellen Burstyn as the narcissistic, vulnerable, dogged Nyad was utterly believable. I met Nyad back in the 1980s, and Burstyn totally nailed her drive and determination. Also, it is a lesbian buddy movie, not a story of psychotic murder or tragic romance, and Jodie Foster plays Bonnie, the other lesbian! At last, right?
Short takes:
According to David Maraniss and Sally Jenkins at The Washington Post, the charges that Congressman Jim Jordan (R,OH-04) ignored repeated charges of sexual abuse by team doctor have a larger context: Jordan abused his athletes regularly in punishing workouts designed to dominate them. “Whether on the mats or in the halls of Congress, as with his persistent yet futile maneuvering last week to win the speakership, Jordan’s dial is turned to the same setting: relentless aggression,” Maraniss and Jenkins write in an excellent and lengthy profile. “When Mike Schyck arrived at Ohio State as a prized freshman recruit in 1988, he was tested by Jordan in the wrestling room at Larkins Hall. As Schyck recalled, Jordan pursued him to the end of the mat, pressing him against the wall again and again, the freshman struggling to keep his balance as the pliant wall swayed behind him, until Jordan cut his legs out from under him and thumped him smack on his tailbone. Then Jordan pounced on him and pressed his chest against Schyck’s mouth, crowding it to where he feared he would suffocate.” But there is a really interesting story behind how Jordan became who he is—read it. (October 21, 2023)
Local struggles over immigration are often more complex than the rhetoric intended to outrage a national audience. Take Texas’s Republican firebrand governor, Greg Abbott. His dramatic policies on this issue (known as “Operation Lone Star”) include something he calls “catch and jail,” incarcerating undocumented migrants that would otherwise be registered and released by the federal government pending a court date far in the future. Abbott has used local trespassing laws, a strategy that has put him in conflict with some landowners along the border. “The state’s ability to charge migrants with trespassing hinges on landowners’ consent,” writes Benjamín Wermund of The Houston Chronicle. And one landowner, Beyer Junfin, has not consented; his lawyer has asked the state to stop making such arrests on the Junfin ranch, causing about 600 migrants to be released. Hence, Abbott is directing his allies in the Texas Statehouse to change the law. (October 20, 2023)
Some rank-and-file Republicans who have refused to be steamrolled by the extreme wing of their party have figured out what to do about it: head for the exits. As Matt Ford reports at The New Republic, “after the latest chaos on Capitol Hill—which has seen Republicans oust one speaker of the House and then repeatedly fail, in tragicomic fashion, to elect a new one—some lawmakers appear to have hit their limit on the amount of misery they’ll put up with to serve in Congress.” Not-so-quiet quitters include Representative Debbie Lesko (R, AZ-08) and Victoria Spartz (R, IN-05). In addition to the dysfunction and threats of violence, often from other Republicans, life in Congress just sucks. “The living conditions in D.C. itself are also hardly glamorous,” Ford writes. “Most lawmakers do not have the resources—or confidence in their own reelection—to buy a full-time home in Washington. Some just sleep in their offices.” (October 20, 2023)
"First, instructing faculty to presume their students are traumatized and then plan their classes around it, substituting reactive, political conversation over the subject students are there to learn and breeding contempt for the idea that formal knowledge matters."
Well said. And I wish this had been discussed more before the 2016- spasm of assuming students are "traumatized" by every election, court judgment, or foreign event.
As a free speech advocate I've been conflicted, both by some of the appalling statements made by various faculty members at different institutions celebrating Hamas, and the predictable demands that these people be fired.
And after a decade of seeing people lose jobs on campus for such things as saying "all lives matter" or clumsily phrasing an email, can academia (writ large) really send the message that saying "I'm exhilarated by mass murder" is ok?
It is a problem that these views are coming out, obviously from people who feel that campuses are an ok place to express them. A view they've been led to by, as you point out, the progessive-left message of official messaging. They're not saying this stuff expecting to get canned, but to get a round of applause. Because they've been saying it, for years, and got pats on the back.
I'd love it if institutions (and professional organizations) did stay neutral. Like you, I don't appreciate messages being sent out that I didn't get to read before they went up on the website, but are presumed to speak for me.
Possibly the most insidious effect of social media in all this is the message that "silence is violence". It's a moronic worldview, but one that many people took on board (or were harassed into going along with).