The Lack of Clarity and Courage in Higher Education

Statements and silence about events in Israel and Gaza

Veritas by NathanF

The day after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill penned an essay in which he referred to the victims of the attack as “little Eichmanns.” Churchill believed that the attacks were a “natural and inevitable” response to longstanding American foreign policy. As reported in The Guardian, he intended “to make the case that even those with innocent roles in a system bear collective responsibility for perpetuating it.” The essay initially went unnoticed but resurfaced in 2005, setting off a firestorm.

Churchill’s claim was offensive and absurd. As a public university employee, his speech was protected under the First Amendment. But outside of a tiny number of progressive voices in higher education, his claim was met with overwhelming critique. Most people recognized its patent moral failure.

One might have thought that last month’s Hamas terrorist attack on Israel would have registered similarly to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Instead, far more voices from progressive corners of higher education mirrored the tone and substance of Churchill’s essay, and fewer institutional leaders forthrightly denounced those voices.

In the News

One of the first stories to hit the news after the Hamas attack was a statement from 34 student groups at Harvard insisting that they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Harvard’s president initially ignored the statement before eventually condemning Hamas.

Leaders at other universities remained largely silent about the Hamas attack. Stanford’s president and provost highlighted a “general policy of not issuing statements about news events not directly connected to campus.”

Writing in the New York Times, Ezekiel J. Emanuel, vice provost for global initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, criticized some of the more limited reactions: “the timidity of many university leaders in condemning the Hamas massacre and antisemitism more generally offers the wrong example.” Emanuel noted that while colleges and universities face many morally vexed questions, this was not one of them:

The Hamas massacre is the easiest of moral cases. The attackers targeted and killed over 1,000 civilians. They killed babies and children, people attending a concert and people from Thailand, Nepal and more than a dozen other countries who could hardly be responsible for the decades of Israeli-Palestinian violence, as if that could be any justification. And then the same gunmen took civilian hostages, with the explicitly articulated intention to use them as deterrence and, if that failed, to execute them.

Other schools spoke more directly. A Washington Post review of colleges and universities in Washington, D.C., Maryland, and Virginia found that most of them strongly denounced the Hamas attacks.

University of Florida President Ben Sasse wrote an email to the Jewish community noting, among other things:

I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism. This shouldn’t be hard. Sadly, too many people in elite academia have been so weakened by their moral confusion that, when they see videos of raped women, hear of a beheaded baby, or learn of a grandmother murdered in her home, the first reaction of some is to ‘provide context’ and try to blame the raped women, beheaded baby, or the murdered grandmother. In other grotesque cases, they express simple support for the terrorists.

This thinking isn’t just wrong, it’s sickening. It’s dehumanizing. It is beneath people called to educate our next generation of Americans.

Despite statements from leaders like Sasse, the muted tone throughout much of higher education regarding the Hamas attack has differed markedly from past statements about other national and international events.

In My Head

As the summaries from Ben Sasse and Ezekiel Emanuel should make clear, the Hamas attack is in no way morally ambiguous or interestingly nuanced. Like the 9/11 attacks on the United States, it was an evil act that violated widely held norms of conduct.

This doesn’t mean that institutional leaders—including university leaders—should feel compelled to denounce the attack. I’m generally not a fan of institutional statements responding to world events, as they tend to generate more heat than light and rarely signal or lead to meaningful institutional change. There are, however, exceptions. A public statement may be warranted when, for example, prominent members of the community make outlandish comments that reasonably threaten the institution’s reputation, or when credible threats are made against members of the community. Circumstances like these make global issues more local.

But if an institution is going to weigh in on a national or global event, it should speak clearly. In the current context, it should condemn the Hamas attack without qualification. To be sure, such a statement should also express concern for civilians in Gaza and might urge caution in Israel’s military response. But nothing about Israel’s response should change the moral clarity of condemning the original attack. After September 11, 2001, the United States engaged in substantial military action that led to enormous loss of life, including numerous instances of civilian deaths from coalition airstrikes. Those actions can be criticized, but they do not make the original terrorist attacks any less evil.

At my school, Washington University Chancellor Andrew Martin addressed both the Hamas attack and the crisis in Gaza in his October 10 letter to the university community:

The violence perpetrated by Hamas against the Israeli people is beyond horrific; the terrorist acts we have been witnessing are nothing short of heinous. The depravity and inhumanity are simply beyond comprehension.  

The developing humanitarian crisis in Gaza is also immensely heartbreaking. Thousands of lives have already been lost in this conflict in just the past few days and I fear that this is only the beginning of what will be an incredibly painful chapter in modern history.   

There is an upside to statements like these that recognize the complexity of the broader conflict and lament the violence in all directions. It’s appropriate to mourn the loss of innocent life whenever it occurs and to urge caution against any action that will lead to additional loss of life. To return to the 9/11 comparison, public discourse in our own country would have been much healthier if greater attention had been paid to the human costs of the U.S. military response rather than simply a chorus of voices echoing its moral imperative. And contrary to Senator Lindsay Graham’s recent intimation that Israel could inflict any number of civilian casualties in Gaza, there is no act, no matter how evil, that justifies an unlimited retaliation.

My intuition is that statements recognizing the complexity of the broader conflict are made possible through ideological diversity within administrative cabinets (the university president or chancellor and his or her direct reports) on this particular issue. Rather than being an echo chamber that represents only one side of a complicated policy matter, these cabinets likely have senior leaders with conflicting normative intuitions about the Middle East. That means high-level discussions will acknowledge and grapple with multiple sides of a contested and complicated policy issue rather than presuming a clear right answer—in contrast to their approach to other contested issues where there is little ideological diversity at the top levels of higher education. Diversity of thought about the Middle East conflict—and diversity of thought more generally—is a good thing.

Still, the difference between the Hamas attack and the Israeli response to it matters. The reality of our world is that some actions are unambiguously evil and others are more complex. That doesn’t insulate actors in morally complex situations from blame or accountability, but it does require making distinctions between evil and moral complexity.

In the World

Today seems like a timely opportunity to highlight an important book by the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence. Rabbi Sacks argues that universal agreement about the illegitimacy of religious violence cannot be established by secular frames but only by appealing to the texts and traditions of the world’s major religions. He narrates key passages from the book of Genesis recognized by Jews, Christians, and Muslims and suggests that these passages establish, as Matthew Rowley summarizes: “(1) the radical implications that all humans are ethically bound in a mutual relationship of rights and obligations with God and each other due to the Noahic covenant; and (2) that all humans are made in the image of God.”

In a particularly apt comment, Rabbi Sacks notes, “You cannot stay moral in hard times and towards strangers without something stronger than Kantian logic or Humean sympathy.” If Sacks is right, then some of our universities may need to find different intellectual and philosophical resources to ground their institutional commitments.