I certainly am not the only one hearing echoes of last winter’s Hamline University “image of the Prophet” fiasco in the cringy mumbo-jumbo coming out of the mouths of the presidents of MIT, Harvard and U Penn. And as much as everyone can see that the three Ivy League presidents were baited into it by congressional actors of rancid bad faith, the fact none of them could summon anything other than legalized corporatese to answer basic questions like whether students ranting about “intifada” is hate speech, equivalent to fat-shaming and misusing pronouns is smack-worthy of the gob-most.
I’ve avoided adding my .05 to the howling and posturing over the attack/war in Gaza, because it is very difficult to come up with anything that hasn’t been said a million times before over the past 2000 years. Additionally, my only “expertise” on the Israel/Palestine question comes from a winter and spring on a kibbutz in 1973, a time as a callow youth that I spent mostly as a hippie vagrant volunteer planting and picking grapefruit and chasing cute Long Island Jewish girls away from mom and dad for the first time. Not exactly deep academic endeavours.
If there is a foundational floor for any commentary here, on Ivy League quads or from extraordinarily well-bred presidents before Congress it should be that:
1: The October 7 attack was a checks-all-boxes terrorist atrocity … with an option to add that it was carried out by fanatical religious fundamentalists dedicated to the death of Jews anywhere.
2: The Israeli response while legitimate to a point, is far too broad to achieve its stated goal of destroying said terrorists “once and for all.”
Beyond that we can then satisfy ourselves with a discussion of the 800-pound nuance of Israel incinerating its moral standing with a civilian pulverizing operation designed primarily to — I’m just sayin’ it — keep Benjamin Netanyhu’s deeply corrupt, arch right-wing administration in power. An administration undergirded by … fanatical religious fundamentalists dedicated to sustaining a dehumanizing existence for Palestinians.
Point being that somewhere in there is an option for public verbiage more compelling than saying, it is “a context-dependent decision”, when asked if calling for genocide against Jews is hate speech on an Ivy League campus. As the kids like to say, “Oh, for f*ck sake!”
Hamline had to suffer international embarrassment before learning, there is a point where defering to any complaining interest group is counter-effective to insuring free speech for all. The cruel lesson being that at some point the adults in charge have to swallow deep, step up to the microphone and say, “No. That is not right. You are wrong.”
But we — and as we see they, meaning college administrators — live in a world that places proficiency with tortured legalese among the key criteria for prominent public positions. Never mind the way board room gobbledygook looks and sounds when it gets pushed out into public view and the conflict-addicted internet.
And it’s not that I don’t have some level of sympathy for an administrator’s position. Stroking the egos of donors is a full time job. But in the case of the three Ivy Leaguers who resisted admonishing anti-Jewish speech prior to their Congressional debasement, had they jumped in, mid-protest and told the demonstrators on their campuses that they were engaging in intolerable hate speech … they would then have been in the position of having to … you know … do something. As in punishment, or sanctions, or … something.
Go ahead and imagine where they’d be if they called in the campus cops to put an end to the “intifada” rallies.
And then there’s the question of billionaire donors inflamed by two bit maga politicians deciding who should lead our top universities. Oh well. Guess they already do.
On the small point of the college presidents’ response to the haranguing questions: It’s not that they “resisted admonishing anti-Jewish speech.” The Penn prexy was asked if a hypothetical statement violated the U’s harassment policy. Harassment, not speech. Being a lawyer, she accurately said context was key. Better she should have challenged Stefanik’s premise.
Turns out no one on campus had called for genocide of Jews. The chant in question accused Israel of genocide. Or, as Lambert put it, “fanatical religious fundamentalists dedicated to sustaining a dehumanizing existence for Palestinians.”
Were I not struggling to avoid my usual 2000 word rant, I would have added more about the three (quite sophisticated) presidents’ lack of strategy for dealing with such a bad faith actor as Stefanik, specifically the high likelihood that she was going to maneuver them into something that affirmed the usual MAGA complaints of “feckless, woke elites”.
1973? That’s your problem right there, old-timer. You actually have a sense of history. Even the supposedly educated youth of the ripening 21st century cannot follow the bouncing ball that far back . . . much less back to 1943. I happen to agree with what you’ve written here. I really really don’t want to have to live through election night, 2024.