The muted response from college and university presidents to barbarism inflicted upon Israel might not have raised eyebrows in the pre–George Floyd world. But since that time, “obligatory” describes the role of public figures, to include faculty and administrators, in taking a stand on this or that issue.
Academic leaders weigh in on transgenderism, the Dobbs decision, Jan. 6, fatphobia, and much else. Listen to the crickets on Hamas.
The Chronicle of Higher Education noticed. Earlier this week, academia’s trade publication reported, “The violence in the Middle East that began Saturday with Hamas’s surprise attack on Israel … has drawn a more-neutral response from significantly fewer colleges. After four days of deadly attacks and retaliation from Hamas militant groups and Israeli forces, just 14 colleges had responded to the violence, according to an unscientific tally by the Chronicle. And many of the responses walked a thin line concerning the increasingly complicated conflict — they called for all-around peace and encouraged members of the campus community to not only support one another, but also respect differing opinions.”
The idea of issuing endorsements and condemnations on current events would seem a rather bizarre prerequisite for running an institution of higher learning. But that is the world that they not only inhabit but created. And after creating this opinionated world, academics have decided they do not wish to live in it.
Not everyone, however, exercised their right to remain silent.
At Columbia, where a young woman attacked an Israeli student with a stick on Wednesday, professor Joseph Massad carefully chooses such words as “pogroms” and “collaborators” central to Jewish suffering to apply to Israel’s position vis-à-vis the Palestinians. Indulging this same tic-taunt, he posits that telling Hamas to stop taking Iran’s money “would be like demanding that the Europeans resisting the Nazi occupation during World War II refuse military and financial help from the white supremacist and apartheid United States, not to mention the racist colonizing regimes of France and Britain.” He hopes that the recent Hamas operation inspires “a permanent exodus” — yet another word loaded with meaning in the Jewish experience — hoping that Jews “may have finally realized that living on land stolen from another people will never make them safe.”
Dozens of Harvard student organizations, most but not all identifying as Muslim or Middle Eastern, reacted to the weekend carnage by jointly releasing a statement that started by saying they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.” Not since perhaps the Oxford Pledge has a student declaration inspired such off-campus scorn. Within a few days, five of the groups, including the campus Amnesty International chapter, withdrew support. After pressure, including from former school president Lawrence Summers, Harvard President Claudine Gay condemned the attacks while emphasizing that no group speaks for the student body.
“When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model,” posted Derron Borders, a diversity, equity, and inclusion officer at Cornell. “Let it be known the fight for Palestine against colonialism is a fight for the imagination that other worlds are possible, that genocide should not be accepted, and that people always have the choice of refusal and the right to resist. Free the land.”
One could not walk a majority of prestigious campuses in the United States wearing the red baseball cap favored by one of the two major party’s presidential candidate without receiving all manner of abuse. But professors, students, and administrators feel free to take the side that slaughtered defenseless young people attending a music festival, raped women alongside their dead fellow concertgoers, and dragged half-naked bodies around as though trophies.
This suggests the whole game of virtue signaling, in which one reflexively and loudly proclaims one’s position on a hot-button topic, has always relied not on morality but power. Some campus denizens feel free to embrace barbarian activity because the power on campus resides with people designated as falling in the “oppressed” category — no matter that people kidnapping old ladies and killing babies are not oppressed but oppressors. The silent others, as the informal Chronicle of Higher Education survey suggests, do not feel as free to publicly condemn the carnage.
This spotlights the topsy-turvy morality of American campuses. Speaking out on this or any other atrocity from thousands of miles away usually provides catharsis to the speaker but little relief to the victims. Still, in a world where everybody must loudly voice an opinion on everything, the silence says so much.
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