The Great Academic Squirm

The protest season at universities usually crescendos just before commencement: The weather is balmy and most term papers are done, but what student or professor would wish to stay around campus during summer break if they did not absolutely have to? This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

In each case, students, faculty, and administrators participating in or supporting the protests assert that universities have a special obligation to take an institutional stand, separate and apart from what any of their members believe, say, or do as individuals.

Universities have reacted in various ways. University of Florida President Ben Sasse was firm and unambiguous; the administrations at Tufts and Cornell similarly refused to fold, and the students threw in the towel when they realized that their protests were going nowhere. Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia, accepted the demands, while the larger university vacillated between tolerance and crackdowns, ultimately having the police storm an occupied building. But some elite institutions—Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard among them—have chosen to end the encampments by offering disciplinary amnesty for nonviolent protesters, and promising to review investments in Israel, often through expedited processes.

The reality behind this last approach is a desperate squirm.

On the one hand, university presidents do not want riots in the quad, and they know that calling in the cops can trigger more extreme demonstrations by faculty and students. On the other hand, they are feeling the fury of pro-Israel alumni and donors and, after watching congressional hearings on television, have a healthy fear of being, as one might say, Stefaniked.

Their solution, however, is no solution, resting as it does on flawed practical politics, wishful thinking about the real animus on their campuses, and, most seriously, a misunderstanding of the moral concerns and values that universities can legitimately represent.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over, and in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next, while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.

The problem is that the appearance of caving is caving. If you tacitly tell students that violating university rules will bring no sanctions, they will do it again. The chances are pretty good that the students and others will see through the “we will look carefully at our investment decisions” dodge and come back, with more insistent demands and an awareness that the university lacks the gumption to suspend or expel them for setting up tent cities, blocking access to buildings, and disrupting study in libraries and dormitories.

The wishful thinking about what is actually going on is much worse. The brute fact is that many American universities and colleges, including some of the best, have seen a surge in anti-Semitism, including protesters mobbing students wearing kippahs and shouting that Zionists—that is, people who believe that the Jews deserve a state of their own—deserve death. Many Jewish students, as a result, feel unsafe and unwelcome, and university leaders have only rarely denounced anti-Semitic outbursts without reference to other forms of bias, thereby skirting the core problem.

The deeper misunderstanding of universities’ roles and moral standing, however, is the most troubling aspect of the Great Academic Squirm of 2024. Universities cannot claim and do not deserve some special status as arbiters of a moral foreign policy. After all, they are not, and have never been, paragons of moral virtue. Both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, universities with which I have been proudly affiliated over many years, in the past century had rabidly anti-Semitic presidents: A. Lawrence Lowell and Isaiah Bowman, respectively. They were accomplished academic leaders and architects of much of the modern university. They had academic vision, and they did good things for their institutions. They just also happened to be bigots.

Modern university leaders have recognized the sins of their predecessors and apologized copiously for them, but that is not the point. The lesson, rather, is that as individuals, they are probably every bit as fallible, albeit in different directions. They should aim for humility, not self-flagellation.

The students and faculty are even worse from this point of view. Nineteen-year-olds make good soldiers, but not good generals, judges, corporate executives, or bishops, for the excellent reason that their emotions and passions, noble or ignoble, have yet to be tamed by wisdom and good judgment. It was the best and brightest on our campuses who signed up for the original America First movement, after all, pushing for isolationism as the Nazis seized power in Germany. (Many, of course, more than compensated for the puerility of their collegiate political views by honorable service in World War II.)

Today’s students are no better or worse than their predecessors. They are, as befits their age, morally selective to a fault: Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago? Where are the mass demonstrations about the Rohingya, Sudan, the Uyghurs, the Syrian massacres, or for that matter the Chinese laogai penal-labor system or the prisons of North Korea? Or, in an earlier era, against Robert Mugabe’s murderous tyranny in Zimbabwe or the Vietnamese gulag after the fall of Saigon?

Presumably, students come to a university for an education, which implies that they need to be educated, which means that they are not, in fact, ready to make the deeper judgments on which society depends. They are high on passion, and, as interviewers have found, many of them are extraordinarily ignorant about the causes for which they are demonstrating.

As for faculty, reading the novels of David Lodge and Julie Schumacher—not to mention viewing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—would confirm the view that I have come to after 40 years in departmental meetings, that one should not expect too much by way of prudence and profound moral and political judgment from them, either.

There are sterling characters among the professoriate—heroic, self-sacrificing, and wise. There are a great many more who are simply passionately dedicated to a subject, be it broad or arcane, and just want to teach and research it and otherwise be left in peace. But in addition, there are the garden-variety intriguers, backstabbers, prima donnas, and bullies. There are also quite a few adulterers, predators, egomaniacs, and borderline swindlers, and even a sociopath or two. Some professors are experienced in the ways of the world; most of them are not, having viewed it with all the blessed autonomy and freedom from the constraints of politics or war that universities appropriately provide. They have no special qualification for the role of society’s conscience.

The university’s real missions are noble: education, particularly of the young, and the pursuit of the truth. The people engaged in that mission may or may not be the finest characters in the world, or have the best moral or political judgment, but the missions are of the highest importance.

It is the business of academic leaders to sustain their institution’s commitment to those missions, and nothing more. They have neither the moral standing nor the credibility in wider society for exceeding that mandate, or doing anything other than creating an optimal environment for learning and research, upholding the rules, and stewarding the institution’s finances.

The leaders of universities do not exist to pass judgment on politics, or twist their endowments into moralistic knots, or attempt to shape the course of American foreign policy. As individuals, they (and students, faculty, and administrators) may have something useful to say about politics and every right to do so. In their official roles, they should have none.

When educational leaders exceed their mission or, conversely, lack the courage to defend it resolutely, they will bring more discredit, more unwelcome political attention, and more turmoil upon themselves and their institutions than they already have. And however much they squirm today, the protesters will come back to make them squirm more tomorrow.