Free Speech
Campus Protests about Israel and the Palestinians (several updates)
This post is for discussion of the ongoing campus protests against Israel’s response to the October 7th, 2023 attack on it by Hamas, and in support of the Palestinians.
More than 34,000 Palestinians have been killed by Israel in its attack on Gaza, with two-thirds of the dead being women and children, according to the local health ministry, reports the Associated Press.
[original photo by Jay Janner/USA Today Network, via Reuters]
A round-up of recent news about protests at various college campuses can be found here.
Of particular interest are questions about how universities should (or should not) respond to these kinds of protests, and the principles, ideals, and practical considerations that underpin answers to those questions.
Details about what’s happening at your campus are welcome, as are links to news and commentary elsewhere, including links to particularly valuable social media feeds.
By way of background on the matter of free speech and campus protests, I recommend this piece by Jacob Levy (McGill). Some excerpts:
[U]niversities offer very robust protection for political and protest speech, but as an incidental byproduct, not in the same deliberate way that a liberal democratic society does. A university’s core commitment is to the discovery, transmission and preservation of knowledge – paradigmatically, what is done in research, in teaching, and in publication and library collection. The principle that defends that commitment is not freedom of speech as such, but rather academic freedom.
Academic freedom has a few moving parts:
First, the freedom to follow arguments and evidence where they lead, according to scholarly methods…
Second, the freedom to teach, within the confines of the scholarly mission of the class, and limited by the freedom of students to be secure that they will be assessed fairly…
And finally, freedom from evaluation on non-academic grounds, of which the traditionally most important are political and religious grounds. Members of the academic community are only to be academically evaluated, for purposes ranging from student grades to professors’ tenure, on the grounds of the success of their academic work. They may not lose academic standing (student enrolment, faculty employment and so on) for their views and speech on other questions. In the early 20th-century cases that helped shape this rule, universities came to the understanding that, say, an economist couldn’t be fired for being an atheist, a mathematician for being a socialist; what they had to say on those political and religious questions was irrelevant to their work. The technical phrase here is freedom of extramural speech – outside the walls of the laboratory, the classroom and the library. Protections of extramural speech are very strong, not primarily in order to protect that speech, but in order to protect the academic integrity of what goes on inside the laboratory, classroom and library.
A rule that has traditionally accompanied and strengthened academic freedom is institutional neutrality. If academic freedom is the ability of scholars and scholarly communities or disciplines to work without having an orthodoxy imposed on them, institutional neutrality is the commitment not to declare an orthodoxy in the first place. Just like a professor at the front of a classroom shouldn’t use it as a pulpit to announce their own political and religious views, so too should the university as a whole not adopt substantive political or religious opinions that would chill the freedom of its members to pursue their own ideas and arguments. A great deal of important political inquiry and debate happens at a university, but it’s undertaken by students and professors with differing views pursuing differing arguments, not by the institution as a whole declaring official conclusions…
These principles generate some surprising and strange outcomes. For example, the odd thing about the centrality of student protests to important moments in university life is that they are so irrelevant to the university’s mission. There is very strong protection for the freedom of protest, not because protest is important to a university the way it is to a democratic society, but because it’s academically irrelevant. It’s wrong to question a student’s (or professor’s) standing in the academic community because of what they say at a protest – or on social media, or in any other non-academic setting. The only appropriate limits are not about the content of what’s said, but about the conduct of the protest action; the university has to protect not only the safety of its other members but also the security of its academic functions. It can’t rule against the language on a sign, but it must intervene to prevent violence between students, or occupations and blockades that would prevent a class from meeting, or an invited speaker from speaking.
This is easier said than done…
I recommend reading the whole piece.
One thing to note is that the institutional neutrality Levy discusses is especially tricky, particularly in this context: one declared aim of some of the student groups is to get their universities to stop investing in companies involved in or profiting from Israel’s military efforts in Gaza. Should such investments themselves be considered a deviation from institutional neutrality, such that the student calls for divestment could be seen as a call for institutional neutrality? Or are such investments in principle relevantly different from what we might think of as paradigmatic departures from institutional neutrality, such as an official statement supporting a side in a political dispute? The details probably matter here, both on the extent to which investment in certain companies is intentional, and the extent to which such companies are “involved” with Israel’s war efforts.
And that’s just one issue.
OK, let’s see how this goes. (Comments are moderated. Please remind yourselves of the comments policy. Thanks.)
UPDATE 1 (4/25/24): The Department of Philosophy at Columbia University has issued the following statement:
The Philosophy Department is concerned for the safety, academic progress, and rights of our students. We condemn all forms of hate speech, harassment, and incitements to violence. We also regard it as quite implausible that erecting a tent on a lawn constitutes a clear and present danger, and we urge the lifting of suspensions of students whose charges stem from that act. Thus we support the joint statement by the Columbia and Barnard Chapters of the American Association of University Professors and the letter from the Columbia College Student Council. We want President Shafik to succeed, and for mutual trust between all parties on campus to be regained. Such success and trust requires visible engagement by the President and Trustees with the procedures of faculty governance.
UPDATE 2 (4/25/24): Noelle McAfee, professor and chair of philosophy at Emory University, was among those arrested for protesting at Emory.
WATCH: Among those arrested today were Noelle McAfee, Chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University.
I’ve asked for a comment from Emory on this arrest, no word yet.
This video provided to us by an #Emory PHD student. You can hear him in this video. @ATLNewsFirst pic.twitter.com/86aJgb7NUX
— Patrick Quinn (@PatrickQuinnTV) April 25, 2024
Thanks to several readers for bringing this to my attention. Original Tweet here.
UPDATE 3 (4/26/24): Sukaina Hirji, assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, gave a speech to protestors there. Watch it here.
UPDATE 4 (4/26/24): Caroline Fohlin, professor of economics at Emory University, asks three law enforcement officers who appear to be on top of a student protestor on the ground, “what are you doing?” A fourth officer grabs her, pulls her away, twists her arm behind her back, and pushes her to the ground. A second officer joins in pushing her down, heedless of the fact her head is being pushed into the sidewalk.
FULL VIDEO OF ELDERLY AMERICAN ECONOMICS PROFESSOR CAROLINE FOHLIN BEING ASSAULTED BY POLICE
She is an over 65 year old American woman.
Americans attacked for Israel.
What if this was your mother/grandmother? pic.twitter.com/ne7uDsPGIX
— Sulaiman Ahmed (@ShaykhSulaiman) April 26, 2024
According to news reports, she was charged with disorderly conduct and battery of a police officer. This guy:
The post Campus Protests about Israel and the Palestinians (several updates) first appeared on Daily Nous.
I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power
Following years of pressure from Israel lobbyists and British spooks, I was finally banned by Twitter/X. What does my removal say about Elon Musk, who flaunts his opposition to censorship, while promising to build an “everything app” where you could lose access to banking and messaging for violating dubious speech codes? On February 17, I was suspended from Twitter/X without warning. The cause was mass-reporting by Zionist activists I’d offended. My removal was justified on the basis that I violated […]
The post I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post I was banned from Elon’s ‘free speech’ X app for offending power appeared first on The Grayzone.
DHS Using Hamas to Expand Its Reach on College Campuses
The Department of Homeland Security is stepping up its efforts to penetrate college campuses under the guise of fighting “foreign malign influence,” according to documents and memos obtained by The Intercept. The push comes at the same time that the DHS is quietly undertaking an effort to influence university curricula in an attempt to fight what it calls disinformation.
In December, the department’s Homeland Security Academic Partnership Council, or HSAPC, sent a report to Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas outlining a plan to combat college campus unrest stemming from Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. DHS has used this advisory body — a sympathetic cohort of academics, consultants, and contractors — to gain support for homeland security objectives and recruit on college campuses.
In one of the recommendations offered in the December 11 report, the Council writes that DHS should “Instruct [its internal office for state and local law enforcement] to work externally with the [International Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators] and [National Association of School Resource Officers] to ask Congress to address laws prohibiting DHS from providing certain resources, such as training and information, to private universities and schools. Current limitations serve as a barrier to yielding maximum optimum results.”
Legal scholars interviewed by The Intercept are uncertain what specific laws the advisory panel is referring to. The DHS maintains multiple outreach efforts and cooperation programs with public and private universities, particularly with regard to foreign students, and it shares information, even sensitive law enforcement information, with campus police forces. Cooperation with regard to speech and political leanings of students and faculty, nevertheless, is far murkier.
The DHS-funded HSAPC originated in 2012 to bring together higher education and K-12 administrators, local law enforcement officials, and private sector CEOs to open a dialogue between the new department and the American education system. The Council meets on a quarterly basis, with additional meetings scheduled at the discretion of the DHS secretary. The current chair is Elisa Beard, CEO of Teach for America. Other council members include Alberto M. Carvalho, superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District; Farnam Jahanian, president of Carnegie Mellon University; Michael H. Schill, president of Northwestern University; Suzanne Walsh, president of Bennett College; and Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers.
In its December report, the Council recommends that DHS “Immediately address gaps and disconnects in information sharing and clarify DHS resources available to campuses, recognizing the volatile, escalating, and sometimes urgent campus conditions during this Middle East conflict.”
DHS’s focus on campus protests has President Joe Biden’s blessing, according to the White House. At the end of October, administration officials said they were taking action to combat antisemitism on college campuses, assigning dozens of “cybersecurity and protective security experts at DHS to engage with schools.”
In response to the White House’s efforts, the Council recommended that Mayorkas “immediately designate an individual to serve as Campus Safety Coordinator and grant them sufficient authority to lead DHS efforts to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia.” That appointment has not yet occurred.
The Council’s December report says that expansion of homeland security’s effort will “Build a trusting environment that encourages reporting of antisemitic and Islamophobic incidents, threats, and violence.” Through a “partnership approach” promoting collaboration with “federal agencies, campus administrators, law enforcement, and Fusion Centers,” the Council says it hopes that DHS will “establish this culture in lockstep with school officials in communities.” While the Council’s report highlights the critical importance of protecting free speech on campus, it also notes that “Many community members do not understand that free speech comes with limitations, such as threats to physical safety, as well as time, place, and manner restrictions.”
The recent DHS push for greater impact on campuses wouldn’t be the first time the post-9/11 agency has taken action as a result of anti-war protests. In 2006, an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit revealed that DHS was monitoring anti-war student groups at multiple California college and feeding that information to the Department of Defense. According to documents the ACLU obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, the intelligence collected on student groups was intended “to alert commanders and staff to potential terrorist activity or apprise them of other force protection issues.”
Mayorkas wrote on November 14 last year that a DHS academic partnership will develop solutions to thwart not only foreign government theft of national security funded and related research on college campuses but also to actively combat the introduction of “ideas and perspectives” by foreign governments that the government deems opposing U.S. interests.
“Colleges and universities may also be seen as a forum to promote the malign actors’ ideologies or to suppress opposing worldviews,” Mayorkas said, adding that “DHS reporting has illuminated the evolving risk of foreign malign influence in higher education institutions.” He says that foreign governments and nonstate actors such as nongovernmental organizations are engaged in “funding research and academic programs, both overt and undisclosed, that promote their own favorable views or outcomes.”
The three tasks assigned by Mayorkas are:
- “Guidelines and best practices for higher education institutions to reduce the risk of and counter foreign malign influence.”
- “Consideration of a public-private partnership to enhance collaboration and information sharing on foreign malign influence.”
- “An assessment of how the U.S. Government can enhance its internal operations and posture to effectively coordinate and address foreign malign influence-related national security risks posed to higher education institutions.”
The threat left unspoken in Mayorkas’s memo echoes one spoken out loud by then Bush administration Attorney General John Ashcroft in the months after 9/11, when the first traces of the government’s desire to forge a once unimaginable expansion into public life in America rose to the surface.
“To those who scare peace-loving people with phantoms of lost liberty,” Ashcroft told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, “my message is this: Your tactics only aid terrorists, for they erode our national unity and diminish our resolve. They give ammunition to … enemies and pause to … friends.”
The post DHS Using Hamas to Expand Its Reach on College Campuses appeared first on The Intercept.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis – review
In Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis, Alberto Toscano unpacks the rise of contemporary far-right movements that have emerged amid capitalist crises and appropriated liberal freedoms while perpetuating systemic forms of violence. According to Dimitri Vouros, Toscano’s penetrating, theoretically grounded analysis is an essential resource for understanding and confronting the resurgence of reactionary ideologies.
Late Fascism: Race, Capitalism and the Politics of Crisis. Alberto Toscano. Verso. 2023.
Observing the leftwing populism that emerged after the 2007 financial crash, a perceptive critical theorist may have predicted that this hope-inspiring movement would quickly be reintegrated into the neoliberal order. They might further have predicted that a counter-revolution would arise in the vacuum left by the failed leftist movement and as a reaction to continuing economic difficulties. Indeed, in the last decade the rise of the populist right has been both steady and near universal.
[Toscano] sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe
In Late Fascism, Alberto Toscano, who has been instrumental in the resurgence of Marxist and materialist sociocultural analysis over the past twenty years, offers an important theory of fascism for our current historical juncture. He sets out to explain why the spectre of the extreme right is not merely haunting us, but gaining political purchase across the globe. The measured, lapidary style of Toscano’s argument, which draws on the 20th century’s “rich archives” of antifascist thought (155), most of it Marxist or marxisant, treats the deep, structural aspects of the political often ignored by other analyses. He does this by leaning on a style of literary-philosophical excavation and elucidation more often found in classical critical theory like that of Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin.
One of the marks of fascism is to amalgamate seemingly incompatible positions. Indeed, it is a complex phenomenon, “scavenging the ideological terrain for usable materials”, including many currents on the left (155). Toscano does not follow mainstream political theory in conflating fascism with totalitarianism, command economies, and brute force. He argues that late fascism is “disanalogous” with historical fascisms. Instead, he focuses on the implicit forms of violence and repression – colonial, racial, sexual, and gender-based – that inform late fascism. This kind of hidden violence becomes especially noticeable, and acute, when capitalism faces financial and other crises.
As well as developing the idea that reactionary ideologies emerge out of capitalist crisis, notably as the co-option of working-class movements by the right as soon as the opportunity arises, Toscano notes the role capitalist exchange relations play in the epistemological foundation of fascist-adjacent ideologies. Yet the most original thesis in the book is that the touted freedoms of liberalism and free-market capitalism are also appropriated by late fascism. In fact, late fascism is only nominally attached to liberal ideals such as “individual action” and “free speech”. Its claim to be on the side of the individual and their political agency is clearly false, its objective really being to reproduce prior forms of subjection and create new forms of subjugation. Jessica Whyte has also suggested a similar dissimulation in the neoliberal support for human rights.
The rapid rise of this ideology may also be tied to online culture, although Toscano avoids elaborating on the political ramifications of this development. Instead, he gives a historical outline of classical Marxist arguments against reactionary thought and movements. As the subtitle of his book indicates, understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism. Toscano writes, “Whoever is not willing to talk about anti-capitalism should also keep quiet about anti-fascism” (158). Yet understanding fascism as a tendency within capitalism that merely continues what critical theory calls “identity thinking” is part of a critical venture “inseparable from the collective forging of ways of living that can undo lethal romances of identity, hierarchy and domination that capitalist crisis throws up with grim regularity” (158).
Understanding the ideology of the far right must include a theory of the systemic reproduction of colonialism, racism and sexism
Four key ideas explain late fascism. Firstly, it “cannot be understood without the “fascisms before fascism” that accompanied the imperialist consolidation of a capitalist world-system”, namely, the political and economic domination of the world by Europe, peaking in the 18th and 19th centuries, made possible by the material exploitation of its various colonial strongholds. Secondly, it can only be understood “across axes of race, gender and sexuality”. Thirdly, it includes the “desire for ethnonational rebirth or revanche stoked by the imminence of a threat projected as civilizational, demographic and existential”. Lastly, it involves “the production of identifications and subjectivities, desires and forms of life, which do not simply demand obedience to despotic power but draw on a sui generis idea of freedom” (156-57). These four aspects of late fascism are developed in some detail with a breadth that will satisfy anyone interested in the history of antifascist thought and resistance.
Each chapter provides a different window onto the ideology of fascism and explains why understanding it is imperative. The first chapter looks at the temporally destabilising aspects of fascist ideology, with its archaisms, anachronisms, and wrong-headed projections of majestic, uncorrupted futures. The second focuses on the dynamics of capitalism and race, mainly how the Black liberation struggles of the 1960s provide a template for understanding the racial nature of capitalism, with its continuing repression of minorities and punitive carceral system. The third chapter provides an overview of how the populist right appropriates the classical liberal understanding of individual freedom and toleration for its own purposes. It inverts such individualism, supporting the dominant narrative of equality; namely, the freedom to accumulate property and social power (the latter being skewed along racial and sexual lines, ie, white, male or heteronormative).
The fourth chapter, the most difficult, looks at the political subterfuge manifested by the “real abstractions” within a totalised exchange society. The references to Alfred Sohn-Rethel and Henri Lefevbre are especially illuminating. These latter two authors argue that capitalist ideology views everyday social relations upside down, as first pointed out by Marx in his theory of commodity fetishism and alienation. The central point is that the ends of capital and profit are prioritised over labour, the labourer being merely a commodity on the market, and ensuring capital accumulation.
Toscano demonstrates how the ‘scavenger ideology’ of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger.
The fifth chapter deals again with temporality but this time through the philosophical understanding of “repetition”. Toscano singles out and censures Martin Heiddeger’s fundamental ontology”, which is concerned with “being” and the naturalised historical subject, as leading to a reactionary, “counter-revolutionary” politics. Toscano demonstrates how the “scavenger ideology” of fascism, which draws on Romanticism, political decisionism, a fascination with technology, and even socialism, is a pressing danger. This danger is magnified by its ability “to weaponise a kind of structured incoherence in its political and temporal imaginaries, modulating them to enlist and energise different class fractions, thereby capturing, diverting and corrupting popular aspirations” (110).
Based on a reading of the writings of the Italian Germanist and mythologist Furio Jesi, the sixth chapter deals with the far right’s version of the philosophy of religio mortis, a fascination with myth, sacrifice, and death, but updated for a technological (and now digital) era. Drawing on the idea of a “micropolitical antifascist struggle”, as found in the works of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, the last chapter deals with the ambivalent erotics of fascist ideology, arguing that the libidinal introjection of violence reinforces various forms of social power. Here, Toscano also draws on the feminism of Maria Antonietta Macciocchi, claiming that the Nazi “antipolitical politicization of women” (148) resonates with current modalities of “fascist feminism” that seek “to violently secure and affirm a normative, if not necessarily heteropatriarchal, figure of woman, and which invests desire and libido in its narratives about the imminent threat of the erasure of women and even feminism by ‘gender ideology’ and ‘transness’” (150).
Toscano’s archaeology of 20th-century antifascist theory is an essential springboard for understanding the current political moment. It is a boon for those thinkers and activists interested in human emancipation and the struggle for real, rather than merely abstract, freedom. It alerts them to the threat posed to such projects by that deeply prejudicial ideology that arises alongside capitalism in crisis – late fascism.
This post gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Image credit: Alexandros Michailidis on Shutterstock.
Speech, Campuses, Antisemitism (guest post)
“If we don’t resort to censorship, we need to think more about the responsibilities of all actors involved with this difficult speech… This suggests an important role for colleges: helping students to exercise these responsibilities rather than simply trying to control them through speech codes.”
In the following guest post, Adam Omar Hosein, associate professor of philosophy and affiliate professor of law at Northeastern University, discusses how universities need to protect free speech while developing an “ethics of speech” that articulates the responsibilities of students, faculty, and other members of the university community.
It is part of the ongoing series, “Philosophers On the Israel-Hamas Conflict“.
Speech, Campuses, Antisemitism
by Adam Hosein
It’s clear that something was lacking in the congressional testimony of the three university presidents. They were quite right in their claims that standard campus speech codes, as well as the related First Amendment doctrine, protects the expression of odious, even horrifying ideas. And I think that these protections are necessary. Yet their remarks were insufficient. Just because a university formally protects speech doesn’t mean it is a healthy community of equals. We need an ethics of speech that goes beyond just legalistic formal protections.
What I want to do here, in a very preliminary way, is start a conversation about what this ethics might look like, for speakers, listeners, and institutions. I will suggest that part of why the presidents struggled is that there are in fact some hard, underexplored issues about how to respond to difficult, contested forms of speech on a campus, including speech that some want to label antisemitic. But rather than being purely defensive about higher-education, we should ultimately make clear that campuses are one of the few places in society where a valuable discussion of the issues can still take place, if appropriate measures are taken.
First, a brief reminder of the speech at stake. Despite Elise Stefanik’s disingenuous questions, campuses have not seen direct calls for a genocide against Jewish people. What we have seen is much more complicated: the use of phrases such “From the River to the Sea,” “Globalize the Intifada,” and “Free Palestine.” These phrases do not directly refer to violence, but count as “difficult speech” because some students associate them with liberation while others associate them with dangerous, even genocidal threats.
For example, “From the River to the Sea,” can be read simply as a call for liberation for Palestinians within the space between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean, especially for self-determination within the 1948 borders, or it can be read as a call to remove Israelis from that space, through either violence and expulsion. “Intifada” is most associated in the popular consciousness with the violence of the Second Intifada. But the word itself has a more complicated history: the Arabic word “Intifada” means (roughly) “shaking off,” and in the context of Palestinian resistance it can also be associated with, say, the non-violent student protests of the 1980s. A lot also turns on how we understand “globalize”: whether it means rally worldwide support for Palestinian resistance or (on the most disturbing possible reading) conduct violent uprisings worldwide.
Perhaps you think it is naïve to complicate the interpretation of the phrases and that some or all should all be banned on campuses. In that case, consider those who feel threatened by unqualified support for Israel on campuses, which they read as indifference to the death of Palestinians or indeed as an endorsement of ethnic cleansing and potential genocide. Should all of this speech be banned? In the end, I think even-handed protections for speech will be to the advantage of all sides in these debates.
If we don’t resort to censorship, we need to think more about the responsibilities of all actors involved with this difficult speech. The most basic problem arises from the fact (which I’ve explained at greater length in earlier, co-authored work) that neither criticism of Israel nor anti-Zionism is necessarily antisemitic but each can be antisemitic. For example, some anti-Zionism is motivated by the view that under present conditions equality for Israelis and Palestinians can only be achieved within a single, pluralist state. But anti-Zionism can certainly be antisemitic as when, for example, it is motivated by animosity towards Jewish people, reflects stereotypes that Jewish people uniquely cannot be trusted to wield state power, or is expressed through tropes about Jewish perfidy. Likewise, criticisms of Israel can be legitimate condemnations of particular policies, but can also involve problematic stereotypes and so on. For instance, observe how easily some people move from discussing the “pro-Israel lobby” to “the Jewish lobby,” even though there are many Jewish people who are critical of Israel or are anti-Zionist, and a substantial amount of U.S. support for Israel comes from evangelical Christians.
These distinctions create responsibilities on the part of speakers and listeners in debates about Israel. Speakers should consider why certain words or phrases might reasonably, or at least understandably, be understood or felt as threatening or hurtful by fellow members of their community. That includes taking into account the full history of violence against Jewish people as well as present day rising hostility. Speakers also need to ask whether there is any special value in phrasing or presenting things a particular way and whether an alternative form of expression would do just as well. For example, before making Holocaust analogies, it is important to consider how fresh the memory of the Holocaust is in many Jewish communities, the “psychic familiarity” to many Jewish people of the Oct. 7th violence, and the fact that alternative analogies are surely available. Whichever phrases anti-Zionists use to rally their cause, it’s important for them to make clear that they equally value Israeli life and what they think peaceful co-existence might look like. Listeners need to consider the full range of goals that speakers may be pursuing. They should ask, for instance, whether everyone with a Palestinian flag is in fact aligning themselves with Hamas. And they too should consider the broader context, including the fact that the U.S. is not a passive observer to the war in Gaza but a major funder of Israel’s military operations and the key veto to U.N. ceasefire efforts. So protestors have important reasons for actions in the U.S. in particular that aren’t about targeting Jewish students.
This suggests an important role for colleges: helping students to exercise these responsibilities rather than simply trying to control them through speech codes.
A relatively straightforward task of this role during the present conflict is making sure that everyone is clear on the core facts by, for instance, dispelling conspiracies about the attacks of Oct. 7th, and making clear the full scale of civilian deaths and infrastructure destruction in Gaza. That includes emphasizing in a range of classes the importance of media literacy and good information.
In the longer-term, discussions of antisemitism shouldn’t only come up when there is war in the Middle East: students should be aware of the history of antisemitism as well as contemporary trends including not just left-wing antisemitism but ring-wing conspiracies that plausibly pose the greatest threat to Jewish people in the U.S., such as the “Great Replacement Theory” echoed by Stefanik. And while I have been focused on antisemitism, there is also of course also crucial work to done be in education around Islamophobia, including the long and distinctive history of anti-Palestinian racism. There have already been important efforts on colleges to ensure that students are exposed to teaching about racism and that teaching ought to include discussions of antisemitism and Islamophobia. My own class this semester in the philosophy of race, for instance, included a week on each of these topics, as well as a walking tour to discuss Jewish and Black history in the city, superbly led by a colleague in Jewish Studies. (All of this was planned long before October 7th.) The relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is not the place to start a conversation, but something to consider after establishing a shared understanding of the full range of forms of antisemitism.
In addition to educating, colleges can also help students fulfil their responsibilities by modelling how to engage in debates about the Middle East in a manner that is empathetic, well-informed, and so on. For instance, faculty panels can be organized that are likely to draw students from across the political spectrum and conducted in places, like large dorms, that are easily accessible to students.
Work of this kind is hard and takes time but is of course already being done by many dedicated faculty and staff members. While media attention has been almost exclusively focused on campus failings, campuses are in fact one of the few places in society with the speech protections and intellectual resources to frame lively but respectful disagreement. It’s time to use those strengths and trust what our students are capable of if we provide them with the necessary tools and support.
The post Speech, Campuses, Antisemitism (guest post) first appeared on Daily Nous.
Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis
Lawsuits accusing top US universities of harboring antisemitism all originate from one source: a corporate law firm that fielded the pro-settler ex-US ambassador to Israel, and which was registered as a foreign agent of an Israeli principal as recently as 2021. The firm now represents professional Israel lobby activists posing as victimized “Jewish students” and seeking to crush the free speech rights of Palestine solidarity activists. The fallout from December 5 House Committe on Antisemitism hearings has already cost University […]
The post Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis first appeared on The Grayzone.
The post Registered Israeli foreign agent driving contrived campus antisemitism crisis appeared first on The Grayzone.
The Appropriateness of Appropriateness
A journal’s editorial team conditioned the acceptance of an article on the removal of two footnotes they said were “distracting,” its author reports. Distracting how? The author thinks the editors judged the footnotes to be salacious, and thus inappropriate for the journal, though it’s not clear that was their reasoning.
Among the questions the episode raises are: How do norms of appropriateness function in editorial judgments? How ought they?
The journal in this case is Mind, the author is Florence Ashley (University of Alberta), and their article, recently published—sans the footnotes in question—is “What Is It Like to Have a Gender Identity?” Here’s an excerpt from the abstract:
By attending to how people speak about their gender, we can find diverse answers to the question of what it is like to have a gender identity. To some, it is little more than having a body whereas others may report it as more attitudinal or dispositional—seemingly contradictory views. In this paper, I seek to reconcile these disparate answers by developing a theory of how individual gender identity comes about.
And here are the footnotes that, Ashley reports, the editors insisted be removed in order for the paper to be accepted (skip if you’re offended by vulgarity, mentions of surgery, references to genitalia, or puns):
Ashley said in a message that the footnotes were questioned during the peer review stage, adding:
I wrote a substantive defense in my response to reviewers. Eventually, they made it clear that the only thing standing in the way of official acceptance was removing the footnotes and that they wouldn’t publish the paper with them. The official reason was that they were distracting, but it is difficult for me to see it as anything other than prudishness.
Ashley also expressed a concern that there’s a risk of “stifling” discourse when “what is considered improper is one of the better ways to make a point, which may happen more in subfields relating to gender and sexuality.”
According to Mind‘s editors, Lucy O’Brien (UCL) and Adrian Moore (Oxford), the editorial team has a policy of not publicly commenting on its editorial work in relation to specific papers. It’s a reasonable policy, but what it means is that we do not have their side of the story. So it’s quite possible that salaciousness was not the issue at all. Maybe they were concerned that the lightheartedness of the notes was disrespectful for such a sensitive topic. Maybe they deemed the notes’ relevance to the paper’s central argument too tenuous. Maybe they hate puns. While we may be Mind readers, we are not mind readers, so the bottom line is that we don’t know for sure.
In any event, the point of this post is not to condemn the editors. Even if we assume Ashley is correct in their interpretation of the decision, an editor making judgments in accordance with a sense of appropriateness that differs from the author’s is not necessarily objectionable. Were an editor to, for example, insist as a condition for an article’s publication that an author remove from it a racist joke possibly relevant to but unnecessary for the author’s argument, most of us would think the editor is acting well within their rights.
Better than condemning anyone involved in this would be to getting a grasp of the variety of cases in which something like a moralistic or aesthetic sense of “what is appropriate for this journal” is plausibly the explanation for suggested or required revisions of a manuscript. Does it happen a lot or a little? Is it more or less common in certain subfields of philosophy or on certain topics? Has it happened to you?
Then we might be in a better position to assess under what conditions, and to what extent, such editorial pressure is (or is not)… appropriate.
The post The Appropriateness of Appropriateness first appeared on Daily Nous.
Lang on Academic Freedom
Gerald Lang (Leeds) has a thoughtful discussion of academic freedom, prompted by the UK government’s appointment of a “free speech tsar” (who happens to be Cambridge philosopher Arif Ahmed), over at the PEA Soup Blog.
[photographs by Gerald Lang]
It’s part of a new series at PEA Soup of philosophical discussions on current events.
I appreciated Professor Lang’s consideration of the complex, interacting factors relevant to thinking about, for example, activities that are labeled as “no platforming.”
Here’s an excerpt:
The management teams in universities preside over communities that must be willingly cooperative and reasonably harmonious if they’re to get anywhere in the activities of teaching, learning, and research. We all have to be steering together in the same direction. The ideal of an academic community, after all, is not fundamentally deferential. The ultimate aim must be to allow us to see things for ourselves, rather than blindly deferring to authorities because that’s what the authorities have instructed us to think. But the institutional complexities and realities of university life make us all too aware of hierarchies and asymmetries of power: there are relations of vertical authority wherever you look.
There must be ways of curbing these asymmetries and fostering academic community. One obvious way of doing this is by listening to students. And that may give us some sort of case for acquiescing to students’ (and in some cases, also faculty’s) demands for the no-platforming of certain speakers, if it is seriously alleged that their presence on campus would lead to feelings among audiences of unsafety or ostracism or the conviction that they have been shown gross disrespect. The refusal to go along with these demands may increase disaffection among students and some faculty, thereby making it less likely that these individuals will engage productively and willingly with others in the academic community. If their complaint is that these invitations make them unsafe, one underlying concern may be that they don’t feel sufficiently valued as members of a community that in some sense makes collective decisions about whom they can profitably engage with. If their expressions of distaste or anger about speakers aren’t heeded, they may be more likely to conclude that they count for less. We should avoid this sort of situation if we can.
These dynamics are part of university life, and it is sensible to expect there to be some give and take. Not every battle has to be fought, and not every hill has to be died on. One thing we should note, though, is that the proper management of these issues isn’t fundamentally concerned with competence or the maintenance of intellectual standards, and it can’t be understood simply as a corollary of selectivity. At bottom, these issues present us with a trust exercise, an invitation to engage in quid pro quos and sensible management of potential conflicts among management, faculty, and students.
There are limits to this sort of accommodation, however. The ideas we’re exposed to in higher education should be capable of surprising us or making us uncomfortable. And that friction shouldn’t be unwelcome. (This is a familiar enough point from Mill’s On Liberty: how could it fail to be relevant to what we do in universities?) If these ideas disturb our worldview, we’re not entitled on those grounds alone to banish the speakers who espouse them, even if we think their ideas and arguments fall short. How do we distinguish, then, between unsafety and discomfort? Mere hostility to certain ideas or the speakers associated with them won’t be enough, because it won’t in and by itself discriminate between the feelings of unsafety we should be taking seriously and the feelings of wider intellectual discomfort we all need to put up with. We may know how we feel and what we think, but the significance and implications of those feelings and thoughts aren’t always luminous. More, then, will often need to be said before final decisions can be taken.
The post includes a response from Robert Simpson (UCL).
I’ve closed comments here to encourage people to go over to PEA Soup to read the whole post and discuss it there.
The post Lang on Academic Freedom first appeared on Daily Nous.
Five recommended reads for Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday 2023
As we approach Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday 2023, Alex Mayhew, Assistant Professor in Modern European History at LSE, and an expert on the history of the First World War, shares a reading list of five books that explore the commemoration of war in Britain and beyond.
As we near Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday, the commemorative ceremonies have become a cause for debate once more. This time, however, the discussions do not focus solely on well-worn questions about their meaning, nor on the political messages that might underpin wearing poppies or the two-minutes silence. They emerge from divergent responses to a conflict of a much more immediate nature. Rishi Sunak feels that any demonstrations would be “provocative and disrespectful”. In contrast, whilst protests can undoubtedly create difficulties, several historians have noted that demonstrations demanding a ceasefire – ultimately, cries for peace – “can be seen as closely related to some of the most established historical traditions of the day. An Armistice is literally a ceasefire – albeit of a complex variety.” It would appear that other organisations, from the Western Front Association to the Metropolitan Police, agree – or, at least, believe in privileging freedom of speech and the right to protest.
Several historians have noted that demonstrations demanding a ceasefire – ultimately, cries for peace – ‘can be seen as closely related to some of the most established historical traditions of the day. An Armistice is literally a ceasefire – albeit of a complex variety.’
We should remember that practices of commemoration are invented. Illustratively, it was only after the fiftieth anniversaries of the D-Day landings, V-E Day, and V-J Day in 1994 and 1995 that the Royal British Legion lobbied to reintroduce the two minutes silence on Armistice Day itself. Whilst they might appear to symbolise continuity, these practices have changed to mirror the needs and wants of different generations and communities in the years since the guns fell silent in Belgium and France on 11 November 1918. Therefore, they are inherently, and regularly, contested. For this reason, then, there is perhaps no more apt a vehicle for confronting and considering the terrors of war today. At the same time, we should be suspicious of anyone that imposes a single, static, meaning on these events.
Whilst they might appear to symbolise continuity, these practices [of commemoration] have changed to mirror the needs and wants of different generations and communities in the years since the guns fell silent in Belgium and France on 11 November 1918.
The Great War and the current conflict between Israel and Gaza are related in other ways. Beyond the historical parallels one might draw (including the consequences of 1914-1918, its imperial dimensions, and the geo-political fall-out) there are threads of a more human kind. Palestine was a theatre of war then, too, and the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC) maintains several sites in the region, including two cemeteries in the Palestinian territory. One of these, the Gaza War Cemetery, is the final resting place of individuals from many places and backgrounds. The majority are British, but one can also find the graves of Ottoman, Indian, Australian, Polish, and Canadian troops. Significantly, as is the case with many CWGC graveyards, it is also maintained by local staff. Indeed, this sight of memory has been diligently (and beautifully) cared for by Ibrahim Jaradah’s family for one hundred years. Yet, it is now he, his relatives, and countless others, that are confronting the violence of modern warfare.
The Gaza War Cemetery, is the final resting place of individuals from many places and backgrounds. The majority are British, but one can also find the graves of Ottoman, Indian, Australian, Polish, and Canadian troops.
Below, readers will find a selection of five books to enrich their understanding of how the First World War has been commemorated over the past century, in Britain and internationally.
1. Adrian Gregory, The Silence of Memory: Armistice Day, 1919-1946 (Bloomsbury, 1994)
Gregory’s monograph might be nearly thirty years old, but it provides a detailed, compelling, and at times moving, account of how the British made sense of the traumas of the Great War. His analysis of the public ceremonies that took place in and around Armistice Day on 11 November uncovers how these reflected (and mediated between) the wishes of veterans and the bereaved, were often “multi-vocal”, and inflected the memory of the conflict itself. Beyond this, Gregory’s narrative exhibits the ways in which commemoration was altered and morphed as history continued to play itself out. New realities – especially the shadow of war in the 1930s – changed perceptions of the past and the purpose of the rituals. For this reason, the global conflict in 1939-45 fundamentally reshaped, and eroded, the ideas and beliefs that fed the practice of commemoration in the interwar years. Armistice Day was suspended during the war and in its aftermath Remembrance Sunday became the focus of events.
2. Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge University Press, 1995)
Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning is a classic text on the history of the Great War and cultural history more generally. In this book, Jay Winter interrogates mourning during and after the war. Unlike The Silence of Memory, this takes a pan-European (and, at times, Australian) perspective, and shows what a transnational lens can offer to our understanding of a phenomena – namely grief – that defies national categorisation. Though, as Winter shows, it does vary over space and time, whether it is expressed publicly or in private. The psychological adjustments that were necessitated by the war’s traumas fed culture after 1918, but this often drew on traditional, frequently pre-war, ideas and norms. Presciently, at least this coming weekend, Winter examines how war memorials became a “foci of the rituals, rhetoric, and ceremonies of bereavement” (78).
3. Dan Todman, The Great War: Myth and Memory (Bloomsbury, 2005)
Commemoration, and mourning, are common experiences across borders. The cultural afterlife of the First World War is also one that spreads beyond individual nations. For example, trenches, No Man’s Land, or going “over the top” have become shorthand and metaphor in many English-speaking countries. They are also tropes we fall back on to make sense of contemporary conflict. One only need think about how frequently pictures from the frontlines of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are compared to scenes from the Western Front. Nevertheless, historical memory is often peculiar to one country’s construction of its own past. Britain’s memory of the Great War is particular and distinctive, often sitting at odds with scholars’ interpretations of its history. Dan Todman’s book explains how this came to be by focusing on the “functions” of myths (namely those of mud, death, donkeys, futility, and poets). Drawing on literature, television, films, and much more besides, he reveals how public perceptions – like commemoration – are not static. In fact, Britain’s memory of the Great War has evolved, reflecting the ever-changing priorities of a society that has itself transformed both culturally and demographically.
4. Bart Ziino (ed.), Remembering the First World War (Routledge, 2015)
Of course, the First World War does not only form a part of collective memory in Britain. Memory is also shaped by more than just practices of commemoration. To truly understand the diversity of ways in which 1914-1918 has been memorialised requires a more holistic approach. Bart Ziino’s edited volume, Remembering the First World War draws together the work of a variety of leading international scholars to understand why interest in the First World War has grown in recent years. To do so, it focuses the significance of family history, practices of remembrance, and the reincorporation of the war into commemorative narratives of several countries. Karen Petrone’s chapter on Russian celebrations during the centenary of the war, Vedica Kant’s essay on the memory of Gallipoli in Turkey, and Keith Jeffrey on the hazards of commemoration in Ireland reveal just how inherently political the commemoration of war is, even when that conflict has now passed into historical memory.
5. Ben Willings, Shanti Sumartojo, and Matthew Graves (eds.), Commemorating Race and Empire in The First Word War Centenary (Liverpool University Press / Provence University Press, 2018)
Recent historiographical shifts have encouraged historians to study the Great War through new temporal and spatial lenses. In many places, and in many minds, the war did not end on the 11 November 1918. Furthermore, there is a reason that the dead of so many nationalities lie in Gaza War Cemetery. This was an imperial conflict and our understanding of the First World War’s commemoration – not just its course and consequences – should be approached through a global lens. This edited volume provides a welcome, and important, contribution to our understanding of the global First World War, and its afterlives. The chapters contained in it investigate the commemoration (and memory) of the war across the world and amongst a range of different communities. Whilst every contribution is worth reading, I was particularly struck by Laurence van Ypersele’s and Enika Ngongo’s discussion of the Belgian Congo, Elizabeth Rechinewski’s analysis of the role of Black African troops, and Dónal Hassett’s fascinating research into memory and war memorials in post-colonial Algeria.
Note: This reading list gives the views of the author, and not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics.
Image: Headstones in the Gaza War Cemetery. Credit: Joe Catron on Flickr.