Quickly, the "sides" were slotted into pro-Israeli and pro-Palestinian categories, flattening any nuance among the protesters, even though a range of sentiments, perspectives, demands, and goals were apparent. That reduction also undermined the prospect for critical analysis, any true exchange of views, or the possibility of minds being changed -- everything, in other words, that's supposed to underpin a liberal education. And whatever happened to the idea of being pro-peace? I don't remember that label ever being applied to the protests, although the one area most protestors agreed on was the need for a ceasefire in Gaza.
In his keynote speech at MIT's graduation, entrepreneur Noubar Afeyan acknowledged the students' pain over the tragic Israeli-Palestinian conflict and rued his own lack of answers on the subject, concluding, "But I do know this: having conviction should not be confused with having all the answers."
I have a certain sympathy for that sentiment, though I doubt I did when I was a student with my own set of demands over a different tragic conflict, which leaves me sympathetic to the student activists, too. After all, you don't need answers to pinpoint a problem accurately or to believe peace is a precondition for finding such answers. Protest isn't supposed to be nice. Dissent courts the heterodox. The point of a political action is to get in people's faces, disturb complacency, and command a response. Protest that doesn't challenge our norms, or at least get people to think about other possibilities, is just spectacle.
Of course, dissent also threatens authority, and the kneejerk reaction of authorities fearing that they're losing control is to try to take ever more control. Insisting that the students and their organizations were being punished not for their speech but for breaking the rules, university administrators suspended anti-Zionist groups, breached principles of academic freedom, opened the way for violence by ushering the police onto campus, and caved to financial pressure from donors and alumni. And what to make of the suggestion of a Harvard dean, who, "look[ing] forward to calmer times on campus," argued that the solution was for faculty members to just shut up?
You'd think such beleaguered university administrators would learn. Clampdowns usually backfire and severe punishments hardly make for calmer campuses. The repression, in fact, succeeded mainly in turning the conversation from core issues like war and human rights to an assessment of free speech and the very nature of academia -- not to mention good old American anti-intellectualism. Educational leaders were called before Congress to confess; university presidents were fired; hate speech codes, mostly moribund in this century, got renewed attention; and the crisis became focused on campuses riven by incivility and bad words.
Dissension at educational institutions over what kinds of expression are acceptable, no less desirable, has a long history and merits periodic revisiting. I suspect, though, that there's another reason what we say has bested what we do as the issue du jour: that is, a lot of Americans find it easier to champion the idea of free speech than to demand that Israel get out of Gaza or that the Biden administration rethink its military aid policies.
About 20 years ago, when I wrote a book about free expression controversies, I saw repeatedly how words make convenient scapegoats. Arguments over language are often a way to avoid arguments we'd prefer not to have, even if working through those very arguments could produce the resolutions we want to reach. As paramount as free speech is to me in the pantheon of human rights, I wish in this case -- and in Aaron Bushnell's memory -- we hadn't relegated war to just a background hum but had assessed the validity of the protesters' demands and dealt with them, as fraught and frightening, involved and painful as that process would inevitably have been.
Copyright 2024 Nan Levinson
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