Political Responses vs. Academic Ones

The drama of a five minute clip has come to an end.

This post was originally written on my blog, Human Politics and Childish Philosophy. I’d appreciate it if you could read it over there — the formatting is much better, too.

I was disappointed to see that Claudine Gay had resigned from Harvard’s Presidency.

Let me be clear from the outset: the testimony (at least the viral part of it) was horrendous. I don’t think anyone could argue that. Calling for genocide is obviously against any college’s policy — as Magill herself later said, “irrefutably… evil”. If I were at an institution where people could freely call for the murder of a community I belonged to, I’d understandably feel insecure. Just the call, by itself, is harassment.

That said, I think there are a few points to be noted — and nobody seems to be noting them, so here they are.

1. The questioner, Elise Stefanik, was aggressive — extremely aggressive. You take academics — people who’ve spent their whole lives in the pursuit of knowledge, a relatively solitary activity — put them in front of millions, and bully them — and then when they mess up, you blame them. Sorry, but I can’t accept this. If Stefanik failed a difficult academic exam phrased to trip her up, nobody’s going to criticize her for it.
2. Yes, on the face of it, it was an easy question. Under pressure, however, we shrivel into our defaults. For academics, the default is to see nuance — a true academic never says “always” or “never”. Politics is not like that. Even me with my so-called human politics couldn’t appreciate that response — I cringed badly. Politics must, for better or worse, massage the hearts of the masses. It must do that while balancing ethics.
3. This, however, is the weaker argument. The real response to “it was a simple question” is that… it wasn’t. The question wasn’t to be taken out of context: Stefanik obviously meant the current situation after October 7th. What she considered to be calls for genocide included “from the river to the sea” and “globalize the intifada”. Few, if any, bodies of students have openly called for the genocide of Jews — rather, they use language that you interpret to call for the genocide of Jews. Does the “from the river to the sea” mean a call to exterminate Israel and its inhabitants or one for an independent Palestinian state peacefully coexisting with its neighbor? It all depends on what you mean and who you are, and while I plead pro-Palestinians to stop using such terms and spreading fear (as Gay aptly put it, it is extremely “thoughtless” behavior), college campuses have the notoriously difficult job of protecting both free speech and campus harmony/safety. You can argue whether it would have been better if they banned such calls, but (apart from the fact that censorship of language is a really bad idea) the awful testimony itself is unrelated to their decision. I’ll say it again: these are tough questions, and the answer depends on the individual and the context (and it’s harder to figure out than it might seem). And that’s what the academics were trying to say. That, however, is not what the common masses want to hear. In an extremely polarized climate, when you hear something that is against your position, you just dismiss it — or if, as in this case, you can politicize it for your purpose, you do it. A better response, then, would have been to say something along these lines: yes, calling for genocide is against policy. However, individual context matters: the university examples are not unequivocal calls for genocide, as (as of now) MIT President Sally Kornbluth said in her brilliant response.
4. Plenty of US representatives — members of government, people of politics — have used dehumanizing language with Hamas, sometimes with the whole Palestinian people. Oh, but Hamas is a terrorist organization — you say. Well, fun fact: the guys who are screaming these slogans consider Israel to be far more of a terrorist group than Hamas. “But they’re calling for the destruction of Israeli civilians”, you insist. (Most of them are not, but) These US representatives have said much, much, worse about Palestinians. That doesn’t justify the idiocy and thoughtless lack of ethics displayed by some anti-Israeli protestors, but it should strongly weaken the attacks of these self-righteous hypocrites who fail at their sole job of pacifying people and bang academics over the very mistakes they commit.
5. The testimony wasn’t antisemitic, not at all. Gay condemned antisemitism at multiple points during her testimony — it was this clip alone that was troubling. She was also very clear in her answers to other questions: she finds such “hateful speech personally abhorring”, but Harvard commits to “free expression, even if you find it objectionable”. Then, Gay, as did Magill, went along with the default response to free expression criticism: if speech “crosses over to conduct”, that would be against policy. This was a dumb response in this context — as Stefanik pointed out, are we going to wait for the “conduct” of genocide?

This whole fiasco does show something, however: politics is interfering in academics in ways it has never done before. As this Harvard Crimson article argued, presidents can no longer be excellent academics alone, they have to be excellent politicians too. To which I only have one response: sigh.