Scholarship which incites Violence
Can we define reasonable limits on academic freedom?
On April 9 Jodi Dean, a Professor of Political Science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva New York published a blog post, Palestine speaks for Everyone on the web site of the left wing publisher, Verso Books. This site is not on my usual reading list and I would not have known about if I hadn’t read a Facebook post by an Oberlin faculty member who is one of my 1300 Facebook friends. My friend was decrying the fact that Jodi Dean had been suspended from teaching as a result of what she wrote in that blog post. My friend’s position was that this was a threat to academic freedom.
My Facebook friend posted an image of the the letter released by the Hobart and William Smith administration and I have reproduced that image just below.
Image: Letter announcing removal of Jodi Dean from the classroom and expressing concern for the impact of her blog post on the student body at HWS College — Source: Facebook post
The blog post by Professor Dean is worth reading in its entirety, although it may be hard for a supporter of Israel or any reasonable person to get through it. The opening paragraph speaks enthusiastically about the sense of exhilaration engendered by images of Hamas terrorists flying into Israel on paragliders. This is the part that has gotten Dr. Dean into trouble with an administration which apparently doesn’t share her delight at the depraved actions of Hamas on October 7.
But the rest of the post is a quite readable (if stomach turning) exposition of the arguments, used by ostensibly left wing groups to justify their support of a fundamentalist, misogynistic, anti-gay and antisemitic movement like Hamas. While we shake our heads at the existence of groups like Queers for Palestine, this is exactly the kind of thinking that makes it possible.
The argument in the blog post is not the claim we are hearing from some on the left, that what Hamas did was horrible, but that Israel has over-reacted. This is not the Canadian TV news coverage which often sounds as though Israel isn’t fighting Hamas at all, but just dropping bombs on innocent Palestinians for no reason worth mentioning.
No, this essay is a full throated defense of Hamas as the authentic embodiment of the Palestinian liberation struggle and a denunciation of weak kneed leftists who do not celebrate the right of Palestinians to resist “by any means necessary.” In Dr. Dean’s world there are only two sides. You are with the Imperialists and Zionists or you are with the Revolution.
Later on in the blog post she quotes from the 1969 manifesto of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) which is her true political home. The PFLP was Soviet backed and a mouthpiece for the Soviet world view. Dean approvingly quotes its most famous member, Layla Khaled, who participated in passenger jet hijackings in which Israelis were taken hostage. She rightly points out the common thread between the PFLP and Hamas which is the claim that the crimes they commit are justified as part of a revolutionary struggle.
In response to my Facebook friend’s post, I commented that if disciplining someone who teaches undergraduates, for celebrating and justifying the mass murder of Jews is a violation of academic freedom, then there is a problem with academic freedom, and there is a need to circumscribe it in order to uphold basic standards of human decency and protect young minds from the promotion of evil in the world.
I was then engaged in a debate by another Facebook friend, who rightly denounced the content of the article as celebrating the murder of Jews, but staunchly defended Jodi Dean’s right to express her views without any sanction by the college that employs her.
I scoffed that her political views were similar to Fascism and racism and that there was no tolerance for the presence of people who hold such views in the classroom at schools of higher learning in North America. I mentioned Jordan Petersen whose views were deemed so toxic that a teaching assistant named Lindsay Shepherd was disciplined by Laurier University for using a clip from one of his videos in a seminar for first year communication students.
Academic freedom was not top of mind in that context. The risk of harm to students was. But in the case of Jodi Dean, the risk of harm to Jewish students, which is the main concern of her employer did not seem to carry much weight with the professors discussing the issue of her academic freedom.
While this debate about academic freedom continues, let’s shift our attention to events at Colombia University in New York. For months we have been reading reports about rising antisemitism there. On April 6. speakers at a teach-in praised Hamas’ actions in Israel. This was denounced by the Colombia University President and four students were suspended.
Late last week at Colombia, over 100 protesters were arrested, including the daughter of US Representative Ilhan Omar, as Colombia’s president fulfilled a vow she made during congressional hearings to crack down on illegal activity by protesters. In addition, Colombia said that students who participated in the demonstration were suspended.
Image: Israeli President Herzog denounces campus antisemitism in the US — Source Arutz 7
In response, angry demonstrations have continued. A campus rabbi is reported today to have advised Jewish students to stay away from campus due to an unsafe environment, while the campus Hillel said that Jewish students should come to school and the university should protect them. A report in the New York Post said that pro-Israel protesters on Saturday Night were told that they should be the next target of Hamas. The White House denounced antisemitic protests at Colombia this afternoon.
It seems to me that there is an obvious connection between the views expressed by Jodi Dean in her blog post, and similar declarations by many others in academia, and the public declarations of support for Hamas which were denounced by the President of Colombia at the beginning of April, and by the White House this afternoon.
If such views are protected by academic freedom and are widely taught at North American universities, it should not come as a surprise that speakers at those same universities are repeating those opinions. The discussion on Facebook of academic freedom seems curiously disconnected from the real world events that are unfolding at those same academic institutions, events which are driving Jewish students and faculty off campus while threats of violence are tolerated in the name of freedom of speech.
If university leadership are serious about preserving the safety of everyone who attends their institutions they are going to have to take responsibility for the promotion of hatred and violence that occurs within their walls. Not all views deserve the stamp of academic approval. We have to find a way to bring back standards of intellectual rigor as well as standards of human decency in assessing who gets to teach in our classrooms and what should be taught. For now, it seems like anything goes.
Thank you to everyone who has signed up as a subscriber over the weekend. We are taking a few days off for Passover, which begins tomorrow evening. Wishing a meaningful celebration to all who are observing the holiday.
We will be setting an extra seat at our Passover table for those who are still held in Gaza. It’s hard to celebrate our redemption with a full heart, knowing that they are still in captivity.
If you are a paid subscriber you can leave a comment.
If you are not yet a paid subscriber, please consider upgrading today to join the conversation and support our work.
Thanks to everyone for reading Canadian Zionist Forum
It is not just harmful to Jewish students. It is harmful to the very students who are out there celebrating Hamas and the murder of Israelis. These people, not far removed from being children, are having their minds utterly ruined by this heinous claptrap. I am actually less concerned about what this miscreant professor blogs about and much more concerned about what she is doing in her classroom to impressionable minds. So yes you are right, academci freedom shouldn't permit the teaching that murder is an appropriate means to "resist". It shouldn't permit a lot of things that are being "taught" But the genie has been out of the bottle for over half a century and the fruits are being harvested. I don't think banning this or that professor based on social media statements will do anything at all. I don't know the answer, if there is one.
Is the world getting crazier? You summarized it perfectly - we need "intellectual rigor" as well as "standards of human decency"