Friday, February 16, 2024

The Humanities on Climate Change

William Paley claimed that the “university exists to form the minds and the moral sensibilities of the next generation of clergymen, magistrates, and legislators.”[1] The assumption at Cambridge in 1785 was that both “individual conduct and a social order pleasing to God can be known and taught.”[2] To know outside of divine revelation what is pleasing to God was typically considered to be presumptuous back then because human finite knowledge cannot claim to encompass all possible knowledge. This could not even be claimed of AI a couple decades into the twenty-first century. Although infinity itself is not necessarily a divine concept—think of infinite space possibly being in the universe—it cannot be said that humans have, or even are capable of having, infinite knowledge. Theists and humanists can agree on this point. So, when a professor decides that a political issue is so important that using a faculty position to advocate for one’s own ideology in the classroom, presumptuousness can be said to reek to high heaven. I assume that any ideology is partial, and thus partisan, rather than wholistic. Both the inherently limited nature of the human brain, and thus human knowledge, and the presumption of an instructor to use the liberal arts, or the humanities more specifically, to advocate for one’s own ideology were strikingly on display on a panel on what the humanities should contribute on climate change. The panel, which consisted mostly of scholars from other universities, took place at Yale University on Ash Wednesday and Valentine’s Day, 2024. Perhaps on that day in which the two holidays aliened, both fear of our species going extinct—literally turning to dust—and love of our species and Earth could be felt.  That we can scarcely imagine our planet without our species living on it does not mean that such a scenario could not happen; and yet I contend that the humanities should not sell its soul or be romanticized ideologically to be transacted away into vocational knowledge, as if the humanities would more fittingly ask how to do something rather than why something is so. Going deeper, rather than departing from the intellectual raison d’être in order to tread water at the surface, metastasizing into training and skills, is not only the basis of the humanities’ sustainable competitive advantage in a university, but also the best basis from which the humanities can make a contribution to solving the problem of climate change by getting at its underlying source. Neither a political ideology or skills in “knowledge-use” can get at that; rather, they are oriented to relieving symptoms, which although very harmful, could be more expeditiously redressed by discovering and understanding their root cause. So I’m not claiming that universities should do away with applied science and research on technology, such as to absorb carbon from the seas and atmosphere; rather, I contend that the liberal arts and sciences, especially the humanities, should not be turned into engines of application. 

One panelist opened minds in the room to a tension within liberal arts. While the humanities are liberating for a free person, individual research and truth-seeking are in tension with forming groups with shared understandings. Both, the panelist asserted, are part of liberal arts education. When I was a student at Yale, I applied truth-seeking to theology, philosophy, and history, and constitutional law; I also joined a debating society, or “political party,” in the Yale Political Union. Some of the ideas I came up with in my studies were unique, and I conformed to an ideology in a debating society (which owned one of Yale’s secret societies). The other members of that “political party” engaged with me during the debates on ideas stripped of the usual distracting media-driven sideshows.  Both my own studies and debate in the Yale Political Union held my ideology in check, though obviously didn’t eliminate it.

In fact, both my ideas and ideology have changed since I studied at Yale; for one thing, I went on to study historical moral, political, and religious thought at another university after graduating from Yale. I had moved from natural science, to business, to the social sciences, and finally to the humanities. I wanted a firm foundation in the latter. After all, political economy and economics were once part of philosophy; Adam Smith was a professor of moral philosophy. It is from my broad educational background, to which I sacrificed entirely too many years of my youth (without being a professional student!), that I took in the panel’s opinions on how the humanities should address climate change. I was not looking through ideological glasses so much as through those of the humanities and business.

A participant on the panel defended the liberal arts, possibly because business-oriented “academic” administrators at some schools were shedding parts of the humanities.  The University of West Virginia, for example, had recently announced that it would eliminate foreign language study because the students’ eventual employers would not value that kind of knowledge. Not even administrators at business schools should delimit courses offered to those which the administrators think CEO’s would like. When I was a graduate student in business at Indiana University, the dean told the incoming class that we would not use the knowledge we obtain for 10 or 15 years. “We’re not here to train you,” the dean said. Indeed, more than one CEO told me that they did not want business schools to train future employees. We can do that; we want business schools do what we can’t do—educate them. Indeed, large CPA firms were hiring English majors because such students could reason well. Deans of the liberal arts and science should therefore not listen to the corporate sycophants running business schools.

Liberal arts “are about questioning and liberating,” one of the panelists insisted.  During World War II, the liberal arts were criticized in the U.S. for being a luxury that a country at war simply could not afford. Wendall Wilke, who ran for U.S. president against Roosevelt in 1940, defended the humanities as the franchise of the mind to free the mind, and an open mind is beneficial to economic and political freedom—virtues whose value could be confirmed merely by looking over at Nazi Germany. Wilke’s claim is in line with Paley’s thesis that the humanities are useful in terms of individual conduct and social order, whether of a religion, an economy, a political system, or a university.

If the liberal arts really are about asking why beyond the opinions broadcasted on a public square, and are thus about freeing the mind from societal constraints, then it could be asked, as one participant did: “Is climate-change a necessary thing that liberal arts and science has to do, or is covering climate-change a luxury?” What is the opportunity cost—the benefit that is foregone—in orienting the liberal arts and sciences to applied work so as to reduce carbon emissions? If a person loses one’s soul to be someone else, I submit that the benefit would be less than had the person stayed true to oneself in making a contribution. The same holds for academic disciplines. Math students should not be forced to be trained in accounting. I once worked in that field, and, believe me, I’m no mathematician.

So how can the humanities help us to understand climate change? A couple panelists distinguished local, national, and global social scales. Scaling, or viewing the world in terms of different scales, was said to be relevant to climate-change. One question that the liberal arts and science could answer is, “Are different scales naturally related?”  I thought of the natural fractals in chaos theory, and the research that has gone into applying the natural sciences, including evolution, to social organization. By 2020, the imprint from the aggregated energy consumption of individuals was clear on the global scale; we had entered the Anthropocene era in which aggregated individual conduct really could change the natural world on a global scale. Even so, studying scaling only goes so far; it does not get at the root cause: why the aggregated individual conduct is now so detrimental on the global scale scientifically.

Time can be thought of as a scale. Universities are not necessarily set up for the long term, one panelist claimed; and yet another panelist pointed out that, traditionally, college has been seen as a leisure, and thus not something oriented to a demand for immediate action. Indeed, going to college used to be a luxury because students could take several years off full-time work in order to become knowledgeable. I would add being better at reasoning, which training students at skills does not sharpen nearly as much. This is one reason why I studied at Yale after my studies in business. It is also why Richard Brodhead, the dean of Yale College when I was at Yale wrote to the undergraduates in the liberal arts and sciences that business would not be major. “Let us educate you; we know how to do that. Then you can go out and get trained.”

Certainly, the humanities are not inherently oriented to serve immediate action, and yet climate change has become urgent because governments have not stood up to their polluters. Is this, however, the root cause? Does losing the climate-change battle boil down to a dysfunctional political economy steeped in corruption? The humanities can dig deeper than political economy. So to siphon the liberal arts and basic sciences into serving only that which is immediately useful can be reckoned as dogmatic both in terms of being arbitrary and imposed. Einstein was not awarded a Nobel prize for either of his theories of relativity because at the time they could not be tested empirically. It was more than ten years after his general theory in 1905 until a solar eclipse provided empirical support that gravity from a large mass bends space itself. Limiting theorizing on astrophysics to knowledge that can be empirically tested and is immediately useful would a the very least be “penny proud; pound foolish.” Such a foolish litmus test would cut off too much paradigm-changing knowledge. I don’t think the stricture of immediate usefulness should deplete human knowledge of the possibility of on-going scientific revolutions; they are hard enough, as Thomas Kuhn argued. I submit that this also applies to the humanities. Should they study only those causes that can be immediately acted upon? At the very least, uncovering a cause of a phenomenon instantly highlights the symptoms as symptoms.

Such artificial delimiters as immediate action come from not only positivists such as Popper in the natural sciences, but also from business schools, especially in a culture in which business is revered. I suspect that many humanities professors in the American states are unaware of how much they have imported not only from business schools, but also from the business world itself. One of the panelists insightfully observed that education as (vocational) training is transactional, whereas the mantra of the liberal arts and sciences is knowledge for its own sake. So it is at a fundamental level that the litmus test of immediate action is so exogenous, or foreign, to the humanities. Unfortunately, vocational skill had been eclipsing even basic knowledge at many American universities since the rise of business schools in the 1980s. American business culture has been so salient in the societal cultures of many of the American states that even humanities professors at state universities especially use power-point presentations with knowledge as bullet-points.

The panelist from Arizona State University taught at the time in the School of Ocean Futures, which in turn is in that university’s College of Global Futures, as if they were labels for academic schools of knowledge rather than being in actuality marketing slogans and ideological jargon. She spoke in terms of training students in skills on useful knowledge. That only such knowledge is to be taught and researched there is clear, for the panelist bragged that useful knowledge is literally “etched in the stone” that displays the university’s mission. It is significant that Einstein would not have been welcomed at ASU.

Furthermore, that panelist spoke of “teams” of students in her classroom, as if she were a manager at a corporation referring to her subordinates. She also spoke of the need to turn her students into leaders, by which she meant practitioners. The term leadership had come to be so vague that it could be both a vehicle and cover for  ideologically-infused agendas. For example, in business world, “leadership coaches” roam free-lance on a bad metaphor without even bothering to distinguish leadership from management or supervision. It was as if that panelist were so ensconced in vocational jargon that she took it as legitimate for academic knowledge.

It was very clear that she thought that the humanities should only be “applied knowledge.” She bragged that ASU was inaugurating a “general sustainability” requirement for every student as a means to get them to display leadership in 20 years. Never mind that sustainability is not an academic term, and yet ASU has a School of Sustainability (and another of Leadership). She said that the “sustainability” requirement is meant to “train students to envision alternative futures will give skills.” She was quite explicit that training is what university faculty should do. That this might fit a school of global futures does not mean that her vocational orientation should be applied to faculty and students in the liberal arts and sciences. Of course, requiring certain courses with a vocational and ideological agenda comes with an opportunity cost because other courses that might otherwise be required are not chosen. Rather than studying one issue, students’ reasoning ability, which they could apply to any topic, could benefit from requiring a course in logic. Also, a semester or two of Latin would help immensely with understanding English grammar, which, along with logic is (as I have found) extremely useful in writing on a variety of issues. The world needs excellent thinkers rather than just skill-doers.

ASU at the time had an applied lab in a new building. The technological research there was on “carbon trees,” which can absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Such labs are definitely needed, and this need is indeed urgent. Imposing that on humanities faculty and students is thus not only unnecessary, as it would be duplicative, but also, as I have already argued, detrimental to the humanities. Even the priority of ASU’s president at the time on forging lucrative applied labs with corporations and government can be criticized as detrimental to the liberal arts and basic sciences. Ironically, post-doctoral researchers in those labs have complained that the funding by the university has not been sufficient for a course of research to be followed to a conclusion.

The participant from ASU also admitted that she was unapologetically ideological in the classroom in advocating her ideology of “stewardship and responsibility” applied only to climate-change. She also answered a question by insisting that advocating is a legitimate teaching role because her issue is “too important.” No ideological faculty member of a university would need to use much self-discipline in pledging not to advocate on issues that are not important. In short, her stance would open the flood-gates to going after “bad” ideologies and promoting one’s own as a significant part of teaching. It is telling that the panelist viewed critical thinking as being able to distinguish “true from false information.” When I heard that, I thought of “fake news.” Even though I believe that climate change is a very important issue, I don’t see a college teacher’s role as including rebutting statements made on Fox News.

Recall Paley’s caveat that we presume that our knowledge is of individual conduct and social orders that are pleasing to God. Viewing one’s own ideology as true knowledge is antipodal to Paley’s epistemological humility. The ASU panelist, whose background outside of academia includes advocating on her issue to Congress, was narrowing, and thus warping, “critical thinking” to being ideologically opposed to conservatives. Of course, she had not applied such thinking to her assumption of having true information, or even to her assumption that her cause is so vitally important that it is worth hijacking her teaching role to spread her ideology in the classroom. What about nuclear war? What about AI getting out of hand? What about the impotency of human rights in the extant global order? Are teachers whose values galvanize to any of these issues not allowed to turn their respective classrooms into ideological soapboxes because these issues are not important enough? Strangely, she said that liberal arts students should come to “appreciate different ways of seeing things.” Apparently, this is so as long as their views are in sync with her ideology. I submit that different ways include unpopular, and thus disliked, ways. To the extent that the status quo itself has contributed to the problem of climate change, then thinking through alternative paradigms and getting to the root problem of the extant paradigm is of great value. I submit that the world needs a lot of different and more fundamental thinking even though ideological strictures narrow or even block such thinking.

Lastly, the panelist from ASU was dismissive of another panelist’s suggestion that in the humanities, the question of whether our “virus” species—think of the film, The Matrix—should survive should be asked. She said that’s a bad question, so she would bar it even in the humanities. Her prejudice was clear when she referred to the humanities as being “too Ivory Tower.”  Although the event was indeed atop the Kline Tower on Yale’s campus, the building’s exterior walls were still made of brick rather than ivory.

So, what can the humanities offer in line with the nature of that knowledge? Beyond scaling, I suggest that rather than showing ASU students maps of places that may be flooded from climate change, the distinction between a cause and symptoms should be studied. Going beyond the latter would be extremely beneficial to the survival of our species. I would include study of Thomas Malthus’s 1798 text, Essay on Population, because the expediential increase in (over) population during the twentieth century is arguably the root cause of climate change. Deep thinking, rather than being trained on decision-making skills, not only is the forte of the liberal arts (and sciences), but paradoxically can also leap over policy and technology in revealing the underlying problem, which is a prerequisite to really solving the problem rather than merely addressing admittedly injurious symptoms as they crop up. Malthus claims that a species’ population can outstrip its food supply, and I would add its energy supply. If we don’t self-regulate our species’ population, nature will step in, whether in pestilence, disease, or war, according to Malthus. We could add to these three a shift in the equilibriums of the global climate and ecosystems beyond the habitable zone for homo sapiens. We, the wise human species, likely have innate and learned attributes responsible for the astonishingly fast growth and size of human population on earth. So we can go even deeper than overpopulation by focusing in the humanities on its deep knowledge. Even theory development in the social sciences can be done in part to rectify the flawed institutional political and related economic systems and cultures that have enabled the explosive population growth. If our species of homo sapiens really is wise (sapientia), then reducing knowledge to skills that are the immediately useful seems perplexing to me. Ironically, going deeper has a better chance of solving a myriad of problems beyond a few quick fixes.


1. A. M. C. Waterman, Political Economy and Christian Theology since the Enlightenment: Essays in Intellectual History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), p. 211.
2. Ibid.

Saturday, February 10, 2024

Yale Vipers

Even though it is sometimes difficult to "read between the lines" to assess whether or not people in an organization are welcoming or tacitly "showing you the door," the message is undoubtable and even palpable when "all the arrows are pointing in the same direction." In the case of Yale, where I have been an alumni scholar temporarily in residence during the 2023-2024 year, the university's administration could do its alumni a big favor by explicitly saying that we are not welcome back on campus, except to visit and of course donate money. Instead, passive aggression, unaccountability, and even unwarranted retaliation rule the roust there, in what is a toxic organizational culture. 


The full essay is at "Yale Vipers."

Tuesday, January 30, 2024

On Universities Cancelling Classes on Some Minor Holidays for Ideological Purposes

Higher education is not valued equally in the various American states. Where academia is not particularly valued, other things can intercede as priorities even at the universities themselves at the expense of academics. In such places, even the universities themselves may value being academic institutions too little by allowing other societal agendas to eclipse the distinctly academic mission. Indeed, even academic administrators may be infected with an ideology currently in fashion societally, and insufficiently academically minded to thwart the interlarded non-academic values that seek hegemony even on academic campuses.

The value that a university places on its academic classes as a priority can be gauged by whether classes meet on minor holidays. Even if the length of the semester is not shorted as a result, breaking up contiguous class days may have negative academic effects. My point here, however, is that cancelling classes for minor reasons demonstrates a lack of respect for the academic functioning of universities as regards teaching and learning course material.

In 2019 at Yale, classes met on Columbus Day, Veterans Day, and Presidents Day even if administrative offices were closed. Harvard’s academic calendar explicitly stated that classes would meet on Veterans Day and President’s Day (Columbus Day being the exception among the minor holidays for the academic year). Classes are different; they are too important to be interrupted for every minor holiday. Yet those very academic universities have not been above cancelling classes on a minor holiday, and for ideological reasons. Martin Luther King's day is a case in point. 

Out in the provinces, Arizona’s major universities cancel classes for Veteran’s Day, perhaps out of deference to the military-industrial presence in the state. The privileging of that holiday is all the more conspicuous because Columbus Day is practically ignored, perhaps owing to the numbr of American Indians in Arizona. In fact, no mention was made of that holiday in the 2019-2020 academic calendars of the University of Arizona and Arizona State University—the latter having Fall Break instead on the Monday and Tuesday.
 
The cultural differentials between New England and Arizona cannot be ignored; they are essentially different countries. In 2017, Arizona teachers came in last in the U.S., and, moreover, K-12 (pre-college education) had consistently came in at 48th or 49th out of the 50 States for years. In an analysis by WalletHub, Arizona’s pre-college education came in at 49th out of the 50 States, whereas Massachusetts and Connecticut came in at first and third, respectively.[1] Including standardized tests such as the SAT gave the interstate comparison particular credence. Besides having a high drop-out rate at the high-school level, Arizona had a high drop-out rate at ASU and likely at the University of Arizona too given the low standardized entrance exam scores. We can conclude that education was valued much more in New England than in Arizona. 

I contend that ideology had come to play an outsided role not only in the creation of new national holidays in the U.S., but also in how much in a given state closes for a holiday. For example, not allowing classes to meet even at the public universities on Veterans Day in Arizona is a way of instilling the value of a military to young adults, many of whom could be expected to vote in line with what they believe is important. Businesses and the government of Arizona there doubtlessly benefitted by more money for military contractors. 

Of course, cancelling classes for minor holidays has a drawback. As cited above, Arizona has ranked 49 out of the 50 states on the quality of education, and that state has been known to be notoriously low in having a college-educated citizenry. The low value placed on education in Arizona has been exacerbated by the predominant politically conservative bent there. Even if the state was becoming competitive for both of the major parties, the extreme nature of the conservatism has been well documented. Enough of Arizona’s tax-payers have referred to taxes as theft (by the government) that the lack of K-12 funding per pupil and the high pupil-teacher ratio relative to the other States can be understood. Beyond the conservative politics, the sheer aggressive prejudice on the streets (i.e., low and perhaps middle-income residents) against ASU students and even highly educated people belies any suggestion that the locals respect higher education. The attitude obviously excluded respect for the academic functions of universities. Accordingly, the few major universities (ASU and AU) there strove for legitimacy in financial rather than academic terms. Students at ASU regularly referred to their university as being primarily about money. As a business, the university would follow the banks and close for the minor federal holidays. In effect, the University of Arizona and Arizona State University morphed into something more familiar to, and valued by the typical Arizona citizen. 

The role of ideology in deciding which minor holidays on which to cancel classes also infects the Ivy League universities. Even though the value of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln far surpasses that of Martin King for the U.S., the elite schools have not have classes on King's day but have had classes on President's Day (and Veterans Day). The picking and choosing among holidays that are all minor rather than one of the majors, such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, and Independence Day, points to the involvement of ideology. I would expect all of the minor holidays to be insufficient in cancelling classes. The privileging of some such holidays over others is just not fair. I contend that interrupting the rhythem of a semester and sending the message that academics is not the highest value at a university, especially if the university is a citidel in protecting the value of academic knowledge, are not wise.  


1, Adam McCann, “States with the Best & Worst School Systems,” Wallethub.com, July 29, 2019.

Wednesday, December 13, 2023

On Calls for a Genocide of the Jews: Harvard vs Yale

A university administration can be susceptible to creating an unlevel playing field in the name of truth but with political ideology in the driver’s seat.  Amid controversial political disputes wherein ideology is salient and tempers are flaring, free speech can be arbitrarily and prejudiciously delimited as academic freedom is eclipsed by ideological intolerance. More abstractly put, the ideology of an organization’s dominant coalition can be stultifying. During the fall 2023 semester at Yale, for example, I attended a lecture at which the lecturer, a faculty member, held his own topic hostage by deviating to an unfounded ideological presumption of systemic racism in Hollywood. The leap in his assumption evinced an ideological agenda capable of blocking even his intellectual reasoning, and the resulting irrational intolerance easily impaired the academic freedom of the students to even question the unfounded assumption or ask what had happened to the advertised topic. Whether the label is systemic racism or antisemitism, the highly-charged application thereof into a political dispute can be act as a weapon to weaken or block outright an unliked political position and thus unfairly limit free speech and even academic freedom. I have in mind here calls for a genocide of the Jews as Gaza ceasefire rallies were occurring on college campuses. Which is more fitting: university codes of conduct against hate-speech or the protection of free speech, which is vital to academic freedom and a university’s academic atmosphere? In other words, are such calls more accurately classified as hate-speech or political speech?

The question is one that university administrations should not avoid in private or public settings even though getting to an answer is admittedly very difficult and the matter was intensely controversial at the time.[1] Of course, a university administration can put up a legalistic smokescreen of bureaucratic-speak terminology wherein the proverbial forest is lost sight of for the sake of specifying the branches of individual trees. When asked at a Congressional hearing on December 5, 2023 “whether ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ amounts to bullying and harassment on a campus, the leaders of Harvard, MIT, and Penn equivocated. Each one offered lawyerly answers—‘it depends on the context.’”[2] The dominance of legalistic fears in university governance does come at a cost in terms of protecting the distinctly academic culture of a university, which includes not only academic freedom, which in turn assumes that free speech is protected. The three presidents were right, though, that the contemporary context was extremely relevant on whether calls for a genocide of the Jews constitute antisemitic hate speech. Unfortunately, this was lost after the hearing in the irrational exuberance being fomented by the press.

The Israeli army had already destroyed nearly 98,000 buildings in Gaza, with entire neighborhoods reduced to rubble. By December 12, 2023, Israel’s military had “already brought unprecedented death and destruction to the impoverished enclave, with much of northern Gaza obliterated, more than 18,000 Palestinians killed, and over 80% of the population of 2.3 million pushed from their homes.”[3] Meanwhile, the official death toll in Israel stood at only about 1,200.[4] Accordingly, the UN’s General Assembly voted by 153 to 10 for an immediate stop to the Israeli attack in Gaza on humanitarian grounds alone.[5] The U.S. had vetoed a binding resolution in the Security Council, and any resolution of the General Assembly is not binding, but the verdict speaks volumes on the horrific nature of Israel’s reaction to Hamas’ admittedly brutal attack and hostage-taking on October 7, 2023.

That context, reflecting Israel’s belief in even disproportionate collective “justice” and Israeli president Isaac Herzog’s claim that “It is an entire nation out there that is responsible,”[6] had ironically already entered the term genocide into the political lexicon of the debate. Jews were being accused of perpetuating rather than being victims of a genocide-scale atrocity. Already on November 2, 2023, UN experts were “convinced that the Palestinian people [were] at grave risk of genocide.”[7] By November 14th, Raz Segal, the program director of genocide studies at Stockton University, referred to the Israeli military attack as a “textbook case of genocide.”[8] Admittedly, other experts disagreed, but my point is that the term was in play. Would calls for a corresponding genocide to right the scales of justice based ironically on the Biblical theory of an eye for an eye be qualitatively different—antisemitic hate speech—rather that part of the give and take that takes place in any political dispute? As one Penn student said on Fox News on December 11, 2023, I’m not going to get into it about the genocides. In other words, the student viewed the use of the term by both sides as fodder in a political dispute in which the student did not want to take sides.

The context did indeed matter, as it had “normalized” the use of the term in the political sphere with respect to the war in Israel even though calling for (and especially perpetuating) any genocide was nonetheless still, in the words of Harvard’s governing board, “despicable and contrary to fundamental human values.”[9] That is to say, that a genocide may have already been in progress rendered calls for a counter-genocide fair-game in the sense of being part of a political dispute, rather than as something free-standing akin to the Nazi extermination of Jews. Had the Jews in Europe already commenced a genocide ridding the world of Germans, then the Nazi’s Final Solution would have been placed in a very different context than what it has been.

Crucially, after the disastrous Congressional testimony of its president, Harvard condemned political statements advocating genocide “while balancing the critical principals of free thought and free speech,” according to the executive committee of Harvard’s Alumni Association.[10] Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay, not only apologized for having gotten “caught up” in a “combative exchange about policies and procedures” at the Congressional hearing, but also narrowed the exception to free speech on campus to “calls for violence against our Jewish community—threats to our Jewish students.”[11] More than 700 faculty at Harvard signed a petition urging Harvard’s board to “defend the independence of the university and to resist political pressures that are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom, including calls for the removal of President Claudine Gay.”[12] By specifying how calls for a Jewish genocide would not enjoy free-speech and academic freedom protections and thus violate the university’s code of conduct, the university’s governance displayed an aptitude for measured balance of competing values (and interests). For it is one thing for a university to condemn certain political positions and yet specify more narrowly circumstances in which they are proscribed on campus, and quite another thin to use university regulations to effectively take sides in hampering one in the course of an ongoing political dispute. After all, a university’s administration would not want to be left with the implication that only certain genocides are political, whereas advocating others, even if in the heat of the moment in the midst of mass, disproportionate carnage, constitutes hate speech. Fortunately, there is a way to avoid this quagmire. I submit that a university administration ought to concentrate on protecting the actual safety of people on university property, rather than overreaching by taking political positions and blocking others at the expense of academic freedom and political free-speech.

Understanding the role of university administrations as the makers of “markets” of ideas is crucial to grasping why ideological activism should be avoided. Similar to how Goldman Sachs and other investment banks make (i.e., construct) markets wherein financial securities can be bought and sold, universities in the U.S. provide a space for academic freedom where even controversial political positions can be aired under the protection of free speech. If an investment bank enters one of its own markets with its proprietary position (i.e., trading with its own securities), a conflict of interest exists even if it is not exploited. Given human nature, institutional and personal conflicts of interests are so likely to be exploited that the conflictual structure itself can be declared to be unethical and deconstructed or prohibited.[13] Goldman exploited its market-making and market-participant dual roles with regard to its subprime-mortgage derivative securities by not telling even the bank’s best clients that the bonds were “crap” because so many of the underlying mortgages were not performing. The clients were not amused, and the bank’s dual role contributed to the financial crisis of 2008. In congressional testimony in 2010, the bank’s director, Lloyd Blankfein, later cited the bank’s role as a “market-maker” as the reason why the bankers hid their valuations from the clients. The truth was almost certainly more complicated, and of course self-serving.

Similarly, presidents of countries who sacrifice their reputational capital in presiding (i.e., above politics) by advocating partisan positions operate at a conflict of interest. The rancorous behavior of U.S. House members of the party opposed to a U.S. president’s party during a State of the Union speech delivered by presidents to a joint session of Congress demonstrates just how much presidents squander their credibility as standing for the country above partisan politics. The temptation to invent and fortify truth in convenient political-ideological terms is often too tempting for most occupants of the White House. Even good intentions can have squalid undertones that gradually and subtly undo the very office.

University presidents, too, can be tempted to use their top office to leverage a cherished truth even though it is inherently tainted with political ideology. I contend that university administrations should be oriented to protecting academic freedom and free speech rather than taking partisan political positions, especially on controversial matters.

To be sure, free-speech protection is not absolute, but because of the importance of academic freedom on a college campus, and the tendency of great minds to think “outside the box”—Nietzsche wrote that a philosopher is not a person of one’s time—even despicable political positions should not be prohibited.  While it is extremely unlikely that the concept of genocide will ever be associated with the good of the species, it is also true that the ideas that the Earth is spherical and not at the center of the solar system, much less the galaxy, were once unpopular at European universities. Einstein’s theories of relativity were controversial, and he never received a Nobel prize for them, because they were so different and not immediately testable empirically. Universities perform a great service for mankind even just in being open to, and thus creative nebulae of, ideas that could revolutionize even our primitive political systems. With political development so far lagging behind technological developments, there is great value in having universities with administrations as “market makers” constructing and protecting the free exchange of political ideas.

Rather than separating the wheat from the chaff in going through political statements as if from an objective fount of fortified truth, university administrators can protect academic freedom, which even a society hostile to higher education benefits from in terms of new potential ideas that could potentially revolutionize even such a society, by focusing instead on protecting people on campus from harassment, bullying, and outright threats of violence. Hate speech, which is rightfully excluded from the protection of free speech, can be determined in action: as outright and targeted attempts to intimidate, bully, and or threaten violence against specific persons on university property.

Overreaching, whether in excluding reprehensible political speech or imposing university regulations off campus, is, I submit, squalidly selfish and preposterously presumptuous. A university administration that presumptuously claims the mantle of fortifying truth and prohibits any political stance that violates that truth-construction even off campus can do a lot of damage to a university’s own mission. Ideologues who seek to dominate under the camouflage of bureaucracy (and enforced by their own private police departments) resemble Nietzsche’s notion of the weak who seek nonetheless to dominate out of sheer resentment of the strong. For “truth” can be used as a weapon ideologically, such as by interpreting safety so broadly that it is deemed to be violated merely because someone’s controversial political speech is disliked and even makes people angry. Put another way, to be angry at someone else’s political position and even to want to rid the world of it, as if by being the world’s monarch appointed for life, does not in itself justify a claim to being unsafe. In contrast, to be personally intimidated or bullied, especially if accompanied by threats of actual, physical violence, definitely puts a person in an unsafe position, and university administrations clearly have a responsibility to protect people on the university campuses from being in such a position.

In their Congressional testimony, the three university presidents should have distinguished between political speech and speech that is directed specifically at particular persons at a university who are not public figures (e.g., students). For example, to say that the Arab countries should invade Israel to uproot and decimate its majority population because of the Israeli government’s disproportionate uprooting and even decimation of the Palestinian population in Gaza is not to bully or threaten Jewish students at Penn with violence or even to bully them. Even calling for the genocide of Jews in general, which also suffers from the erroneous theory of collective, disproportionate justice, is political in nature, rather than being directed at specific individuals who might then fear for their lives. Someone shouting, “Death to the Imperialists!” on a college campus is not threatening to kill the students there who have wealthy parents. For bullying and harassment on a campus to apply, threats of violence (or intimidation) targeted at people on the campus must be made. Such aggression against individuals on a college campus is distinct from the policy suggestions that are made in general political statements, which are typically oriented to societal or international groups and public figures. Donald Trump was not arrested for saying that Hilary Clinton should be arrested, but he would have been had he shouted at her in a room that he was going to push her against a wall before a debate. To criminalize what political figures say about each other risks creating a slippery slope towards autocracy in which truth is defined and fortified by might rather than right.

The three presidents might also have distinguished political speech on the Israeli War from antisemitic hate-speech. Now we have arrived at the definitive question. To be sure, calling for a genocide of the Jews is heinous on its face, given the Holocaust in the 20th century committed in Nazi Germany. Liz Magill, the former president of the University of Pennsylvania wrote after her Congressional testimony to emphasize “the irrefutable fact that a call for genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence human beings can perpetuate.”[14] So even as “normalized” in the context of the Israeli War against the Palestinians in Gaza, the political position that the Jewish people should be killed to redress the hugely disproportional killing of Palestinians in Gaza is a low blow (i.e., underhanded). Furthermore, a genocide of Jews, rather than more narrowly of Jewish Israelis, overgeneralizes because some Jews opposed the military attacks. In fact, I met three Jewish young men in November, 2023 who were on the way to a pro-Ceasefire rally, and my reaction was as nonchalant as them telling me; in the face of the unstoppable carnage going beyond that of the Hamas attack, it didn’t matter. Unless consumed by hatred, the human reaction to such lopsided harm is to recoil in frustrated angst that naturally spurs action even if in mere protest. Therefore, calls for a genocide of the Jews are problematic.  

Even so—and this is where I admittedly climb out on a controversial limb (no saws please!)—the overgeneralization can be viewed nevertheless as part of the political dispute on the conflict. In the context of a war, especially if the harm is heavily lopsided, political barbs do not stay within the limits of reason. The perception and emotions even of onlookers continents away naturally become exaggerated, such that hyperbole is used. Indeed, officials in a government at war can enact policies that are fueled by the use of hyperbole in political speech. The Japanese internment camps in California during World War II furnish us with a good example of overgeneralization in the context of war.  From an innate (though resistible) urge for vengeance, given the flawed, inherently unfair theory of collective justice and the Israeli president’s claim that every resident in Gaza was responsible for the Hamas attack—as if the fact that Hamas had been elected in Gaza implies that every Palestinian must therefore have supported the attack of October 7, 2023—Palestinian calls for a genocide of the Jews can be treated as political speech in the context of that war. Put another way, for so much destruction to fall on one side in a war with no means of answering the harm with the infliction of proportionate harm, the human sentiment of disapprobation, which David Hume saw as furnishing moral judgment itself, quite naturally is aroused. Opposition to the extent to which Israeli government inflicted damage on Gaza can thus be understood to include calls for a counter-attack on the same scale and even including hyperbole without such calls being exogenous to the conflict and to political discourse more generally. Had the loss of housing and lives not been so disproportionate, then I believe there would not have been calls for a Jewish genocide. As the saying goes, vengeance should be served cold, for otherwise you don’t know what might come of it.[15]  

Situating calls for a genocide even though overgeneralized within the rubric of political speech, and thus protected as such even on college campuses, is not to claim that such calls are ethical. Even calls for a genocide more specifically of Jews in Israel to match that (arguably) being committed by the Israeli government against Palestinians in Gaza must reckon with the ethical point that two wrongs do not make a right. Notice that this point implies a prior ethical judgment against the Israeli government’s disproportionate killing and destruction of homes, food, and hospitals without ensuring replacements. Nevertheless, the motive for justice based on equality of harm is not problem-free, ethically.

Watching students at Penn being asked on Fox News whether calls for a genocide of the Jews is antisemitic hate-speech a week after the three university presidents equivocated before Congress, I was initially stunned by the refusal of (at least) one student to take a position in the political dispute on the war, but then I realized that she had had no lived experience in the century of the Holocaust, and, furthermore, that the political dispute had turned even such calls partisan—and thus as fodder in the fight. Agreeing that the calls were antisemitic hate-speech would be to take a side. This in itself means the calls are political speech rather than exogenous to it.   

By implication, neither is it antisemitic to drape a Palestinian flag on a Jewish menorah, as was done in New Haven, Connecticut, where Yale is located, in December, 2023. Rather, the act is a political statement against Israel as a combatant in the war. I contend that Yale overreacted on more than one level—both in how the administration characterized the act and in how far the university presumed its authority went locally, off university property. The hyperbole and encroachment on the purview of the city government of New Haven provide a stark contrast to Harvard’s measured and balanced reaction in the wake of the testimony of that president a week or so earlier. Hence, I declare Harvard the actual winner over Yale even though Yale had won The Game just weeks before Harvard’s D- Congressional testimony.

Even though a Palestine flag was draped on a menorah was off Yale’s campus, literally on a public square, Yale’s administration felt the need to become involved, even notifying the New Haven police as if the mayor’s office could not handle that task. That Yale contacted the New Haven police department is ironic because Yale’s private police cars regularly patrolled beyond the university’s property, even regularly arresting local residents for offensives unrelated to the university. One local resident who worked at a local hospital told me that Yale’s private police force regularly arrests local residents coming out of bars. That they might be drunk and hit Yale students is not a sufficient (contingent, indirect) connection to justify giving the Yale Corporation police power in a city. I submit that the overreach is in need of a court challenge on constitutional grounds, as the U.S. Constitution gives police powers to the state governments rather than to private companies and private non-profit organizations. Astonishingly, even Yale’s security guards felt entitled to patrol local streets not bordering campus as if an organization’s security guards were police. 


Several city blocks from the campus, a Yale security-guard car has its overhead patrol lights on.  If the car were merely en route to campus, then the yellow overhead lights should have been off so not to give the wrong impression that the city is Yale's property. 

 

In over-extending (or hyper-extending), and thus maximizing, its power locally, Yale was being like a private, profit-maximizing company, and thus in need of being regulated.  In contrast, Harvard’s balancing of its disdain for calls for a genocide of the Jews and the value of free speech on a university campus evinces the more general homoeostatic self-regulation that does not trigger the need for external government regulation.


Yale police patrolling off campus, duplicating New Haven police (left); A manned Yale police car and three Yale security guards patrolling off campus (right).




The ubiquitous surveillance by Yale police of a shopping area off campus. 

A Yale police car with overhead patrol lights on making a loop around a city block off campus. 

I turn now to a detailed critique of Yale’s stated position made on December 10, 2023 on the draping of the political flag on a Jewish symbol. “Yale condemns in the strongest possible terms the desecration of a menorah on the New Haven Green,” which is a small park in downtown New Haven. The university opines that the “placement of a Palestinian flag on the menorah conveys a deeply antisemitic message to Jewish residents of New Haven, including members of the Yale community.”[16] I contend that both desecration and antisemitic overstate the effect of a political flag drooping on a menorah. It is a political rather than an anti-religious statement, and thus desecration is not incurred. Nevertheless, Yale felt the need to involve itself in a local matter, off campus, in claiming a role pertaining to local residents not affiliated with Yale. The university even stated that its “regulations reach conduct occurring on or off campus that imperils the integrity and values of the Yale community.”[17] This is an open door, for values is a vague term that can mean practically anything, for a university to assume the power of a city government. For example, Yale presumptuously took on the role of the city in asking “the New Haven police to investigate this incident.”[18] In fact, “Yale may conduct its own investigation”[19] Was the local police department not to be trusted? Were there any grounds to suppose that the local police department’s personnel were incompetent?  As Yale’s own police department was literally over-stepping beyond Yale’s territory, these questions could be asked about Yale’s hired guns, especially as they had handed pathological scare-tactic fliers to freshmen when they were moving in at the beginning of the school year in the midst of a contract dispute with the university.

Even though the problems inherent in Yale’s police-state mentality are tertiary to the question being investigated here concerning pro-Palestinian political reactions, a slippery slope exists between such power-aggrandizement and that of the Nazis in Germany that resulted in a genocide of the Jews. Viewed in this wider perspective, Yale's heavy-handed threat of police power in reacting to the Palestinian flag on a menorah has an undercutting dark side. 

Presuming to fortify truth with a partisan ideology is also something Yale had in common with Nazi Germany. In characterizing a drooping political flag during the Israeli war as a “deeply antisemitic” and a “desecration,” Yale was bringing in truth consisting of ideology, rather than focusing on maintaining a market for ideas and protecting individuals on campus directly (rather than indirectly). Defending Yale, an associate dean at Yale’s School of Management, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld—a nice man and very good teacher who had been mistreated at Emery University before coming to Yale in the 1990s when I was a student at Yale—claimed that university administrations have “an elevated duty to fortify the truth” in regard to the safety of students in fending off what he labels as “hate, threats, and violence.”[20] Like “values,” “truth” is like an open door, giving a university administration dangerous latitude to impose an ideology and expunging other, antipodal political positions. Yale imposed its “truth” locally in declaring that draping a political flag on a menorah is “deeply antisemitic” rather than representing a politically partisan position in a war. What if someone had drooped a Ukrainian flag on the menorah? Would the menorah still be desecrated? Should a ritual artifact of a religion even be on city property?[21]

In conclusion, I have argued that the Israeli war in Gaza politicized what in the previous century had been antisemitic hate-speech in the context of the Holocaust. The disproportionate military aggression of Israel in Gaza unintentionally turned what had been antisemitic hate-speech into fodder in a political dispute. Hence Harvard’s governing board, the Harvard Corporation, intelligently turned its attention to the actual safety of people on the campus—and being angry at a political position does not count as being unsafe—as a way both the oppose calls for a genocide of Jews and embrace the value of protecting free speech where the exchange even of unpopular political speech should be valued, given a university’s “commit to academic freedom.” Yale’s “duty to fortify truth,” which presumably includes declaring as hate any statement that conflicts with that “truth,” is not as consistent with such freedom and represents a slippery slope to totalitarian autocracy in which guns, on as well as off campus, enforce truth from the evil of hate.


1 The number of painstaking revisions I have made in re-thinking and clarifying my argument testifies to both the difficulty and the intensity involved. Easily among the most significant events of the 20th century (although dwarfed by the Nazi genocide of 19 million Slavs in Eastern Europe, including the U.S.S.R., outside of battle), the Holocaust in Nazi Germany was still etched in stone as the epitome of human evil—the banality of evil in bureaucratic yet even so chilling terms—in America even after the Vietnam War. For mind that came of age in the last quarter of the 20th century, it is surreal just to hear the term genocide bandied about in 2023 in the context of Israel’s war by either side.
2. Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
3. Najib Jobain, Wafaa Shurafa, and Samy Magdy, “Israel Strikes Across Gaza as Offensive Leaves Both It and U.S. Increasingly Isolated,” AP News, December 12, 2023.
4. Caitlin Hu, “United Nations General Assembly Votes to Demand Immediate Ceasefire in Gaza,” CNN.com, December 12, 2023.
5. Ibid.
6.  Paul Blumenthal, “Israeli President Suggests That Civilians In Gaza Are Legitimate Targets,” The Huffington Post, October 16, 2023.
7. “Gaza Is ‘Running Out of Time,’ UN Experts Warn, Demanding a Ceasefire to Prevent Genocide,” Press Releases, UN Human Rights, November 2, 2023.
8. Solcyre Burga, “Is What’s Happening in Gaza a Genocide: Experts Weigh In,” Time, November 14, 2023.
9. Matt Egan, “Harvard’s Board: We Unanimously Stand in Support of President Gay,” CNN.com, December 12, 2023.
10. Ibid.
11. “Yale Statement on Desecration of a Menorah,” YaleNews, December 10, 2023 (accessed December 11, 2023).
12.  Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
13. Skip Worden, Institutional Conflicts of Interest. In making this argument, I am admittedly at odds with some other scholars who maintain that a conflict of interest only becomes unethical when it is exploited. I contend that those scholars are too optimistic on human nature to suppose that an arrangement that could be exploited can long exist without being exploited. So, whether viewed as a temptation or as likely to result in harm, institutional conflicts of interest are in my view tantamount to being inherently unethical. Therefore, I recommend that such arrangements, whether in business, government, or business-and-government, should be dismantled rather than tolerated or, even worse, ignored. 
14. Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
15. In having vengeance reside with God—Vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord—the vice is snatched from humans but at a cost. Nietzsche take the attribution of a vice onto a being of omnibenevolence as discrediting the concept of God, hence the philosopher wrote, Gott ist tot. A better concept would entail, Vengeance is null and void, even and especially in the divine. Then there would be no internal contradiction in the concept of God as it has come down through history in the Abrahamic religions.
16. “Yale Statement on Desecration of a Menorah,” YaleNews, December 10, 2023 (accessed December 11, 2023).
17. Ibid.
18.  Ibid.
19. Ibid.
20. Allison Morrow, “How Harvard, Penn and MIT’s Presidents Made Such a Fatal Error in Their Free Speech Defense,” CNN.com, December 11, 2023.
21. As a student at Yale, I took Steven Carter’s class on Law and Religion, in which cases on the separation of church and state were covered. As surreal as calls for a genocide of Jews is, so too are the calls by some U.S. House representatives for a Christian nation. Given such calls, I believe it is prudent to keep city property, including public schools, free of religious iconography. For the record, a Christmas tree is not religious in nature (unlike a manger), and thus to equate it with a religious object is to commit a category mistake. Moreover, secularized “myth,” whether of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Santa Claus and Frosty the Snowman, or the Pilgrims and the Indians sharing a peaceful feast, that is integral to an official national holiday, is not in itself religious.

Saturday, October 21, 2023

Harvard and Penn Alumni Revolt: A Matter of Free Speech on Israel's War

In the context of the embroiled hatred violently spewing out between Israelis and Palestinians in October 2023, some rich, very vocal alumni at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania threated to stop donating money in order to pressure the respective university administrations (and boards of trustees) to clamp down on pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel speech on the campuses. Over at Yale, 25,000 signatures were quickly obtained from students in favor of firing a faculty employee for having written against Israel’s violence against residents of Gaza. Yale’s administration backed up the faculty member’s right of free speech, especially as it was on social media rather than in a classroom or even on campus. Tenure itself, it should be noted, exists in part to protect professors from being fired for airing unpopular opinions. Nietzsche wrote that no philosopher is a person of one’s own time, so it is only natural that thinkers may have unusual and even controversial opinions. I contend that as respites for contemplation and learning, universities should not be pressured into taking sides on controversial political issues that do not directly affect higher education, and, furthermore, that even rich alumni have an obligation to safeguard their respective alma maters rather than seek to turn them into hotbeds of ideological unrest. Of course, money talks, even if it is not in itself free speech, which, even if unpopular, universities should protect. Hence, the question arises: To what degree are Ivy League universities like Harvard and Penn vulnerable to the threats of even a few rich alumni? Does it make a difference whether the demands of such ideologues gain traction among the rank-and-file alumni? Whereas a university’s administration can usually ignore student protests, those of wealthy donors may be another story.

I contend that even scholastically-oriented Ivy League universities don’t know what to make of alumni, both in terms of their moral obligations as members of their respective universities and how alumni should be treated, whether they are on or off campus. A former college dean at Columbia University told me in 2023 that academic (and, much more so, non-academic) administrators don’t know what to do with—nor, equally importantly, how to treat—alumni who are “in residence” (i.e., back on campus for a semester or two to audit classes or use the library for a research project or book). Incredibly, some non-academic employees at Yale have been stupid enough to insult alumni—telling us that we are not really members of the Yale community. The director of an alumni-engagement office even told me that! That would not be my fundraising strategy, but I have a BS and MBA in business and I only worked at Yale’s fundraising office part-time while I was a student, so what do I know. 

It is easier for university administrators (and even non-supervisory employees) to figure out how to treat rich alumni in the business world, but even here, not even university presidents have a firm handle on what obligations even such alumni have to protect their alma maters. Of course, kissing up to (i.e., placating) such alumni only goes so far before it becomes obscenely indecent and even self-humiliating as well as contrary to a university’s interests. As a European visiting student at Yale in the late 1990s remarked to me concerning American society, there is a limit to everything.

Placating a rich alumnus who is publicly screaming at one’s own university’s administration from a distance to prohibit certain objectionable (to the alum) political statements by withholding further donations can become ethically and practically problematic. Giving a spoiled child ice cream because the child is throwing a tantrum might quiet the child today but it is not fair to any other children who are behaving themselves, and the chance of another outrage tomorrow has just increased by rewarding the one today.

When I was a student at Indiana University, I witnessed the famous basketball coach, Bobby Knight, make fun of a group of advertising executives at a lunch at the business school. The university’s president would not touch the bully, who was doubtless very popular with the alumni. Fecklessness eventually catches up with a university president. At the very least, the man looked weak. Eventually, Knight had finally gone too far and the president had to act. It should not have had to come to that. Whether in regard to a "sacred cow" university employee or a rich alum, a university president gradually weakens oneself in habitually reacting in fear. 

The question of whether university presidents should allow themselves to be influenced by loud ideological alumni with a striking financial punch is actually not a simple matter. Should the nature of the cause make any difference, or is the manipulation merely a selfish ploy that should discouraged as at least a deterrent. Furthermore, should academic administrators jettison academic freedom and freedom of speech on campus just because some rich guys far away don’t like what is being said? Are not those alumni using free speech to urge other alumni to stop giving? In the case of a war, where truth is the first casualty, the presumption of being able to insist that the other guy has it wrong and therefore should be stopped from speaking (or writing) can be flagged. In other words, it takes two to tango. Especially where two peoples have been at it as long as the Israelis and Palestinians have, a lop-sided presumption of ideological infallibility is itself problematic. To claim that one of the two belligerent parties is “off limits” as far as criticism is concerned is highly dogmatic. In fact, such a claim, especially if backed up with financial threats, is itself weaponized. Should institutions that are oriented foremost to knowledge and learning as an ideal become embroiled in an international contagion, especially if the facilitators (i.e., the wealthy alumni) are not in residence on campus?

Members of a university’s community include even such alumni, and, unlike the general public, those alums have an obligation to honor a university president’s wishes to protect (what should be) the rarified atmosphere on campus. The heat of battle, slid in by alums at a distance, would come at the cost of reflection, which is more keeping with campuses devoted to thought. Alumni who do not feel so obligated and yet use their wealth, which may have something to do with what was learned, are ethically compromised, especially if the ideological cause is not really as one-sided as it might appear at first glance or for ideological reasons (including those stemming from a reductionistic and hyperextended (and thus artificial) group identification). Generally speaking, a presumption of epistemological infallibility combined with ideological fervent can elude a mind’s natural internal checks and balances. Such thoughts as these, rather than ideological passions, are at home on a college campus. 

Ethical and academic prerogatives are nice, but as the commercializing, de facto “for-profit” universities such as Arizona State University illustrate, lofty ideals are not always believed (erroneously) to be realistic or are otherwise respected by university presidents and boards of trustees. Indeed, a university president—especially if one is a business person rather than a scholar—may even be leading the charge to create profit-centers and “cash-cow” partnerships with companies for applied research.  The power of money is hard to ignore and of itself it pays no heed to other prerogatives other than itself.

A university president’s response to financial pressure from donors may depend on how viral the contagion is likely to spread (i.e., to other alumni) and how financially reliant the university is on donations from its alumni to meet operating expenses without drawing on an endowment.  The presidents of Harvard and Penn were certainly facing some pressure from a few big donors when Israel was destroying Gaza, but how much is hard to say from a distance.

On the one hand, donations had been “the single largest contributor to revenue at Harvard” in 2022, “accounting or 45 percent of the university’s $5.8 billion in income.”[1] Gifts accounted for 9 percent of the university’s operating budget and 36 percent of the university’s $51 billion endowment.[2] Yet Lee Gardner, a writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education remarked in 2023 that even though donor “relationships are very, very important for colleges of all types” and there “is a premium placed on developing and cultivating donor relationships, . . . Ivy League universities have the relative luxury of being enormously wealthy.”[3] That luxury translates into being able to tell even big donors that anti-Israel political statements fall under the rubric of free speech, which is something that universities should honor, respect, and defend. This obviously would not sit well with angry, ideologically driven alumni (or students, as at Yale at the time). Sara Harberson, a former associate dean of admissions at Penn, acknowledged that universities such as Harvard and Penn “have a lot more financial insulation from the impact of some donors getting upset.”[4] That insulation may have a temporal dimension. Gardner points out that the “impact is less likely to be immediate as potentially longer term on gifts or donations that may not have been in the works or would come to fruition for years.”[5] However, what if those donors set in motion a wave of withholdings from the smaller fish?

As individuals, the smaller fish don’t matter to university administrators, and thus have no means by which to pressure them. At my student job at Yale’s development office decades before 2023, I had to figure out how to convince the average alum to give $50 or $200 to a university whose endowment stood back then at $18 billion.[6] Invariably, the alumni would ask me, Why does Yale need my money? My answer was to earmark the small gifts to specific interests going back to the particular alum’s college activities, such as being in a play in one of the residential colleges. In talking with the non-rich alumni, I sensed that they could distinguish the list of alumni who were subject to calls from us students in the phone room from the rich alumni whom I researched for the Major Gifts officers after I had been promoted from making calls.  

Both as a student and then back on campus as an alumnus, I had the sense that Yale’s academic and non-academic staff were indifferent to whether I was there or not, and yet quite interested in certain other people there. When I returned decades after graduation as an alum in residence to write a book, administrators would not have tolerated the rude behavior from more than a few (faculty and non-academic) employees had I have made some very sizeable donations (or written an amazing book) before returning to campus. As an ordinary alumnus, I didn’t matter, and too many employees felt they could take advantage of my vulnerability as an alum at a university at which alumni are not considered to be members of the Yale community. 

The tacit, unspoken and often instant judgment that organizational functionaries make on whether to respect someone as an insider or an outsider is powerful and can rarely be changed, especially if the organizational culture supports viewing one class of insiders as outsiders. At Yale, I observed too many university administrators, faculty, and even non-academic employees who seemed inordinately oriented to either extending or withholding their respect in a way that is passive aggressive. Rich alumni from such an organizational culture who are intent on pressuring a university president for political ideological purposes can be understood subtly as saying, in effect, I do matter and I’m worthy of your respect. This unconscious need is pressing in cultures in which respect tends to be weaponized. In fact, efforts merely to get someone's attention can be read in this way (as means of getting respect). Whether “money talks” in this respect is an interesting empirical question.

Regarding the rich donors at Harvard and Penn who thought that those schools could and should prohibit pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel political opinions by students and faculty, Harberson argues that a few large “donors cutting ties could also convince smaller donors to end their contributions, hurt alumni relations, impact college admissions and put pressure on the president or members of the board of trustees.”[7] The negative repercussions would get the attention of university administrators. Of themselves, small donors are peanuts for universities like Harvard and Penn, but together the small gifts matter. All they need is a leader, but given the arduous dispersion of a large university’s alumni, and the sheer differences in their ideologies, the likelihood is small that a major donor could enlist a large enough cadre of smaller donors as leverage.   

I do think that rich alumni who have made some very significant gifts can have considerable sway with even Ivy League university administrations, but that the impact of small donors as an extension of a few rich alumni is likely nugatory. For one thing, the "rank and file" alumni of a large university are dispersed and hardly of one mind ideologically. Furthermore, it would take a lot of alumni at the $50 or even $200 level to be on a university's radar. 

If a big donor does indeed have sway, I contend that both the presidents of prestigious universities and their respective rich alumni could benefit by thinking about the ethical dimension the status or classification of alumni. If Yale is any indication, a university administration can have a truly pathetic understanding of the standing of alumni, not to mention the moral dimension of the relationship. At its most obscene, telling alumni in residence that they are not members of the university community ("community" here being weaponized and thus not worthy of being a member of) and treating them as such are seriously flawed from the standpoint of fundraising. Superbia mala est. Petty obsessions or fixations such as whether an alum's Yale library ID is really a Yale ID, or whether an alum's email address from the Alumni Association is really a Yale email address are beneath a truly prestigious university. Academic administrators should exercise at least some control over non-academic employees. 

On the alumni side of the moral equation, rich donors should realize that, as stated in the original Spiderman film, With great power comes great responsibility. Imposing an ideological agenda on one's alma mater is egoist and decadent, and using one's money to do so is obscene and anti-intellectual. The responsibility especially of alumni active on a societal level extends to the obligation to protect their respective campuses from commercial and political interlarding encroachments that could compromise the sui generis academic atmosphere of a university. Even an administration’s excessive efforts to render a campus into a police state should be opposed, as  the use of intimidation even as a deterrent is antithetical to the academic atmosphere that should enjoy hegemony or primacy on a university campus. 

As I was writing this essay in Yale's main library, a local protest against Israel's treatment of the Palestinians slowly walked by. My contemplation afforded by the quiet in the library was quite a contrast from the shouts from the street below. 

I went outside to snap some photos to accompany this essay. Before I knew it, the large mass of marchers was turning onto the campus pedestrian lane where I was standing. By the way, it was not at all cold outside, as the white winter coat on the right might suggest.  The campus was largely empty on that Sunday because the university was just about to come off a brief fall recess. 

I stepped aside and watched as the marchers passed by. They cut through the main campus without any obstructions or conflicts before turning right and onto New Haven's central park, or "green" in New England speak. The marchers passed through the quiet campus as if it were a semi-permeable membrane inert to the political angst. I contend that Yale handled the exogenous, interlarding political movement well in allowing it to pass through, though ideally the march should have gone around the private university, for, besides the matter of private property, an academic campus is not a proper situs for that which belongs in the political or civic domain. State universities admittedly have a harder time with this distinction than does a private, academically-oriented university because a public school is linked government and is not on private property.

Safeguarding a campus on which academia is valued thus does not mean having a moral obligation to agree with the policies or culture of a given administration. The vantage point of alumni being longitudinal even over decades, criticism of a university administration can be extremely valuable to a university. For instance, in seeing Yale turned into a fortress, a virtual police state, a quarter of a century after my graduation, I could definitely perceive the salience of intimidation imbued on the hitherto academic campus, and thus the culpability or totalitarian extremism of a university administration. 

Alumni are indeed members of their respective university communities (even at the outlier, Yale), whether an alum is on or off campus, and this brings with it certain rights and privileges, but also obligations. Rather than excluding alumni, universities (especially their students) could actually benefit from alumni who are visiting or in residence. For instance, alumni could be encouraged to audit courses and to attend colloquia and one-off lectures by visitors, and even to eat periodically at residential colleges. In fact, those colleges could even have alumni fellows, who would volunteer their time to associate with the colleges and thus with their students. Now we're talking a real community, rather than a "community" weaponized to exclude even an entire classification of insiders. Alumni could also get the discounts that even non-academic employees enjoy not only at the university dining halls rather than having to pay the prohibitive price for the general public, and alumni could also be distinguished from the general public when paying for symphony tickets. I contend that rights and privileges are justified in their own right, and they can even benefit the current students. Advise from an alum can be extremely valuable because an alum has longitudinal knowledge of the university and vocational experience (and contacts!). From this perspective of enlightened self-interest, the truly pathetic level of university administrators telling alumni that they are not members of the university community can be recognized as not only sordid, but also counterproductive. 

Turning to alumni obligations, these go beyond not compromising the sui generis (i.e., uniqueness) of academia to pro-actively protecting it! Hence, alumni have an obligation to speak out against their fellow alums who would use their wealth to pressure the university into prohibiting certain political speech and thus embroiling the campus in an ideological or political controversy at the expense of a focus on abstract contemplation and learning. University presidents should not be afraid to appeal to the alumni as a group to keep campuses from becoming political by picking sides in an ideological moral, political, economic, or religious societal dispute. A legitimate perspective of a president would be, Look, we extended to you certain rights and privileges when we granted your degree, and you are members for life, so it is only fair that we expect you to accept certain obligations too. Not that I expect you to agree with all of my decisions, and in fact your critical perspective is quite valuable to the university, but I do expect you at the very least to protect the academic mission of the university and by no means to compromise it by pressuring me to embroil the university in an exogenous controversial matter not germane to OUR mission but, rather, fit for inclusion in another domain. Protect us from such interlarding instinctual urges from other domains so we can have a sanctuary for academic discourse and exploration. 


1. Nathaniel Meyersohn, “Harvard and UPenn Donors Are Furious. It May Have a Financial Domino Effect,” CNN.com, October 19. 2023.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. I hope I didn’t just reveal classified information in revealing the endowment figure, and I can state for the record that I did not bring any boxes home from the Development Office and store them in my bathroom after I graduated.
7. Nathaniel Meyersohn, “Harvard and UPenn Donors Are Furious. It May Have a Financial Domino Effect,” CNN.com, October 19. 2023.