Yale Police Arrest 47 Students: A Symptom

A university is not an inner city, and thus should not be policed as such, as if students were hostile gang members in need of constant surveillance. On April 22, 2024, I was not a bit surprised in reading that Yale, which I had hitherto described as a private police-state on steroids, ordered its own private police to arrest 47 students that morning on charges of criminal trespassing on campus for having brought and set up tents days earlier. Even though temporary housing goes beyond political protest per se and the students could have returned day after day to Beinecke Plaza to protest—venting off stream that could be justified by the U.S. Government’s continued financial, military, and political enabling of Israel’s military offensive in Gaza—that Yale’s administration put the plaza under police guard after employees had removed the tents is indicative of a police-state mentality that is not conducive to academic pursuits. Furthermore, arresting students for criminal trespassing rather than simply removing the tents demonstrates an inner-city policing mentality that is out of place on a prestigious university's campus.

Alternatively, the university could have sent security employees rather than its private police force—and notice that both Columbia and NYU used municipal rather than private police! Rather than charging students with trespassing, Yale could have used its on-campus security to tell the students to pack up their tents as cleaning crews cleaned the plaza. “You can come back to protest, but tents are not allowed and right now we are cleaning the plaza from the weekend.” Some students had even brought tall wooden bookshelves with which to promote books on the topic. How Yalie! Boola Boola!

April 22, 2024 at Yale as Yale's private police force arrests students for trespassing (YDN)

Nevertheless, erecting tents and bookshelves is not political protesting. Had particular students refused to pack up, then the university could have called the New Haven police, whose legitimacy is solid from a democratic standpoint, to respond in a per person way. At the very least, the local police should have handled any local residents having tents there. It is entirely reasonable for a university to tell students (and especially local residents!) to remove furniture and tents from campus. Regarding New Haven residents who came to Yale's campus to "set up shop," Yale is not a state university. It would be highly presumptuous for a townie to refuse to pack up, but students should be handled differently, for they are neither locals nor even customers as their university status is academic in nature andthey should thus be dealt thusly. Deans rather than handcuffs, unless the latter are absolutely necessary as a last resort, should do the heavy lifting.

Such a draconian measure as saturating Beinecke Plaza with university police to do a mass arrest as if students on their own campus constitutes trespassing might fit an inner-city mentality, but on a college campus, the trust and stability of students at their school undoubtedly could only take a hit. Put another way, I doubt that Yale students looked at Yale police employees (and their ubiquitous vehicles on campus) the same way for the rest of the 2024 spring term. Certainly, claims by the police employees that they are there to protect the students would fall on deaf ears, as it should.

When Yale graduate students who were teaching assistants had been on strike sometime in the 1990s, while I was a student there, some of them had tents in Beinecke Plaza. I used to walk past them after eating breakfast at Commons (sadly, along with the advent of Yale’s police presence on campus at least as of 2023, breakfast was no longer served at Commons when I returned in September, 2023 as an alumni scholar in residence). Back in the 1990s, there was no hint of possible arrest for trespassing. Of course, Yale was not a campus saturated with security guards and Yale police employees back then; Sterling library did not have its own security force making rounds every 20 minutes or so, disturbing students who study in the stacks. Tents were fine (though not my preference).  A double-standard surfaces, however, 25 years later, now that Israel was being criticized. At the very least, the president of Yale had a personal conflict of interest that inadvertently played into the double standard. 

I contend that Yale students should protest the police-state mentality itself at Yale, and the resulting saturation of security and university police personnel and cars on and even off campus. A local resident told me in December, 2023 that Yale police regularly arrest locals leaving bars at night OFF-CAMPUS, and yet The Yale Daily News reported on April 22, 2024 that Yale police have no jurisdiction off Yale’s property—even on the local streets themselves that border or even run through campus, such as those that intersect at Grove and Prospect, where the sit-down protest resumed on April 22^nd after the arrests. Yale police self-entitlement hardly stops at the edges of Yale's campus. It’s no wonder that Yale students walked into an intersection owned by the city just beyond Beinecke Plaza in preferring to be subject to a police force of an inner city to Yale’s private police state. Arresting young-adult students—many undergraduates still being teenagers!—for trespassing on campus for having set up tents is in my view unnecessary and thus indicative of a mentality of domination and even aggression of easy targets. It is not as if an Ivy League university is at all like an inner city, or populated as such.

The chief of Yale's department of police at the time had been the chief of the New Haven police department for more than a decade, and he participated in an Israel-led program for police as reported by The Yale Daily News on April 22, 2024. To be sure, he did graduate from Yale College, and more than a decade later, he received a degree from Yale’s divinity school, ironically a Christian divinity school. Even so, I contend that his policing at Yale did not reflect his having been a member of the Yale community, but, rather, his time as head of New Haven’s police department. I contend that Yale should not be policed at all like an inner city, and even hiring retired inner-city police employees risks having students treated very unfittingly. For one thing, Yale students (and thus alumni), employees, and faculty are vetted, whereas the residents of crime-ridden urban areas are obviously not.

Nevertheless, at Yale during the fall of 2023, a thug security employee stalked me three times on campus. The local creeper even hid behind a car to take pictures of me one night as I was walking down Prospect Street. Why does Yale hire local creepers who are too weakly constituted to know the difference between a university like Yale and an inner city? I had complained twice with photo evidence, but I soon discovered that a dean at Yale refused to get the bully fired. Get the thugs off the payroll! Where there’s smoke, there’s probably fire. Simply put, Yale is not New Haven. The other school is much better situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

As far as the wildly excessive police presence on Yale’s campus on a daily basis, and even AFTER the tents were cleared on April 22, 2024 at Beinecke Plaza and then on the following day, I’m not the only Yalie to have left. A lawyer who studied at Yale and went on to teach there told me after he and I both had left, “It has gotten really bad there.” I knew he meant it in terms of the sheer meanness, but all I had to do was mention the constant police and security presence everywhere on campus and the guy was firmly nodding his head in agreement. Its certainly ironic when being so "in control" evinces things being out of control. Try squeezing jello in your hand if you don't believe me. Tightness gone too far.   

I submit that something has gone very wrong when an academic campus looks like a police-zone even after an incident has been ended. On April 23, 2024, the day after, CNN reported that Beineke Plaza “was closed and under police guard.”[1] If tents had really been the problem, the university would have allowed students to hold protests there as long as they were not setting up camp. For their part, the students should have given in on the tents in order to stay in the plaza on April 22nd. 

That “50 to 60 Yale police” employees had been at the plaza on the morning of the arrests, along with 15 police from New Haven just shows the over-extent of police presence at Yale and the underlying mentality.[2] Why have the second jurisdiction there?  To intimidate? Only Yale’s police “were involved in arresting protesters.”[3] From a democratic standpoint, it should have been the reverse; like Columbia, Yale should have called the local police department like anyone else. Fifty to sixty Yale police, doubtless with an overwhelming show of their vehicles with lights flashing, is not only excessive, but it pensively baits violance and at the very least stubbornness, which is exactly what they got. 

Even on the following evening, there were five Yale police employees standing in front of the main library, and several security cars stationary on a nearby walkway between the library and the law school, and doubtlessly more Yale police and security in the plaza while a protest was going on nearby, on Cross-Campus lawn until 10 pm. Why all the fear? The protesters had moved from the street intersection at 5pm as New Haven police had asked. Paranoia and an aggressive bent are in my view the underlying causes, and the resulting visuals doubtlessly cause student and faculty discomfort and impede studying. That this was presumably not a concern to Yale’s police and security departments should be something Yale Corporation's board might want to reflect on. 

I had seen such an over-reactive, passive-aggressive, and even paranoid mentality on a daily basis at Yale during the 2023-2024 academic year that I was not at all surprised to read that the reaction to the tents was draconian as well and went on well after the tents had been taken down. Was a full-frontal militaristic assault by some Yale students really likely even after all the arrests?  Why have the plaza then under “police guard?” Why have it closed at all, if the tents were really the problem? I’m sure that even on the day after, that part of the campus looked even more like a police zone than the campus typically looked in 2023-2024. The Rambo mentality has no place at a university like Yale. Students and alumni can unite to defend academia from such interlarding encroachments that do not respect academia. Oil and water do not mix. A university is not an inner city. Where is Yale's board of directors in all this? Silence itself can be enabling.

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1. Devon Sayers et al, “Protesters Remain at Yale University a Day after 45 pro-Palestinian Activists Were Arrested on Campus,” CNN.Com, April 23, 2024.
2. “Yale Police Arrest 47 student protesters for Trespassing on Beinecke Plaza,” Yale Daily News, April 22, 2024.
3. Devon Sayers et al, “Protesters Remain at Yale University a Day after 45 pro-Palestinian Activists Were Arrested on Campus,” CNN.Com, April 23, 2024.

The University of California at Berkeley

In visiting a university even for a short period of time, a surprisingly deep grasp of its dominant organizational culture's mentality is possible, especially if it is foreign to the outsider's perspective and yet draws on  instinctual urges whose imprints one has previously seen. It is perhaps human, all too human to relish sending harsh messages to outsiders, albeit indirectly because cowardness and self-illusion are included with the appetite for blood. This can be so at a university even if scholarly visitors are among the targets. The primitive instinctual urge to aggressively harm people by reminding them unnecessarily that they are not in the tribe can have sufficient power to overcome other contending urges to characterize the very culture of an organization. I will argue that the University of California at Berkeley can be characterized as such. For I witnessed this triumphant urge in rather  obvious behavior of some faculty and administrators. I came rather quickly during my visit to grasp the nature and roots of the favorite blood-sport of enough rude faculty members to get a picture of those primped  up, intellectually stunted "scholars" at that heavily passive aggressive university. The message of exclusion for taxpayers visiting the campus and scholars invited to give a lecture there, I being neither, was made clear to me by a student employee at the main library,  which tellingly is closed on Saturdays even during the semesters: Even if a visitor on the large campus does not have an umbrella and rain is pouring down, the university's shuttle buses are only for students, faculty, and staff. The student enjoyed his power to say no to me; I could not detect even the slightest tone of shame in representing such an inhospitable institutional host. Bad air! Instead, the he relished the firmness in the power to say no, which is to say, to exclude. In contrast, the campus shuttles at Yale, ironically a private university, transport anyone around campus! So much for California being easy-going. So much for UC Berkeley sporting intellectually curious and passionate scholars in search of new ideas from visitors. Rather, Nietzsche’s new birds of prey, whose spite naturally issues out from deep ressentement, populate the faculty and their bosses. So much for even common courtesy and gratitude to California taxpayers and distinguished professors from other universities invited to deliver a lecture; if you are walking around campus or walk out of a library and get wet, tough luck! Public is apparently below even common.  

The full essay is at "The University of California." 

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.

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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.

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."

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 48^th or 49^th out of the 50 States for years. In an analysis by WalletHub, Arizona’s pre-college education came in at 49^th 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.  

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

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 14^th, 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 20^th 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.

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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 20^th 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 20^th 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.