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.
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.
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.
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.
