Lee Loevinger’s law of irresistible use predicts that “if there is a government agency, this proves something needs regulating.” (The Federal Communications Commission in the Sixties, which he served, disciplined broadcasters according to what it termed, with little self-awareness and even less irony, the fairness doctrine.) It shouldn’t be surprising, now, that a pair of academics think that the “toxic discourse” on American colleges regarding Hamas’s renewed declaration of war against Jewry demonstrates that we need to make heavier use of the purifying powers of the academic webinar.
“Universities can help,” is the earnest declaration in the New York Times of professors and deans Amaney Jamal and Keren Yarhi-Milo of Princeton, made in good faith, which is more than can be granted to others who have publicly graced the “discourse” since the first Saturday of this month. But I’m sorry: We’ve already had the universities’ help. Student clubs hurried — while the embers of razed houses in the Be’eri kibbutz still glowed — to bark that Israel had forced Hamas’s hand, the loudest noises coming from the campus of Ralph Bunche: the civil-rights activist and arguably the American most closely involved in the creation of the State of Israel. Members of the professoriate, meanwhile, have mostly kept quiet, and having heard some of those who have piped up, we now wish more of them had chosen silence. Intellectual modesty might have compelled them to, especially when confronted with a fulminant world event, but for their apparent conviction that, simply because we have institutions of higher learning, their expositions are highly learned and we urgently need them.
The deans prescribe against the curse of college fanaticism the same semi-scholarly collegiate politicking that has conjured it. Sober, dispassionate, and rigorous reasoning, a feature of the academy at its best, takes skill and time; commentary on political exigencies doesn’t require the first and cannot afford the second (which is why good commentary — subscribe to National Review here — is so hard to find), and most campus denizens, being students, have patience for neither.
Jamal and Yarhi-Milo are right that the answers to difficult questions cannot be attempted on a placard. They cannot be heard in slogans either, which makes me wonder why the professor-deans try to soften the menace of one of them. “Chants like ‘From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free,’” they say, “are commonly perceived as calls for the annihilation of the state of Israel.” Shouldn’t they be? And shouldn’t educators be vigilant of the evasiveness and obliqueness of the passive voice? (There’s some irony in the fact that, in 2021, this little locution was graffitied in a classroom in the hall at Harvard dedicated to Bunche.) Most Palestinians may not share the sentiment behind the slogan, and they may not even have an affinity for Hamas, but then why do so many of America’s youth? It would seem their mentors have failed to temper the febrile radicalism of adolescence, or they’ve kindled it.
The university’s function is vital but narrow: the painstaking introduction to young people of the self-doubt that results from being proven fantastically wrong. Sophomores will tend to have fringe and fatuous opinions at any rate, but their feeling certain and righteous and unchallengeable in the zealous application of faddish concepts to every sociopolitical cause du jour — this is a debit to their educators. The university has been most generous in its offer to help, but we should politely pass.