This week I am, so to speak, handing over my newsletter to Robert Reich, a former US secretary of labour, who is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley.
What he writes below applies just as much to the UK, and to its universities; separately but intricately intertwined, also to the increasingly shrill efforts to try to ban the weekly pro-Palestinian marches in London. This past week has seen, as well, a gross and calculated provocation by one Gideon Falter during such a march. It was clear, from the very start, that this man set out to cause trouble by trying to cross a road through the middle of the demo. The extended video of the exchanges with the police on the scene gives a very different picture to the one first circulated, most disgracefully and repeatedly by the BBC.
Sir Mark Rowley, the Met police commissioner, has said: ‘The sergeant at the scene clearly assessed that there was a risk of confrontation and was trying to help Mr Falter find a different route. I completely understand why the sergeant made this assessment. A couple of turns of phrase were clumsy and offensive … and we’ve apologised for that.’
The excuse made by Falter and his videoing cabal of minders was that they were exercising their right to free movement. As some sage once said, freedom (in this case of movement) does not give you the right to shout ‘fire’ for no reason in a crowded theatre.
Back to Robert Reich who writes:
The most important thing I teach my students is to seek out people who disagree with them.
That’s because the essence of learning is testing one’s ideas, assumptions and values. And what better place to test ideas, assumptions and values than at a university?
Apparently, Columbia University’s president, Minouche Shafik, does not share my view. Last week she prostrated herself before House Republicans, promising that she would discipline professors and students for protesting against the ongoing slaughter in Gaza in which some 34,000 people have died, most of them women and children.
The following day she summoned the New York police department to arrest more than 100 students who were engaging in a peaceful protest.
Can we be clear about a few things? Protesting against this slaughter is not expressing antisemitism. It is not engaging in hate speech. It is not endangering Jewish students. It is doing what should be done on a college campus – taking a stand against a perceived wrong, thereby provoking discussion and debate.
Education is all about provocation. Without being provoked – stirred, unsettled, goaded – even young minds can remain stuck in old tracks.
The Israel-Hamas war is horrifying. The atrocities committed by both sides illustrate the capacities of human beings for inhumanity and show the vile consequences of hate. For these reasons, it presents an opportunity for students to re-examine their preconceptions and learn from one another.
If Columbia or any other university now roiled by student protests were doing what it should be doing, it would be a hotbed of debate about the war. Disagreement would be welcome; demonstrations accepted; argument invited; differences examined.
The mission of a university is to coach students in how to learn, not tell them what to think. It is to invite debate, not suppress it. Truth is a process and method – more verb than noun.
I love it when my students take issue with something that I or another student has said, starting with “I disagree!” and then explaining why. Disagreeing is not being disagreeable. Disagreement engenders thought and discussion. It challenges students to reconsider their positions and investigate more deeply.
Which is why universities should encourage and protect unpopular views. It’s why unpopular speakers should be invited and welcomed to campus.
It’s also why students should not be shielded from what are often carelessly termed “micro-aggressions”. To be riled up is to be attentive, open to new ideas.
And why peaceful demonstrations should be encouraged, not shut down. It is never appropriate to call in armed police to arrest peaceful student demonstrators.
Finally, it’s why universities should go out of their way to tolerate expression that may make some people uncomfortable. To tar all offensive speech “hate speech” and ban it removes a central pillar of education. Of course, it’s offensive. It is designed to offend.
There is a limit, of course. Expression that targets specific students, ‘doxes’ them, or otherwise aims to hurt them as individuals doesn’t invite learning. It is a form of intimidation. It should not be allowed. [Doxing or doxxing is the act of publicly providing personally identifiable information about an individual or organization, usually via the Internet and without their consent.]
I’m old enough, and have been a professor long enough, to have seen campuses explode in rage – at bigots like George Wallace when he ran for president, at the horrors of the Vietnam war, at university investments in South Africa and at efforts to prevent free speech.
Some of these protests were loud. Some caused inconvenience. Some protesters took over university buildings. But most were not violent. Nor did they seek to harm or intimidate individual students.
Whenever university presidents have brought in the police, and students have been arrested and suspended, all learning has stopped.
Which brings me to the central role of university faculties in protecting free expression on campus.
That role is especially critical now, when the jobs of university presidents and trustees have degenerated mainly into fundraising – often from wealthy alumni who have their own myopic views about what sorts of speech should be allowed and what should be barred.
The faculty of Columbia University has every right – and, in my view, a duty – to protect peaceful free expression at Columbia with a vote of no confidence in Shafik’s leadership and seek to have her presidency terminated.
The faculties of Yale, NYU and other campuses now engulfed in protests about what is occurring in Gaza should do everything in their power to use the resulting provocations, inconveniences and discomforts as occasions for learning rather than repression.
This week: Tim read Simon Sharma’s new book on pandemics, Foreign Bodies, and how, historically they have been perceived and – inevitably badly – dealt with. Written with the usual insight Sharma shows in every aspect of historical life he examines, and providing fascinating snippets (Marcel’s Proust’s father, an eminent surgeon, became entangled among the many ludicrous theories as to the origin of Cholera), the book provides a valuable insight as to how pandemics have been handled, including the all too recent last one. There are going to be a whole host more pandemics. We’ve created a perfect set of conditions for them to thrive in our physically over-connected world. This may turn out to be, literally, our funeral. The climate crisis isn’t helping, just heaping fire on the inferno already among us.