Where Do We Go from Here?

As we head into the new academic year, American colleges and universities that last spring were at the center of protests over Israel’s war on Gaza face two major challenges. The first is the risk that administrations will double down on discipline, policing, and restrictions on student protest as solutions to the conflicts on campus. On my own campus, and elsewhere, there are indications that this train has already left the station. The prospect of a “surveillance university,” where campus police roam college and university grounds trying to determine whether student protesters are violating codes of conduct or probationary terms, has become very real. This is not a future any of us in the academy should want. The second risk is that American college and university leaders will continue their passive cooperation with the right-wing agenda of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (HCEW). The thrust of that agenda is to paint pro-Palestinian student protesters as campus terrorists stoking the flames of antisemitism on their campuses while hapless university administrators sit by and watch. There have been some antisemitic incidents on American campuses, but it is a gross mischaracterization to label what has transpired in the academy over the last academic year as a pandemic of “antisemitic college chaos” (in the tendentious words of the HCEW). The combination of a punitive turn and passivity in the face of the McCarthyite political circus unfolding in Washington, DC, means that academic freedom and free expression are at a low point in our history. To turn this tide, college and university leaders must begin to make a principled case to the public that academic freedom and free expression alike require a robust space for pro-Palestinian dissent on our campuses as the epic cruelty of the war on Gaza continues.

Missed Opportunities

Changing course will require a dramatic rewriting of the script that informed the tumultuous 2023–24 academic year. From the beginning, a concerted campaign to conflate pro-Palestinian student voices with the official position of their institutions pressured college and university leaders to enter into a war of attrition with their own students. Instead of explaining that students do not speak for the university, administrators succumbed to the demand that they adjudicate the Israel-Palestine conflict on their campuses by promising to ferret out antisemitism. This is an important and laudable goal, but it involves contested definitions of the subject that are extremely difficult to apply given the need to ensure a wide berth for political expression critical of the state of Israel. Academic leaders then sought to recover the appearance of neutrality by invoking an equally problematic notion of “Islamophobia” as a substitute for the sin that dare not speak its name in America: anti-Palestinian racism. The reactionary shenanigans of the HCEW forced administrators into the untenable position of having to pretend that they exercise unilateral control over the levers of speech and protest on their campuses. Thrown into this harsh and unfamiliar public spotlight, college and university leaders then used every tool at their disposal in an effort to make the pretense a reality. Through a combination of restrictions on student protest, disciplinary processes, and police intervention, administrators ended the last academic year by investing heavily in the notion that student antiwar protests, rather than state-sponsored, right-wing campaigns to suppress dissent, constitute the principal threat to academic freedom.

These administrators appear to have done so for two reasons. First, they believed, wrongly, that institutional neutrality required them to avoid any criticism of Israel’s appalling war on Gaza. This position would have some merit but for the fact that many of these same leaders showed no hesitation (appropriately, in my view) in denouncing the horrific Hamas-led attacks of October 7, 2023. The second reason for institutional passivity is essentially legal and political: a fear of exposure to Title VI litigation alleging a hostile environment for Jewish and Israeli students on campus, and the prospect of a cutoff of federal funding. This latter threat is itself a core element of the right-wing assault on academic freedom. Rather than capitulate to this assault, administrations must mount a principled challenge to the authoritarian campaign of Republican politicians. Such a challenge would be entirely consistent with efforts to minimize an institution’s legal and political exposure. To the extent that administrators remain mired in a war of attrition with pro-Palestinian student protesters—and refusing to challenge the right-wing weaponization of antisemitism that seeks to suppress criticism of the war on Gaza guarantees that they will—the tension between free expression and academic freedom, on the one hand, and the preservation of a diverse and inclusive learning environment, on the other, will continue to seem like an impossible choice. There may be reasons for colleges and universities to resist the demands of the student movement protesting the war on Gaza. But academic freedom, particularly when it is confused with the issue of institutional neutrality, is not one of them.

Why the current student protest movement has set its sights primarily on institutions of higher education rather than the federal government is an interesting and important question. The vastness and inaccessibility of federal institutions are probably part of the answer. But another part is that our government has itself tried to shift the focus to higher education rather than interrogate its own role in supporting Israel’s brutal war on Gaza. The correlation between the encampment movement, police crackdowns, and the appeal to academic freedom as a reason for rejecting student protest demands is striking. The first encampment, at Columbia University, went up essentially in tandem with the spectacle of Columbia president Minouche Shafik’s disastrous testimony before the HCEW on April 17, 2024. The first crackdown followed the day after. Other university encampments and crackdowns swiftly followed. None of our academic leaders seemed able to see this historical moment for what it was: the product of national and local forces that conspired together, as if on cue, to bring about the largest use of force on American campuses since 1969.

That history provides another explanation for why student protesters have centered their grievances on the university. War-related research programs and policies at both the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where I teach, and the University of Chicago were at the core of student demands in the late 1960s and (especially at MIT) continue to be today. Administrators borrowed from the script of 1969 in some of their responses to the student demands. In other respects, they improvised according to the specific circumstances and logic of the Israel-Palestine conflict on their campuses. In doing so, they tended to overlook one of the key lessons of this history: that students and faculty members, no less than administrators, have always determined the contours and meaning of academic freedom and institutional neutrality. The result is a costly mess that now includes the bitter aftertaste of police intervention (not likely to be quickly or easily forgotten) and the hastily improvised, excessive, and clearly flawed disciplinary crackdowns that, on my campus at least, involved multiple miscarriages of justice that were corrected only after faculty protests. But perhaps the biggest casualty is the ideal of academic freedom, which is under real threat from the political crackdown on the antiwar movement.

At MIT, negotiations between the encampment leaders and the administration centered on student demands that the institution end the involvement of the Israeli Ministry of Defense in two faculty research programs. These discussions concluded with MIT’s president, Sally Kornbluth, proclaiming that she was “not going to compromise the academic freedom of our faculty, in any field of study”—even though MIT has taken steps recently to limit faculty research programs either because of the nature of the partner (in the cases of China, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) or the source of the funding (in the case of Jeffrey Epstein). More to my point, that admirable defense of academic freedom would have been easier for faculty and students to swallow had it also been directed at the authoritarian, right-wing assault on the purpose and nature of the American research university.

The jarring character of the crackdown on the encampments has been aggravated by what can only be described as failures of listening. MIT’s leadership team did not even pretend to tie its position on academic freedom to any existing scholarship or AAUP statement or to the work of any faculty committee past or present. The position is aggressive, if not unprecedented, insofar as it would extend academic freedom from the realm of ideas (once the coin of the academic realm) to the choice of institutional partners and to the nature of research funding. At MIT, these are especially thorny issues because so many of our scholars are engaged in research projects that intersect with industry and government, including military agencies. Perhaps we do want academic freedom to extend this far, given the AAUP’s long-standing position that “teachers are entitled to full freedom in research.” But if we do, that decision should be informed by history, applied consistently across a range of cases, and accompanied by an effort to consult a range of faculty members, who are, after all, the core repositories of academic freedom.

The MIT administration did manage to procure an advisory opinion effectively endorsing its decision to end the encampment from a new faculty-student-staff committee convened to implement the recommendations of a prior Ad Hoc Working Group on Free Expression, on which I served. The new committee, known as the Ad Hoc Committee on Academic Freedom and Campus Expression, has seen fit to publicly pronounce thus far only on the encampment issue. (The committee published some recommendations related to postering in March 2024.) It did so in order to explain why the doctrine of time, place, and manner restrictions on free speech supported ending the encampment. The committee has yet to issue an opinion or statement finding that any forms of student antiwar protest constitute protected expression. It is highly unusual, in my experience, for a faculty-led committee at MIT to issue pronouncements prior to concluding its work and issuing a draft report. I believe that my colleagues on this committee, and in the MIT administration, genuinely value free expression and academic freedom. But the public record has left an awkward impression that is not quite dispelled by any number of formal declarations of allegiance to the values of the First Amendment.

The administration has also struggled to come up with the right words to respond to the appalling brutality of the Israeli government’s war on Gaza. The charitable interpretation of this failure is that it involves a confusion over the ideal of institutional neutrality. In the same statement in which MIT’s president defended academic freedom, she observed that the student protesters’ “grief and pain over the terrible loss of life and suffering in Gaza are palpable.” Contrast this with her October 10, 2023, statement about the horrific attacks of October 7: “The brutality perpetrated on innocent civilians in Israel by terrorists from Hamas is horrifying. In my opinion, such a deliberate attack on civilians can never be justified.” (President Kornbluth added, “And now we are bracing for a prolonged conflict that will also gravely harm or kill many innocent Palestinians in Gaza. The suffering and destruction of human life are intolerable.”) In the first case, there is an acknowledgment of (psychological) grief and pain, with no attribution of responsibility to any state authority for the violence that has produced that grief and pain, let alone a characterization of the (il)legitimacy of such violence. In the other, there is a commendable willingness to speak frankly and even personally. Harvard University’s leadership (including its corporation, which serves as a board) has demonstrated a similar tendency in its public pronouncements, going back to October 7. Clearly, concerns over institutional neutrality cannot be the reason why American university leaders have found it necessary to mince their words in denouncing the atrocious conduct of the Israeli government’s war on Gaza.

And yet, one such university leader appears to think that the 1967 Kalven Report not only prevents such moral candor but actually required police suppression of a student encampment. In an op-ed published in The Wall Street Journal last May, University of Chicago President Paul Alivisatos argued that, in order to uphold the sacrosanct Chicago principle of institutional neutrality, he had no choice but to call in the police to arrest pro-Palestinian demonstrators and dismantle their encampment. Turning neutrality and academic freedom on their heads and confusing the one with the other, Alivisatos effectively interred the Kalven Report. It is one thing to say that safety or the need to ensure the continued academic operations of the university required ending the encampment. (I believe that MIT’s leadership was genuinely concerned with the safety of all students when it moved to end the encampment last May.) But even those arguments must be handled with care, given that they can so easily slide into content-based suppression of disfavored speech. Some might say the Kalven Report had already perished of self-inflicted wounds present at its creation. Either way, we have almost certainly reached the end of the ideal of institutional neutrality. Rumors of the report’s death were confirmed last May when Harvard issued a new policy on “institutional voice” that (correctly, in my view) rejected neutrality as a philosophical framework for the university while adhering for all practical purposes to the core prudential principles of the Kalven Report.

Echoes of the Past

How did it come to this? Another teaspoon of history is worth a pound of polemics in a field not short on the latter. Here I speak specifically of MIT’s history, but my campus’s experience holds many implications for other institutions.

The encampment movement at MIT focused on the issue of war-related research rather than (as at some other institutions) the need to divest the endowment of funds tied to Israel. This emphasis runs deep in MIT’s tradition of student protest, and it hearkens back specifically to the anti-Vietnam activism of 1969. As historian Stuart Leslie has shown in an excellent essay on the 1969 debates over MIT’s special laboratories, MIT students and faculty emphasized the university’s own role in the wartime effort rather than national wartime policy itself. The result was a protest movement that centered on whether MIT should end its relationship to the Lincoln Laboratory and the Instrumentation Laboratory, both of which were then engaged in Department of Defense–funded weapons-related projects, such as moving-target-indicator radar systems.

Assembled under the banner of the Science Action Coordinating Committee (SACC), the student leaders directly challenged the application of principles of academic freedom and institutional neutrality to such wartime research. In a 1969 statement, SACC observed,

It is frequently argued that in demanding the termination of war related research at MIT, SACC is violating the concept of a politically “neutral” university; that individual scientists should be guaranteed the “academic freedom” to pursue any research which interests them or which they consider to be important. It is feared that the introduction of political criteria to judge the appropriateness of specific research projects would undermine the university’s unique position in society as the last haven of free thought, destroy its independence, and open it to attacks by pressure groups from both the left and the right.

If you substitute the Scientists Against Genocide Encampment (SAGE)—the name of the MIT Gaza encampment—for SACC, it becomes clear that the positions on either side of the debate over MIT’s relationship to military research are largely unchanged. In this sense, although not in others, we are still living in the 1960s.

In effect, the SAGE students were answering the administration’s assertion of academic freedom with the same point the administration had been making all year long in respect of free expression: Just because you can research or say something does not mean that you should, at least not in connection with institutional partners who violate certain norms (including, most notably in this context, the Israeli Ministry of Defense). MIT’s negotiators seemed unwilling to listen to that reasonable view—perhaps more out of concerns over institutional neutrality than over academic freedom. As a result, they failed to apply the norms that MIT has already developed and applied to other controversial research programs and partnerships. The obtuseness or reticence regarding the war on Gaza contributed to the impasse between the encampment leaders and the administration.

The former, for their part, also played a role in producing the impasse, which was an essentially political conflict involving pragmatic factors rather than a showdown over abstract principles. Some of the language used by students who participated in the MIT encampment ultimately made it difficult for others outside the encampment to hear and identify with the moral justice of the antiwar cause. And the students missed several opportunities to end the encampment on their own terms.

At MIT and elsewhere, student protesters have become necessary leaders in the campaign against the unjust war on Gaza and the broader injustice of the decades-long occupation of the Palestinian territories. No one else has done as much as they to bring public attention to the systemic racism and discrimination reflected in Israel’s policies. But to say that students have been necessary leaders in this fight does not mean that their approach has been sufficient. The actions of a group of hapless university administrators engaged in a war of attrition with students are far less consequential to the subjugation of the Palestinians than those of decision-makers in Washington, DC. The protesters’ cause would also be helped by devoting more time and space to envisioning Arab-Jewish solidarity in Israel and Palestine alongside the messages of resistance and opposition. Every civil rights movement needs a vision of coexistence if it is to succeed in retaining the moral high ground, as Martin Luther King Jr. preached in his final book, written in isolation in Jamaica in 1967 (and from which I have borrowed the title for this essay).

The students and faculty involved in counterprotests, for their part, displayed a stark unwillingness to listen to the moral core of the encampment message. From the start of last year’s campus conflicts, those who seek to equate criticism of the state of Israel with antisemitism have shown over and over again, by their words and their deeds, that they simply do not wish to allow speech in protest of Israel’s cruel war on Gaza to be heard on American university campuses. This refusal is a factor in enabling the slaughter and deprivation in Gaza to continue.

For me, the most poignant moment of the 2023–24 annus horribilis was when the SAGE students first met counterprotesting students in the heart of the encampment last spring. I was there at that time, and tried, with others, to help keep tempers calm. But the truth is that this encounter was one of the few moments when it might have been possible for the two groups of students to enter into dialogue with one another. Their intense distaste for one another notwithstanding, each of these groups needs to hear what the other has to say if there is to be a shared future for the people of Israel and Palestine. Yet each does so much to shield themselves from the voices of the other—increasingly with the aid of administrators (and some faculty members), who are now apparently hoping that restrictions on student protest alone can produce the physical, intellectual, and even acoustic separation that they believe will keep the peace on campus.

Reasons for Hope

There is not much good to say about where we landed at the end of the 2023–24 academic year, but let me try to identify at least a few silver linings.

First, the willingness of some American college and university leaders to invoke academic freedom is cause for hope. They should now embrace academic freedom in the name of speaking truth to power. The university officials who testified at the May 23 hearing, titled “Calling for Accountability: Stopping Antisemitic College Chaos,” largely avoided Shafik’s obsequiousness and violation of long-standing academic norms. But the political circus persists. On June 3, the chairs of six House committees sent letters to ten universities announcing a Congress-wide probe into campus antisemitism and threatening a cutoff of all federal funding. And on August 21, the HCEW issued a subpoena to compel production of information related to the encampment crisis and other matters. This script seems likely to become even more bombastic and demagogic as the November 2024 elections approach, so important have the attacks on a handful of elite universities become to the Republican Party’s prosecution of the culture wars.

MIT and other American universities are a bit like Florence circa 1300, as the chair of the MIT faculty, Mary Fuller, has observed: riven by internal conflict and vulnerable to external pressures and interventions, most notably those of the federal government. But that was equally true of American universities in the 1960s, when Congress also threatened to withhold funding in response to universities’ handling of student demonstrations. Today, once again, student protest is shaping the national political conversation. College and university leaders seem to be hoping that, if they just lie low and keep their heads down until November, the storm will pass. But even if Vice President Harris prevails in the election, this storm is not going away. The culture wars, having previously come for our public universities, have now arrived at leading private institutions. Our fates are connected: An attack on academic freedom and free expression at the University of Florida or the University of Texas is an attack on all American universities. The public-private distinction is eroding. The wealthiest private universities have been slow to appreciate this point, in part because of the increasingly vast gulf that separates administrators and faculty at these institutions. A university like MIT now does too many other things beside teaching and research—from leasing land to forming partnerships with corporations and foreign governments—to believe that it has much of a stake in the spat over critical race theory or LGBTQ books in conservative and battleground states.

An assertion of academic freedom as a shield against political or legislative interference should entail explaining to the public that the struggle in higher education over Israel and Palestine stems not from any pathologies peculiar to the academy but from the crisis facing our government’s Middle East policy, now decades in the making. The federal government that subsidizes and enables Israel’s increasingly brazen brutalization of the Palestinian people must begin to face squarely its own failure to foster a just peace in the Middle East. A little more time spent on that mission will go a long way. Such a reckoning will help, in particular, to address the disturbing resurgence in antisemitism that we have seen around the world over the past year. Ideally, it will also aim to ensure that the Palestinian people can live in “dignity, freedom, security, and self-determination”—for those who still care that they do, and are willing to raise their voices in support of that future. The first American university leader to make these points, preferably while testifying live before the HCEW, will earn a rightful place in the history of academic freedom in this country.

A second cause for hope is that faculty members have been instrumental in pushing back against the threats to punish student demonstrators. Only that pushback prevents our universities from encountering the fate that befell Harvard in 1969–70. The draconian expulsion of sixteen students for their role in seizing University Hall in 1969—an act that has no parallel in the recent encampment episodes except for the occupation of one of Columbia’s main buildings—“changed the whole tenor of dissent at Harvard,” observed the authors of the 1970 book The Harvard Strike. “All future political dissent at Harvard,” they wrote, “would be circumscribed by the shift in attitude that the discipline of the University Hall demonstrators represented.” The risk that American universities today will produce a similar quashing of political dissent is real, and it extends to a broad range of issues other than the Israel-Palestine conflict. The next generation of student demonstrators is watching (some of them are even participating). An immediate priority must be to roll back the show of force on campus. At my own institution, the campus police performed an outstanding job in mediating conflict throughout the year. But asking campus police officers to enforce an ongoing disciplinary settlement is a recipe for the creation of a surveillance university. The quirkiness of MIT’s student culture, its fondness for out-of-the-box thinking, and its allergy to hierarchy form a delicate ecosystem that MIT’s students, faculty, and leadership alike must take special care to preserve at this time. A heavy burden of responsibility in this area lies with my faculty colleagues who, only a few years ago, were so outspoken about free expression when the issue was diversity, equity, and inclusion, and who seem not so eager now to accept the perhaps unintended consequences of their campaign against so-called cancel culture.

Finally, the dynamics of the encampment crackdown should encourage faculty members on divided campuses to unite in standing up for academic freedom (and free expression) whenever the next effort to speak out against the carnage in Gaza is subjected to HCEW-style suppression. At MIT and elsewhere, administrators have allowed themselves to be bullied by a handful of student and faculty social media accounts into an endless pattern of whack-a-mole-style crisis management. That pattern, a reflection of the authoritarian political culture of our time, seems likely to persist over the 2024–25 academic year. The case for robust protection of student protest comes down to an old version of the “marketplace of ideas” argument: The policies our government has pursued in attempting to manage the Israel-Palestine conflict for the last fifty to sixty years (those of the Biden administration very much included) have not worked. Can anyone say in good faith that the situation in Israel and Palestine is where we want it to be, regardless of where you land on the tragic events of the past year? If we could have complete confidence that our government knew what it was doing in the Middle East, then the case for suppressing student dissent would be stronger. The temptation to enforce an official orthodoxy on a matter so deeply bound up with traumatic histories and memories of various kinds will always impede the cause of peace and coexistence.

How exactly we get from here to there is difficult to say. The unstable domestic political climate, the uncertain direction of the conflict in Gaza and the West Bank, and the unpredictability of student protest tactics will continue to make improvisation necessary. Those of us who work in higher education will simply have to muddle through as best we can, being of support to students, faculty and staff colleagues, and administrators when possible while continuing the important work of teaching and research. (Being of support to our institutions includes insisting on robust protections for free expression and academic freedom, because administrators merely exercise temporary custodianship of our institutions; they are not to be confused with the college or university itself, the heart of which will always be faculty and students brought together in shared learning spaces enabled by the labors of a large and growing staff. The Kalven Report got this point essentially right.) We should not underestimate the importance of many small acts of kindness in the current conflict. But our core missions remain teaching and research. We were not commissioned to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict, but we can alleviate its side effects on our campuses until our government steps up and becomes part of the solution in the Middle East. The steps that some have outlined for America’s universities to take a role in the rebuilding of Gaza’s educational system, combined with fair treatment of student protest, can help to point the way forward.

Another idea worth considering on my own campus would be to convene a panel similar to the 1969 Pounds Panel, which brought faculty and students together (today we would add staff) to dig into MIT’s connection to wartime research and to consider the possibility of “converting” some of that research to civilian purposes. Thus far, MIT’s leadership has seemed determined to handle any questions involving research connected to foreign militaries through existing processes and protocols, which has contributed to the impasse. No doubt the hesitancy is connected to MIT’s reliance on the US Department of Defense for almost 20 percent of its research budget. The line between American and foreign military action and research has not always been apparent, especially where the Middle East is concerned. Depending on how you look at it, that is either a defense or an indictment of MIT’s position (or both). Either way, a collective effort to help students understand how MIT has or has not changed in this regard seems like the kind of educational effort that could contribute to overcoming some of the deadlock of the past year.

These kinds of efforts can succeed only if we can recover a sense of common purpose on our campuses. We have lost that sense of shared mission. Tribal affiliations have taken hold of campus culture, bringing students and faculty together for certain purposes but separating them for others. Efforts to bring together students and faculty aligned with either side of the Israel-Palestine conflict have proven exceedingly challenging. Above all, we must discover a way for all of us to rally around the principles that define higher education communities: a commitment to learning and research, curiosity, academic freedom, and free expression. These principles cannot be allowed to serve as buzzwords for one side or another on a charged political issue. We can care greatly about the Israel-Palestine conflict, but we can also recognize that people in other parts of the world are suffering, too, and need our attention—including neighborhoods in our own country. A community defined only by conflict has no space for the kind of generous openness that makes it a trusting one. We will have to reach out, as individuals, across the gulfs that separate us from one another, and discover at least some common ground—something that permits us to see one another in relationships of solidarity, collegiality, and even friendship. This is the precondition for a robust culture of academic freedom and free expression. It may never be perfect, and it probably never was, but it could be enough.

Malick W. Ghachem is professor of history and head of the history faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is teaching a seminar this fall titled Free Expression, Pluralism, and the University.