By Michael S. Kochin · Monday, May 13, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative  How should American universities foster enlightening and challenging debates on matters of public, faculty, and student concern while maintaining a university community that is as politically, religiously, ethnically, and racially diverse as the country in which they sit? In the century or so that the leading American universities have wandered, unguided by their previous Christian mission, this problem—balancing academic freedom and diversity—has become the principal challenge for their administrators, from presidents and trustees down to dorm counselors.[1]
Columbia’s new president, Nemat “Minouche” Talaat Shafik, Baroness Shafik of Camden in the London Borough of Camden and of Alexandria in the Arab Republic of Egypt, was plucked from the London School of Economics by the Columbia trustees to address that challenge, and she has had to brave it amid harsher circumstances in her first year than those faced by her predecessors for decades.
The October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel had as its objective the mass murder, rape, and kidnapping of as many Israeli men, women, and children as it could sadistically brutalize. The success of Hamas at achieving that objective has stimulated enthusiastic and even violent demonstrations of support—not only at Columbia but especially at Columbia, the academic home of some of the West’s most effective and most uncompromising Palestinian nationalists, such as the late Edward Said, as well as current professors in that same mold, Rashid Khalidi and Joseph Massad.
Continue reading →
By Russell A. Berman · Thursday, May 9, 2024 The following essay is part of a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative In the immediate aftermath of the attacks of October 7, and now again during the spring, coordinated protests have spread through colleges and universities. The rapidity with which normal functioning was disrupted and the initial helplessness of administrators both point to fundamental weaknesses in higher education: I doubt that there can be a return to a pre-October 7 normalcy. Public dismay with universities was already pronounced before these events, and the campus chaos has triggered memories of the lawlessness of the George Floyd riots.
There are certainly deep and substantive problems inside academia that explain these events—and I will turn to them in a moment—but it is important first to take stock of what really transpired and not surrender to sensationalist overstatements. It is true that demonstrations have taken place at many colleges, but the number of participants at each has been limited when measured against total enrollment. There were 119 arrests at Columbia, where the student body totals some 36,000. It is also true that antisemitic discourse has emerged, but the extent of its spread is unclear. At Stanford a student vote calling for divestment won 75% support—which is disheartening—but only about 25% of eligible voters took part, so the result only documents an anti-Israel sentiment of 18% of the student body. We need more data.
From the arrest records, we learn that many of the protestors were not students or faculty but came from outside activist organizations. At Columbia, 32 of the 119 were outsiders; at CCNY, 102 of the 173 were not from the university. There is enough evidence to point to a coordinated plan by groups to promote disruption, to commit crimes and especially to radicalize the discourse. For example, a well-meaning student attracted to the logic of a two-state solution—hardly an extremist position—might well show up at an encampment but then be pushed into supporting Hamas or the elimination of Israel, indisputably extreme stances. That radicalization has gone unquestioned. There are no signs of internal debate between, say, supporters of Palestinian national self-determination on the one hand and, on the other, proponents of “global intifada” and “smashing” capitalism. Those are two very different programs, but radical leadership has managed to establish the latter as the norm in the protest camps. It has also left previously unorganized students facing the consequences of arrest and the career damage of a criminal conviction.
Continue reading →
By Andrew Pessin · Monday, April 22, 2024 The following essay is the first in a special series of responses to recent events centered, for now, at Columbia University, and extending beyond its confines to include the wider array of societal problems that the disorder there symptomatizes. For details, see Gabriel Noah Brahm, “From Palestine Avenue to Morningside Heights.”—Gabriel Noah Brahm, Director of the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative I try to be sympathetic to the anti-Israel activists roiling campuses everywhere, including at Columbia University, my graduate alma mater, lately perhaps the most roiled. I do that because of my quaint conception of the academy as a place where, in the pursuit of truth, people should freely express their opinions but also be willing to listen to the opinions of others. And I think about how I would act, say, during the early 1940s, when I learned that a genocide against the Jewish people was occurring and all too many people were not paying attention. Wouldn’t I protest, loudly? Disrupt “business as normal”? Get in the face of the people ignoring it or, worse, in any degree complicit in it? Maybe even break a few rules or laws? I hope that I would.
The problem, then, isn’t the mayhem per se. Yes, it’s appropriately against the rules to domineer a campus for your cause, to rally noisily inside buildings and libraries and disrupt classes and exams, to create a hostile environment for others who are entitled to a safe and secure one to pursue their own paths, programs, politics. Those misbehaviors must be—and have been long overdue for being—punished, by methods including suspension and expulsion. But if you believe a genocide is going on and it’s a moral imperative to stop it, well, I get it: do what you need to, and accept the punishment.
The problem here runs deeper, ultimately rooted in the academy itself: it’s that they believe a genocide is going on in the first place, or have even misidentified the true genocide, as we’ll see below. More generally, it’s that they have adopted an entire narrative that is profoundly one-sided, oversimplified, ignorant of history, often counter to the facts, mistaken about who are the good guys and who are the bad, and driven, ultimately, by hatred and bigotry—and which licenses the profoundly outrageously immoral violence of October 7.
Continue reading →
The fourth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s yearlong series reckoning with the response to October 7 will take place on Sunday, April 7, 2024, at noon Eastern Time.
Click here to register for the event.
All subsequent panels are likewise scheduled for noon Eastern Time on the seventh day of each month. Panels will run between 90 to 120 minutes, followed by a colloquy among the panelists and audience Q&A.
Our fourth webinar is titled “How to Teach in a (Culture) War: October 7, Antisemitism, and the Academy.” Our panelists are David Tse-Chien Pan, who will speak on “Diversity in Higher Education,” and Olga Kirschbaum-Shirazki, who will speak on “History and Theory, the Necessity of the Dialectic: The Case of Modern Jewish History.” Our respondent is John M. Ellis.
Continue reading →
By Telos Press · Wednesday, February 8, 2023 In today’s episode of the Telos Press Podcast, David Pan talks with David A. Westbrook about his article “From the Ivory Tower to the Football Stadium: A Rueful Response to Michael Hüther,” from Telos 200 (Fall 2022). An excerpt of the article appears here. In their conversation they discuss Michael Hüther’s claim that the decline of truth at the university is due to moralization and economization; the traditional conception of the university that forms the background for Hüther’s critique and the function it played in society; how the role and function of the university today is different from that earlier conception and the reasons for this shift; how has university research moved from being a form of science to a form of investment; the political function of the university today; whether the ideals of merit and inclusion contradict each other; and how the university compares to a church. If your university has an online subscription to Telos, you can read the full article at the Telos Online website. For non-subscribers, learn how your university can begin a subscription to Telos at our library recommendation page. Print copies of Telos 200 are available for purchase in our online store.
Continue reading →
By J. E. Elliott · Thursday, August 1, 2019 J. E. Elliott’s “Insourcing Dissent: Brand English in the Entrepreneurial University” appears in Telos 187 (Summer 2019). Read the full article at the Telos Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue in our online store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are available in both print and online formats.
 This essay addresses the emergence of dissent culture as a hallmark of teaching and research in English studies and the humanities more generally in the time and temper of the commercial-bureaucratic university. I argue that the most convincing explanation for the widespread adoption of a protest ethos in an institution ostensibly opposed to its prescriptions is not a paradigm shift from formalist to political approaches to texts and artifacts, much less principled opposition to late Western capitalism or technological reason, but a reproduction of the routines, scripts, norms, and values of American higher education as an entrepreneurial enterprise. Dissent, in other words, is an organizationally conservative force: it animates disciplinary alternatives to STEM and business curricula while articulating a remedial narrative of inclusiveness (“diversity”) that bears witness to American higher education’s residual commitments to political engagement and democracy building. This insourcing of protest has assured English studies’ viability in the corporate university by reconfiguring the discipline as an academic brand alongside Brand Science and Brand Business in the organizational field of the university. To the extent that the politics of advocating for the disempowered and marginalized is an in-house creation without demonstrable political or policy-related impact, however, dissent culture can also be read as a reflexive (and symptomatic) protest against its own institutional capture. The essay concludes with a discussion of prospective alterations to Brand English in light of recent developments in the digital humanities.
Continue reading →
|
|
