By David Pan · Friday, July 12, 2024 Telos 207 (Summer 2024): Politics and the University is now available for purchase in our store. Individual subscriptions to Telos are also available in both print and online formats.
 There is a fundamental arbitrariness about the work that is done at colleges and universities, which stems from the relationship between academic work and the political parameters of this work. The key issue is that the most basic aspect of our humanity involves having a sense of right and wrong. This sense of values sets the framework for all our other thoughts, actions, and decisions, providing direction and meaning for our lives.
The feeling that we are doing the right thing can motivate us to great achievements, and the loss of that feeling can lead us into inescapable despair. At the same time, when we perceive that others are doing wrong, we have a feeling of indignation at such injustice and seek to redress it. We will also judge the wrong doer in the same harsh light that we might use against ourselves when we fail to live up to our own ideals. Consequently, our sense of values will color all our perceptions and determine our decisions and judgments.
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The video of the fifth webinar in the Telos-Paul Piccone Institute’s Israel initiative is now available and can be viewed here. Titled “Our Troubled Institutions: The End(s) of Higher Education, Post-Journalism, and Antisemitism after October 7,” the panel featured Russell A. Berman, Gadi Taub, and Paulina Neuding, and their conversation was moderated by Israel initiative director Gabriel Noah Brahm.
The next webinar in the Israel webinar series will take place on June 7.
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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.
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By Cary Nelson · Friday, April 26, 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 Introduction
Every day, it seems, we advance into darkness we have not known before. It is not a journey we have sought out or chosen for ourselves. We are swept along by a current of malice that can only be avoided if we hide from the news. The spectacle of a mass antizionist and antisemitic “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” on Columbia University’s central quad and elsewhere has structural predecessors, to be sure, like the Occupy Wall Street movement, but parallels with mass antisemitism require comparison with earlier historical moments. The Occupy Wall Street movement was notably accompanied by a substantial body of theoretical work, whereas the Columbia occupation is supported by little more than a Manichean view of a world divided between oppressor and oppressed peoples. The students promise to remain until Columbia meets their divestment demands—which presumably means they will be in their tents for a very long time indeed, since for governing boards to cede their investment authority to mob action means giving up their other responsibilities as well.
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By Gabriel Noah Brahm · Tuesday, April 23, 2024 A virulent, novel strain of anti-Zionist antisemitism is loose on the American campus.
In the wake of October 7, 2023’s barbaric terrorist assault on southern Israeli kibbutzim, a rave party, and a small military base, the Jewish state has been denounced loudly by extremists. As a consequence, Jewish students and faculty in the United States find themselves as unwelcome in the quad or the classroom as a troop of uniformed IDF soldiers. For pro-Hamas demonstrators, as for the terror organization itself, there is essentially no difference.
Apparently the result of a lab leak containing intellectual materials gleaned from various “studies” programs, where experimentation with conceptual “gain of function research” had gone on in relative obscurity for some time (Gender Studies, Middle East Studies, LGBTQ Studies, Critical Legal Studies), a potent “new-new antisemitism,” as it’s being called, is on the loose, spiked with heavy doses of esoteric and markedly volatile ideologemes. “Intersectionality,” in its more dubious applications, reduces all moral and political questions to matters of “oppressor” and “oppressed.” “Critical race theory” brands Jews not only as “white” (a term used on campus to mean “structurally racist”) but “hyper-white” (the whitest, therefore most racist of all). Theories of “settler colonialism” misrepresent Jews as colonizers in their own indigenous lands and the State of Israel as somehow illegitimate, despite its rather unique birth certificate, bestowed by the United Nations itself in 1947. Moreover, what the proponents of all these ideologies have in common is that they point to Jews and Israel as uniquely blameworthy personifications of all the “evils” attributed to the West, historically, by its occidentalist critics.
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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.
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