Views From a Tumultuous Year for Higher Ed

In the year since the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the start of the ongoing war in Gaza, U.S. higher education has been rocked by accusations of antisemitism and Islamophobia and consumed with debates over free speech; diversity, equity and inclusion; political interference; the role of police on campuses; the wisdom, or not, of neutrality; the state of academic freedom—even the very values of the university itself. What follows is a collection of just some of the views represented in our virtual pages over the tumultuous year past.

Even before Oct. 7, as opposition began mounting against then–University of Pennsylvania president Liz Magill over a Palestinian literary festival held on Penn’s campus, college leaders were struggling with what Jeffrey Herbst described as growing conflicts pitting “two noble goals in opposition—the fight against antisemitism and the commitment to free speech.” Such tensions, wrote Herbst, “will only increase in light of the massacres in Israel and the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.”

In the first weeks after Oct. 7, college leaders came under intense criticism for the perceived inadequacy of their statements on the Hamas attack. Presaging what would grow into a newfound embrace of the ideal of “institutional neutrality,” Michael Hemesath begged university leaders to “stop the statement wars”: “Presidents and chancellors do not have a lock on moral truth and should recognize that the central mission of their institutions is to educate our students to thoughtfully listen and learn in order to form their own opinions,” Hemesath wrote.

“Who can speak” on these matters (and how) became a recurrent question. Reshmi Dutt-Ballerstadt and Johnny E. Williams wrote that faculty have “an overwhelming hesitance or fear of speaking up. There is fear of being marked as angry, hostile or divisive. There is fear of being accused of being Islamophobic or antisemitic. There is fear of being harassed. There is fear of being prosecuted. There is a growing fear that academic freedom is dead and speaking up will cost one their job.”

David H. Schanzer argued that colleges are broadly failing in teaching students about Israel and Palestine—a failure grounded in fear. “Rather than becoming actively engaged in providing their students with a rich and nuanced education about the conflict, universities mainly seem content to be the protectors of free speech by allowing both sides to have their viewpoints expressed on campus,” Schanzer wrote. “University officials seem to be exhausted by the experience and concerned mainly with avoiding bad publicity, preventing events from being canceled through a heckler’s veto and managing the blowback from important constituencies like students, faculty, alumni and donors. These experiences seem to make university officials loath to be proactive in trying to alter the polarized narrative.”

Eboo Patel made the case that colleges should create centers for pluralism, helping students develop and strengthen relationships across differences. “The breakdown of dialogue on college campuses is real,” Elizabeth H. Bradley and Jonathon S. Kahn wrote in another essay. They called for a renewed pedagogical focus on “epistemic humility, an acknowledgement of the necessity of curiosity, nuance, uncertainty and multiple perspectives needed for building knowledge.”

Even as professors struggled to engage with students in the classroom, outside pressures on colleges increased. Students linked to anti-Israel statements were doxed, leading Sarah Hartman-Caverly to raise alarms about FERPA’s obsolescence and the importance of digital privacy to student learning. As big donors withdrew (or threatened to withdraw) gifts over antisemitism concerns, causing angst about donor interference or control, Noah D. Drezner called for reframing the narrative: Drezner argued that such actions are not “instances of donor control but rather are a form of donor activism that is in line with higher education’s mission.”

After the—by most accounts—disastrous testimony of Magill and two other Ivy League presidents before a congressional committee investigating campus antisemitism in December, Karl Schonberg wrote, of one of Magill’s responses, it “was not so much wrong as it was incomplete and deaf to the broader ethical and political import of the question.” John Tomasi wrote that the presidents’ sorry showing was indicative of why colleges need to adopt principles of “institutional neutrality,” even as he lamented their failure to defend free speech and open inquiry. He offered an alternative answer the presidents could have given: “Yes, universities have failed to apply their existing rules against true threats and harassment in a consistent manner, and many students are suffering from this failure. But the remedy you propose strikes at the very heart of the university and the search for truth. Would you use this moment of public anger to erode an ideal of open discourse at our universities that is already under threat? Congresswoman, have you no shame?”

Jennifer Ruth wrote that the congressional hearing ushered in a new stage of the culture wars, one that demands no less than the humiliation of higher education and its leaders. Mariam Durrani and Sarah Ghabrial argued that “the extreme right has been given a license to act out xenophobic fantasies under the cover of performative antisemitism policing” in an effort to shift “blame for growing antisemitism to ‘liberal’ institutions like universities and in particular racialized students and faculty, thus drawing attention away from rampant anti-Jewish hatred on the far right.” Jonathan Feingold argued that the right-wing assault on DEI has, ironically, undermined colleges’ ability to combat antisemitism on their campuses: “The GOP might like talking about antisemitism. But its crusade against DEI compromises every student’s civil rights—Jewish students included,” Feingold wrote.

Michael S. Roth pushed back against the growing pressures on college presidents to stay silent about the Israel-Hamas war, calling, in March, for a ceasefire. “Silence at a time of humanitarian catastrophe isn’t neutrality; it’s either cowardice or collaboration,” wrote Roth, the president of Wesleyan University. “We don’t need institution-speak, but we do need leaders of academic and cultural institutions to call on our government and our fellow citizens to address this crisis.”

As the spring unfolded, the intensity of student antiwar activism increased. Pro-Palestinian student protesters set up literal camps at colleges across the country; some institutions responded by asking the police to break them up. Yalile Suriel; Charles H. F. Davis III, Jude Paul Dizon, Jessica Hatrick and Vanessa Miller; and Gregg Gonsalves all criticized the resort to policing in three separate essays. And on the anniversary of the May 4, 1970, shootings of Kent State University students by Ohio National Guard troops, Kent State president Todd Diacon wrote that the university’s violent history serves as “a bitter and vivid reminder that when external troops are put in charge of dealing with student protesters, university leaders can lose control over what follows.”

As some college leaders began striking deals with protest leaders to dismantle the encampments, Sara Coodin warned against the temptation to reward student disrupters in the name of temporary campus peace. Arguing that they “will not be placated with token divestment votes,” Coodin wrote, “The committed activists have shown us their endgame, and it isn’t the end of the Israel-Hamas war or a ceasefire. For some time now, they’ve had a far broader target in view: the existence of Israel and Zionism itself, Jews’ right to self-determination in our ancestral homeland.”

Over the summer, numerous writers weighed in with advice on how colleges could craft better policies to govern speech and protests—and protect student safety—in the fall. “Protect, teach, enforce,” urged Ted Mitchell. Rajiv Vinnakota wrote that colleges should protect free speech while promoting free inquiry—“a higher goal that demands higher standards of public discourse.” When the academic year resumed, Radhika Sainath argued that many of the new policies went too far in suppressing pro-Palestinian speech: “My office, Palestine Legal, is receiving a surge of reports of students being censored and punished as they return to school, often under the pretext that support for Palestinian rights (or wearing Palestinian keffiyehs, or scarves) violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by creating a hostile environment for Jews, even though Jewish students are at the center of many of the protests and wear Palestinian scarves.”

Austin Sarat argued that the wave of lawsuits and Title IV complaints accusing colleges of tolerating antisemitism “have shined a harsh light on the progressive illiberalism that has become a defining feature of their educational cultures. Or maybe it would be better to say that those suits offer colleges and universities an opportunity to re-examine and revive their commitments to liberal virtues like tolerance, open-mindedness, skepticism, curiosity and the avoidance of political orthodoxy.”

Abiya Ahmed and Alexander Key, co-chairs of a committee charged with investigating anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bias at Stanford University, described an “awkward false neutrality” on campuses: They wrote that their report, which documented numerous incidents of bias, “shows what can go wrong when a university cannot quite reconcile the divergent views of its stakeholders and community members. It ends up hurting the people whom the university wants to educate, whom the university’s leadership wants to thrive.”

Some writers described an intense personal toll. In the weeks immediately after Oct. 7, Marina Umaschi Bers described the importance of institutionally supported spaces for community for Jewish faculty who were struggling with the attack against Israel and the responses of their institutional leaders, colleagues and students—having been surprised, she wrote, “to learn how much anti-Israel hate and antisemitism hides in their academic departments and in student groups.”

Atar David, a Ph.D. student from Israel at the University of Texas at Austin, wrote of his decision to leave academia: “Palestinians and Israelis everywhere feel as though the walls are closing in but, in academia, things are even more dire. Whereas academic institutions stress their commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, people like me are expected to shed a big chunk of our identities or risk being ostracized and banned,” David wrote.

Rosemary Admiral wrote that her deep sense of belonging at her institution was shattered after she was arrested and charged with criminal trespassing for standing between riot police and students at a pro-Palestinian protest on the University of Texas at Dallas campus. “How do I teach at a university that wants me in jail?” Admiral asked in July.

Finally, writing in August, Gary Gilbert expressed a deep sense of apprehension about the academic year ahead, “a personal feeling of frustration at not knowing how to change the tenor of the conversation. Like other faculty across the country, I participated in panels, gave informational talks and even posted myself at the center of campus with a sign that read, ‘Have questions about Israel/Palestine? Let’s talk. No shouting. No slogans. Just talk.’ For effort, I clearly deserved an A. For effectiveness, I would assign a generous grade of C-minus.” No doubt many others on campuses can relate.