An Awkward False Neutrality

“This conversation is off the record—no notes or identification, please,” our colleague asked. Not a typical refrain for a working lunch, but this is what we heard time and time again in our capacity as co-chairs of Stanford University’s Muslim, Arab and Palestinian Communities Committee.

Our charge was to examine anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bias on campus and provide recommendations to the university on how best to combat them. Our committee spent hundreds of hours listening to more than 200 students, staff, faculty, alumni and parents. The conversation with our colleague, part of this process, took place on a gray Wednesday in January. At this time, the death toll in Gaza had reached 25,000.

We discussed Stanford’s events programming and gaps in the university’s academic structures with respect to Palestine and Arab studies. In some ways, it was a typical meeting on institutional academic needs, the sort that occurs countless times at Stanford, on subjects ranging from aeronautics to urban studies.

Why, then, the need for anonymity and secrecy? What—or whom—was our colleague afraid of? As we illustrate in our recently released report, “Rupture and Repair,” the fundamental issue on campus is that Palestine is an exception to Stanford’s stated mission to educate “global citizens who embrace diversity of thought and experience.” In spite of this lofty ideal, students, faculty and staff on our campus learn that Palestine is a topic that one cannot study, discuss or teach without potentially damaging one’s future.

In our conversations across campus, our committee heard the same troubling “we can’t talk about Palestine” lamentation over and over. It was usually accompanied by a request for some level of anonymity: from the student who feared being doxed or disciplined for their pro-Palestine activism, to the junior faculty member afraid of being denied tenure for their pro-Palestinian views; from the staff member reprimanded by a human resources officer for their use of the term “genocide” to the senior administrator who worried that they would be excluded from key decision-making conversations due to their advocacy for Muslim, Arab or Palestinian students.

None of the people we spoke to in our listening sessions said or did anything that, we thought, would warrant such consequences. But our committee also documented ways in which these fears were substantiated: An alum had expressed an interest in serving on the committee, only for their employer to refuse permission because the work was deemed too controversial; another potential committee member, an undergraduate student, was told by university administrators he could not visibly participate because he was at risk of being doxed and attracting undue attention. By the end of the academic year, we had heard enough to know that the collective fears were justified.

To their credit, Stanford’s leadership gave us the support, autonomy and access to do our work and publish our conclusions. But our findings make for grim reading: We documented numerous incidents of anti-Palestinian and anti-Arab bias intersecting sharply with Islamophobia, from threats to intimidation to violence, coupled with the suppression of speech on Israeli state violence and occupation. We confirmed the existence of a “Palestine exception” to free speech and academic freedom on campus, a phenomenon documented elsewhere for years prior by scholars and human rights organizations. Our report 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.

Stanford professed to maintain “neutrality” on the war in Gaza, as on other contested social and political issues. But our report showed how university decisions, in areas ranging from official university statements to responses to student and faculty speech, often failed to maintain neutrality in the face of political pressure. We documented the silencing of speech on Palestine through a variety of formal and informal means, some easier to document than others but all equally damaging to the pursuit of knowledge. We revealed a climate in which, for example, a professor organizing a conference is told that their conference keynote speaker simply cannot call for a ceasefire in Gaza, or where colleagues nudge each other in the hallway about how an anti-Zionist Jewish colleague is perhaps a “little too controversial” to be invited to speak.

The university’s profession of neutrality also had the effect of dividing people into binary categories on complex issues, as if there were two monolithic and competing sides defined by identity alone. With our colleagues on Stanford’s Subcommittee on Antisemitism and Anti-Israeli Bias, we shared the experience of seeing the university constantly try to balance what were framed as opposing sides that needed to dialogue, rather than a range of people with diverse beliefs, commitments and experiences that make up the university itself.

Throughout our work, we had to continuously explain that identities do not determine political positions; that people who are not members of Muslim, Arab or Palestinian communities also care deeply about genocide and apartheid; and that diversity within communities is real. Many university stakeholders were surprised to hear that a quarter of Stanford’s Palestinian undergraduates come from Christian families, or to observe that a large number of students active in the historic Sit-in to Stop Genocide on campus did not identify as members of any of these communities.

Moreover, in practice, Stanford’s profession of neutrality distanced the university’s leadership from communities on campus who were suffering. Students and others experienced university leadership decisions as separating the neutral us from the you who are in pain. In our committee’s work, we saw the impact of this on people who mourned and protested the killing of Palestinians and advocated for their human rights. The insistence on neutrality manifested, in actuality, as an othering of those on campus who did not have the luxury to remain neutral as their families and loved ones suffered.

Navigating these challenges in a time of conflict is not easy, and Stanford is certainly not unique in facing them: Reports issued by task forces at Harvard University and the University of California, Los Angeles, illustrate similar issues. Our report sets out a range of recommendations to begin healing the ruptures we saw on our campus, many of which are applicable within higher education broadly and can be used to inform specific campus contexts.

Our primary recommendation is to nurture and protect more speech, not less. That means cultivating robust debate and adhering to core values of free speech and academic freedom, even and especially in the face of pressure. It also means investing in more faculty with the relevant expertise in Palestine and Arab studies alongside more protection for, and trust in, the expertise of those already there. Doubling down on knowledge is perhaps the only way to get to a vibrant intellectual discourse that could enable universities to cope with the next crisis. We must avoid reverting to an awkward false neutrality that does inevitable disservice to discourse on Palestine, forcing those who do engage in it to either prepare for retribution or, like our colleague did, remain anonymous.