The revolting response of students and other members of campus communities to the Hamas attack and subsequent barbarism inflicted on Israeli citizens has launched a full-fledged ethics train wreck:
- Zareena Grewal, a professor of American Studies at Yale, tweeted out “There is no question who the oppressors are who the oppressed are. And somehow people are confused about this. White supremacy never stops being shocking to me.” Then she wrote, “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle, solidarity.”
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Derron Borders, a diversity administrator at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management, wrote on Instagram in support of the Hamas terrorists who killed more than 900 people, “When you hear about Israel this morning and the resistance being launched by Palestinians, remember against all odds Palestinians are fighting for life, dignity, and freedom — alongside others doing the same — against settle colonization, imperialism, capitalism, white supremacy, which the United States is the model.”
Meanwhile, the students in the 31 Harvard campus organizations that famously announced that Israel was fully responsible for all the violence erupting in and out of Gaza, are facing organized efforts to ensure they are punished:
- Bill Ackman, the billionaire founder of hedge fund giant Pershing Square Capital Management, has demanded that Harvard release the names of the students who belong to the 31 organizations, so that corporations know not to hire them. “I have been asked by a number of CEOs if Harvard would release a list of the members of each of the Harvard organizations that have issued the letter assigning sole responsibility for Hamas’ heinous acts to Israel, so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members,” Ackman, a Harvard alum, wrote on “X.” “If, in fact, their members support the letter they have released, the names of the signatories should be made public so their views are publicly known. One should not be able to hide behind a corporate shield when issuing statements supporting the actions of terrorists, who, we now learn, have beheaded babies, among other inconceivably despicable acts.” So far, at least a dozen company heads have endorsed his campaign.
- Two trucks circled Harvard Square yesterday with LED screens that flashed the names and photos of about a half dozen students known to be involved with the pro-Hamas groups. The billboard trucks were funded by the conservative news group Accuracy in Media, showed the Harvard students under the words, “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites” and linked to a website, HarvardHatesJews.com, which directed users to send messages to Harvard’s board of trustees. “Tell them to take action against these despicable, hateful students,” the website states. “Each and every one of these students should be expelled and their student organizations should be kicked off campus.”
Your Ethics Alarms Ethics Quiz of the Day is…
What constitutes a fair and responsible response to the campus supporters of the Hamas terror attacks?
Two thoughts: 1) The consequences facing professors, administrators and students should be different, 2) College is a time to make mistakes.
The First Amendment’s principles and academic freedom must apply. I believe the primary negative consequences should fall on the institutions who hire fools like Borders, allow political ideologues like Grewal to indoctrinate students, and who are negligent in teaching their charges in history, ethics, and critical thinking.
Ethics Alarms 
I think them exercising their free speech rights is great. We need to know who and what these people are. If they are willing self identify and advertise their hatred, that’s great. Let them and take note who they are.
Mao Zedong did say during the fake liberalization before the “Cultural Revolution” that he wanted all the dissidents to feel safe to come out of their hiding places and sing and fart, that way he’d know who they were and could nail them later.
So you don’t think it’s good for people who side with baby killing terrorists to tell us who they are?
FIrst Amendment turned up to 11! I am free to never associate with you. I am free to never render aid to you. I am free to watch you die a slow and regret filled wasting death from lack of food(dehydration would allow you to die too quickly).
I will confess to being genuinely conflicted on this topic.
I agree completely that college is the time to make mistakes and that the primary blame should go to the instructors and institutions and their processes of indoctrination.
There is also, however, the issue of accountability. We are in a society that no longer respects or stresses accountability and responsibility for one’s own actions. We hide behind an avatar or screen name and shout the most absurd and obscene vitriol with no concept of repercussions. What a life lesson for these students if they actually had to face the consequences of their ill-advised actions.
At the same time, given that they are in fact college students, barring them from any future employment is too draconian an action, as is expelling them from the very university that indoctrinated them in the first place. Perhaps they should be called to account for their actions, but also be given a chance at redemption if they accept responsibility, show remorse, and focus their efforts on getting a deeper understanding of middle east politics. Dialog is surely the answer rather than a ban on future employment.
The answer to bad speech is good speech.
I second that. Each of these students should have as part of their classes the obligation to take place in a debate on the topic. It is fine if they want to support the Palestinians, but they should research all the particular areas where Palestinians failed to move to the two-state solution, and have a cogent answer for why that happened. Of course, similarly, all the defenders of Israel should acknowledge that the state of Israel was not immaculately conceived, and that the Israelis have not been perfect in their dealings with their neighbors.
These debates won’t happen, of course. And all these students will receive their A’s regardless.
I loathe Sean Hannity – he is dumber than a box of hammers, but to his credit, he has leftists on his show and generally treats them with respect. (Aside: After the second RNC candidates’ slugfest, he interviewed Gavin Newsome, thinking that he was take Newsome out with biting questions; sadly, Newsome swatted the questions away with real aplomb and left Hannity looking stupid, if that’s even possible.)
Last night, my wife was watching Hannity (and I was clawing my eyes out) but Hannity had Prof. Cornell West and Prof. Emeritus Alan Dershowitz debate the issues. Enlightening, I must say.
Dershowitz took the position that Hamas is solely responsible for what is happening to Israelis and Palestinians in Gaza, the Golan Heights, and the West Bank, and support for Hamas is support for Islamic genocide against Israel and Jews, and there was a material, moral difference between “collateral damage” and directly targeting innocent noncombatants. West stated he abhorred what Hamas did to the babies but there was no moral distinction between the two – death of innocents is morally reprehensible, and that the deaths of innocents in Gaza and Israel was the result of colonialism, Israeli-US-led genocide against the Palestinians, and stated that the death of innocents in Gaza should be just as morally reprehensible as the death of innocent Israelis.
jvb
I agree that we should find the deaths of innocents abhorrent, but even in that there are degrees. The deliberate killing of innocents as an end in itself is more reprehensible than the unintended, though foreseen, killing of innocents. Killing babies in cold blood is far more reprehensible than targeting a building with a mixture of militants and civilians. Even Catholic Just War Doctrine notes that innocent casualties can be accepted in times of war, as long as those deaths were not intended in and of themselves, within reason. If a nest of militants are hiding among civilians in a public building, then it can be acceptable to target those militants, even if the civilians there will be killed in the process. But it is not acceptable to target the public building in order to kill civilians with the intent to demoralize the enemy through civilian deaths.
I have not paid much attention to what Israel has done policy-wise with the Gaza strip, and how any of those policies have impacted Palestinians there. I am willing to believe that some of those policies have made life almost impossibly difficult for people there. I’m not very sympathetic, because of all the wasted opportunities for a two-state or other peaceful solution, and the fact that Hamas and other Islamic militant groups swear that Israel must be completely destroyed. It is hard to negotiate with someone whose overarching goal is your utter annihilation. But people are still people and deserving of some basic rights, and if — let me stress IF — those rights are being violated by Israeli policies, those policies should change. But when militants strike out using civilians as shields, it is utter hypocrisy to cry out when those civilians are killed during retaliation.
The CEO’s should focus their ire on the school’s faculty. Do not hire any Harvard grad (or other grad from similar schools), do not use any Ivy league faculty as consultants, stop taking their students as interns, and stop supporting them financially and the culture of those indoctrination centers will change rapidly. In short, starve them of the resources needed to maintain their Maoist agenda. Students should be allowed to make mistakes, but they must learn from them as well otherwise they will continue to make them over and over again.
We should also be calling out the media that promotes the use terrorism by equating the beheading of babies and raping women as “resistance and failing to acknowledge that any retaliatory strikes on the Palestinians was brought on by the brutality of the Hamas government
Wait! What? These Harvard students won’t get internships and jobs at places like Goldman Sachs? That’s not fair!
Bill,
By cancelling opportunities for all students in institutions that promote the racist or anti-Semitic agendas only then will the schools have to decide whether their faculty is an asset or one great big liability.
Harvard has already show they are willing to punish students for tweets and post made before they were students at Harvard. As much as I think this is wrong, their own standard demands they take similar action against students who are actually represent them.
These students are not children, they are adults. Supposedly they are the best and brightest members of their age cohort. These students have been vocal advocates of harming anyone who is racist, sexist, xenophobic, homophobic, transphobic or disagrees in any way with leftist orthodoxy. They have demanded the cancellation, debanking, depersoning and jailing of anyone who says anything “harmful”.
The inability of intelligent adults to think through the consequences of their own beliefs is not reason to spare them from the consequences of their own beliefs.
A person cannot advocate “believe all women and cancel, destroy and jail all accused men based solely on an accusation” then turn around and endorse public gang rape of women without facing consequences.
A person cannot advocate for the cancellation, destruction and jailing for hate crimes anyone who upsets a member of a minority group then turn around and endorse the massacre of a minority group without facing consequences.
As a society we have to have a set of standards of behavior and there has to be consequences for violating those standards. I don’t like the standards that have been created, but these students are members of the group who created them. This is what they wanted. They need to be held responsible for the consequences of their behavior both past and current.
NP
In general I agree with you. However, the cancellation must begin with those who fill these young adults with noxious ideas.
Just as Hamas uses its women an children as human shields so too do the indoctrinated on college campuses. Every group has an advisor and every advisor has his or her allies who give them political strength. This is why we have so many mealy mouthed cowardly administrators. If we eliminate the reason so many want to go to these schools ( big entry level salaries) then the schools will be forced to reinvent themselves as true centers of scholarship and they will have to get rid of the indoctrinators.
These people ARE the indoctrinators. They have been front and center in the fight against free speech. They are not small children parroting the adults in the room, they are the adults in the room. We need to stop infantalizing adults. If they are old enough to vote for the noxious policies they believe in they are old enough to take responsibility for their beliefs and actions.
Good point but someone trained them – we need to address how he indoctrinated become that way at the institutional level
Given the prevailing distaste for anything but an absolutist position, I suppose I’d better start by saying that I unequivocally condemn Hamas’s actions.
OK, moving on. I’ll have a much longer piece on this story on my own blog in a day or two, but a couple of quick comments here.
1. This sounds perilously close to suggesting that free speech rights ought to be restricted to people we agree with.
2. Many members of the organizations in question didn’t even know the document existed until after it had been signed in their name. Releasing the names of individual students simply for being members of an Amnesty International chapter or the Nepali Student Association would be grossly unethical.
2a. Harvard might do it anyway, because preening billionaires (apologies for redundancy) want them to.
3. Anyone who never did anything stupid as a post-adolescent has my permission to cast the first stone.
Larry Tribe, in one of his rare lucid moments, has essentially made many of the same points, writing,
“Any number of the students who got caught up in this misguided campaign probably didn’t even know there was a statement. Others no doubt didn’t focus on, much less understand, what they were signing. Naive and stupid as they may have been, I now think it would be an overreaction to penalize them permanently by publishing their names and implying that they actually endorsed what the terrorists did to innocent Israelis.”
Larry Tribe lucid or not is part of the origin of the problem. It stands to reason that he would defend these students. The question remains would he say the same for students that belong to extreme right wing fringe groups. I doubt it.
A lengthy response to Curmie went to moderation for some reason
Just caught it, and it’s up.
Curmie
No one has suggested that any student’s ability to voice an opinion has been restricted. Quite the opposite. The only people demanding voices to be silenced probably belong to one or more of these 31 groups.
Those who support exposing those holding the belief that rape and massacring civilians as an appropriate means to an end would rather these people stop hiding in the shadows like cowards and put themselves on the line for what they believe. I for one would say the same thing about people who push white supremacy ideals.
My position has been to hold organizations and their members that promote violence accountable for their beliefs. Just as I would allow neo-Nazis to march on the streets I am just as willing to allow Palestinians the right to demonstrate or petition for redress.
These young adults or post adolescents can scream their opinions all they want. What those preening billionaires are saying is that is they do not wish to enable people with such attitudes to poison the culture they have spent time and money developing.
No one should be able to hide behind a organizational veil. If the membership takes issue with the letter then they should either resign from the organization or work to oust the leadership that created the letter. Any person able to gain acceptance to an Ivy League school cannot feign ignorance.
I have tried to be specific regarding who should be held accountable. Far too many professors inculcate within students an orthodoxy and the student must demonstrate fidelity to that orthodoxy or else. You don’t see many faculty putting their names on such letters just as you didn’t see any faculty standing alongside those Kent State students. They remained safely ensconced in their safe Ivory tower sending their charges to face the Ohio National Guard. Faculty use students as canon fodder to advance their political objectives. These kids were groomed to be activists by their handlers.
This is no different. These young people have little understanding of the world let along the Palestinian question. The idealism of youth is easily exploited by those relying on the appeal to authority. If left leaning faculty comprise the search and tenure committees it is unlikely that students will confront information antithetical to the left’s orthodoxy.
I left higher education for this reason alone. Anyone challenging the ideals of the left was to be shunned and denied opportunities for tenure or other advancement.
It rather reminds me of the armchair warriors in “All Quiet on the Western Front”. Pushing the glories of war that they had never experienced onto young and naive young men who could not know that the rules of combat had changed since the Crimean War. Those boys found themselves literally entrenched in a quagmire.
“What constitutes a fair and responsible response to the campus supporters of the Hamas terror attacks?”
Send them immediately on a free, month-long all expenses paid vacation to Gaza to make their support for Palestinians known in person. They’ve earned it! I hear its beautiful this time of year, and mostly peaceful!
Seriously, if most of these foolish students ever had a serious thought in their lives it would surprise me. Let them babble. They need to be firmly rebutted, denounced and called out for sure, but I haven’t heard anything so far that isn’t covered by the First Amendment.
As far as the faculty members are concerned, they know their legal rights all too well. They also know exactly what they are doing. Their employers should apply sanctions or suffer the backlash they richly deserve.
The names of the students should be published. If the organization wants to publish a statement defaming a group with the expectation that people take it seriously, they should have to attach their names to it. These statements are published in the press as if they mean something. People get fired or thrown off campus because of these statements.
If you want college to be a place to make drastic, stupid mistakes, fine. However, if you do want that, then they don’t get to publish things like this. They can stand and shout and have debates on campus all they want, but the moment they take their opinion to the world and demand to be taken seriously, their “I was young and stupid and YOU need to protect me from my stupid opinions” demand goes away too.
It is an either/or. Either you get to have completely idiotic opinions you didn’t think through and share them with your friends on campus without consequences or you get to demand to be taken seriously. You don’t get both.
Well said Michael
Actions have consequences. Speech has consequences. We can talk all we like about the Freedom of Speech (or Religion or Right to Assemble, etc), but while the government cannot punish us for our speech, our fellow citizens can and will make judgements about us despite that.
There needs to be some degree of determination for how to decide what to do with adults who proclaim stupid things in an institute of learning. However, we also need to appreciate free speech. So, I propose that for professors, lecturers, administrators, and those in positions of power, that they be held to a requirement that they must give a two hour session on their position, open to all. The first 45 or so minutes are reserved for what they have to say, with the remaining time being allowed for question/answer type time. A moderator (or perhaps two of opposing positions) should be present to account for any time the person does not answer a question. Ex. “Why do you believe that is is fair to intentionally target and behead young children and the elderly non-combatants?” “Well, Israel doesn’t belong there so it doesn’t matter.” Moderators can point out that this is not an answer and require a real answer to the tough questions before continuing. On the other hand, “Does this mean you deny the Moon Landing?” would be thrown out by the moderator as completely stupid. Of course, anyone, teacher or student, who tries the heckler’s veto or shouts down another person should be immediately escorted out. If they are a professor who supports the heckler’s veto, they should be immediately terminated.
Now, at the end of this session, hardly difficult for people who purportedly have the job of educating others, they acquit themselves with some degree of valor, they can keep their status. If not, depending on what their status is, they can be punished, for showing their inappropriateness in position. Administrators would be most easily disposed of and likely terminated, followed by faculty in positions that SHOULD be able to figure this stuff out. For example I would hope a History or Ethics professor would acquit themselves well, but a Math professor would have more difficulty. If a Middle East History professor says that they didn’t know that Hamas has declared that only the eradication of the Israeli state is acceptable in a compromise, then out they should go.
However, if they acquit themselves poorly, but not enough so to lose their job, they should have to take an ethics and/or maybe a history class so that they are reminded that to form educated opinions, they need to actually be educated.
As for students, I think that in our cancel culture today, a company can very easily say that they won’t hire students from certain schools for certain years as they apparently had a very bad education, which may protect those companies from having certain bad educations on staff.
However, it is also fair to require students to take History and Ethics classes. This could be a request from companies, or a step forward for Universities to start to acquit themselves. If your students are proclaiming terrorism is good, requiring them to learn what they are missing is a step towards proving that you are no longer just a facility for brainwashing. I personally prefer three credit hour classes requiring strict attendance at 8 AM requiring 40 page papers weekly, with a D denying you progression on your degree. Certain degrees could up that requirement to a B or A, like both semesters of O-Chem must be passed with an A if you want to go to the Pharmacy College. In plenty of majors, a class with those requirements is common, so let’s add another on. What is 139 credits compared to 133? Sleep is overrated in college anyway.
Finally, I dislike the idea of saying that just because you were a young adult when you did something stupid means that consequences should be light. I know people who did something stupid in their early twenties who cannot get jobs or travel, more than two decades later, because of something that is a felony in one state and a slap on the wrist a few miles further north. I feel very sorry for people who do stupid stuff in their twenties, but at what point do we decide that people are adults? My great grandmother was expected to be an adult when she was married at 13 and started having children 13 months later, and that was the case over many centuries. Now at twice that age, people are still saying that being an adult is too hard and we should forgive them for the mistakes they make at young ages.
I’m not opposed to compassion, but lessons are almost always learned better when the consequences are strict. I do believe that many things in our society have turned a little too harsh, but many others have turned too lenient. This is a case where we need to up the severity, but not go overboard.
College is a time for making mistakes is 100% true. But mistakes still have to have consequences or else the mistake isn’t learned from.
This is where “cancel culture” has some uses. Every single society has some level of “cancel culture”. What happens after any particular “cancellation” is what distinguishes radical societies from conservative societies.
In a conservative society – such socially horrendous conduct worthy of “cancellation” should have its practitioners “canceled” BUT, there is ALWAYS an opening to return to society and extend grace to the offender when the offender recognizes the error and changes their mindset and conduct.
In a radical society – those “worthy” of cancellation will never be forgiving, will be expected to be in constant life long groveling, and, at some point, much like the French revolution and luckily not *yet* here in the United States, can very well expect to be murdered for their cancellable actions.
These kids should face some sort of open and uncomfortable ostracism and push back. They won’t learn otherwise. But as soon as they learn, they should be seen as fully reintegrated kids in society.
And to be clear, in a radical society, not only are the “permissible” viewpoints *extremely narrow*, but they are very likely constantly changing, where no one idea set can ever feel secure in testing out its opinion.