https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/n10/amia-srinivasan/if-we-say-yes

An open letter​ is an unloved thing. Written by committee and in haste, it is a monument to compromise: a minimal statement to which all signatories can agree, or – worse – a maximal statement that no signatory fully believes. Some academics have a general policy against signing them. I discovered that was true of some of my Oxford colleagues last year, when I drafted and circulated an open letter condemning Israel’s attack on Gaza and calling for a ceasefire. Some, like those who are in precarious employment or whose immigration status isn’t settled, have good reasons for adopting such a policy. Others understandably don’t want to put their name to something that doesn’t perfectly represent their views, especially when it might be read as a declaration of faith. I always cringe at the self-importance of the genre: though open letters can sometimes exert influence, stiffly worded exhortations hardly suffice to stop states, militaries, bombs. And yet, a ‘no open letters’ policy can serve as a convenient excuse when one is hesitant to stand up for one’s political principles.

In the last seven months, there have been many more open letters on Gaza. I have signed some of them. One, in November, was a reply to a statement published by a group of prominent German intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas among them, who had lambasted anyone who accused Israel of flirting with genocide. ‘Despite all the concern for the fate of the Palestinian population,’ the statement read, ‘the standards of judgment slip completely when genocidal intentions are attributed to Israel’s actions.’ It went on to suggest that attributions of genocidal intent were an expression of antisemitism. The response, which I signed along with Adam Tooze, Samuel Moyn, Chandra Talpade Mohanty and others, condemned Hamas’s actions of 7 October and affirmed the ‘vital need to protect Jewish life in Germany in the face of rising antisemitism’. It insisted that we must not ‘close down the space for debate and reflection about the possibility of genocide’, while noting that not all the signatories believed that Israel’s actions constituted genocide. This even-handedness did not stop an editor at the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung from declaring, with our letter in mind, that Jews have an ‘enemy’ at universities.

In April, the critical theorist Nancy Fraser, who had also signed the letter criticising the statement by Habermas et al, had an invitation to visit the University of Cologne as its Albertus Magnus Professor rescinded. Cologne justified the disinvitation on the grounds that Fraser had signed yet another letter, ‘Philosophy for Palestine’, which questioned ‘Israel’s right to exist as an “ethno-supremacist state”’, and called for an academic and cultural boycott of Israeli institutions – a call that Cologne said was ‘irreconcilable’ with its ‘close ties to Israeli partner institutions’. Fraser, herself Jewish, described her cancellation as an instance of ‘philosemitic McCarthyism’ – ‘a way to silence people under the pretext of supposedly supporting Jews’.

Also last month I signed a petition, launched by the political theorist Enzo Rossi, protesting against the suspension of Jodi Dean, a professor of politics at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, from her academic duties. In a blog post, Dean – a communist and anti-Zionist – had remarked of the early scenes from 7 October:

Who could not feel energised seeing oppressed people bulldozing the fences enclosing them, taking to the skies in escape, and flying freely through the air? The shattering of the collective sense of the possible made it seem as if anyone could be free, as if imperialism, occupation and oppression can and will be overthrown.

Four days later, Mark D. Gearan, president of Hobart and William Smith, announced that Dean was being suspended from teaching pending an investigation. ‘As a result of Professor Dean’s comments,’ he explained, ‘there now may be students on our campus who feel threatened in or outside of the classroom.’ An email, with the subject line ‘Invitation to Participate in Investigation’, has been sent to Hobart and William Smith students by a law firm retained by the college ‘to conduct an independent investigation into whether Professor Jodi Dean has violated policies or standards of the Colleges prohibiting harassment and discrimination’. The email asks students to contact the investigative team directly ‘should you have any information that is relevant to our investigation’.

On 15 April students at Columbia University and Barnard College set up a Gaza solidarity encampment on a university lawn, just hours before Columbia’s president, Minouche Shafik, was hauled in front of Congress to answer questions about the way her administration was dealing with the ‘rising antisemitism on campus’. The next day, Shafik authorised the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group to enter Columbia’s campus. They did so, in full riot gear, and arrested more than a hundred student protesters. The police reported that the students they arrested ‘were peaceful, offered no resistance whatsoever’. Visiting the Columbia campus the following week, the speaker of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, suggested the National Guard be brought in to deal with the students, whom he called ‘lawless agitators and radicals’. With their encampment dismantled, the students built another on a different lawn, and occupied a university building; mass arrests again followed. One Columbia professor commented: ‘When I saw that police “tank” coming up the street, something in my heart broke. I stood and sobbed. The trustees had broken their compact with the university and I do not know it will come back.’ On 22 April, more than a hundred Columbia faculty members held a rally to protest against the arrests and suspensions of their students. The day before, I had signed an open letter – along with three thousand other academics from around the world – that pledges us to uphold ‘an academic and cultural boycott of Columbia University’.

While Columbia was not the first university to call the cops on its students during the current wave of protests, its heavy-handed intervention galvanised students across the US and abroad, and set the template for their protests: the solidarity encampment. More than two thousand students in the US have been arrested, from Yale and NYU to the University of Northern Carolina, Emory (Georgia), Vanderbilt (Tennessee) and Pomona (California). At SUNY Purchase, a public liberal arts college in upstate New York, students gathered, without tents, on campus to protest; when the college’s ‘quiet hours’ began at 10 p.m., the students sat down and fell silent. The cops came in anyway and arrested seventy people, including faculty observers and students who had tried to flee the protest after the police ordered them to disperse. At Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, police body-slammed a Jewish labour historian in her mid-sixties. At Emory an economics professor was wrestled to the ground by the police for objecting to their manhandling of a student; she was charged with battery for ‘resisting’ arrest. At the Universities of Ohio and Indiana snipers were stationed on rooftops. At UCLA, pro-Israel counter-protesters attacked the Gaza encampment for hours with sticks, traffic cones, bear spray and fireworks as police and campus security stood by; the following night, riot police attacked the encampment with rubber bullets and bean bag rounds. Such actions are not confined to the US. Early in May, at the University of Amsterdam, masked far-right activists attacked the Gaza solidarity encampment with flares just a few hours after it was set up, while the police looked on. That night, riot police dismantled the camp with bulldozers, knocking one protester unconscious and injuring several others.

In April​ I was asked to sign a letter opposing the University of Cambridge’s investigation into Nathan Cofnas, a Leverhulme early career fellow in philosophy. A self-described ‘race realist’, Cofnas has written widely in defence of abhorrently racist – particularly anti-Black – views, invoking what he claims are the findings of the science of heredity. In 2022, when he was first appointed, Cambridge students protested, to no effect. Student calls for his dismissal started up again this year, after Cofnas published a blog post in which he claimed that in a meritocracy the number of Black professors at Harvard would ‘approach zero per cent’ and Black people would ‘disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment’. At a protest outside the Cambridge philosophy faculty, students chanted ‘Fire Nathan Cofnas’; a student petition calling for his dismissal has more than a thousand signatures. This time, Cambridge has responded. On 5 April, Emmanuel College wrote to terminate Cofnas’s research affiliation, explaining that his blog post ‘amounted to, or could reasonably be construed as amounting to, a rejection of Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI and EDI) policies’. Cambridge’s philosophy faculty and the Leverhulme Trust are both investigating Cofnas; his employment status presumably hangs in the balance.

There were things about the letter, which I had no part in drafting, that I did not like. It did not contain a condemnation of Cofnas’s racism, noting only that signing the letter ‘does not indicate endorsement of Dr Cofnas’s views’. It did not draw a distinction between supporting Cofnas and objecting to Cambridge’s investigation of him. It did not note that academic freedom isn’t the same thing as free speech: that the former is about academics’ rights to make content-based discriminations in speech based on their disciplinary expertise, while the latter is about everyone’s right to be free of content-based speech restrictions in the public sphere. (It may well be that Cofnas’s academic work, in its racism, does not meet the disciplinary standards of philosophy; but Cambridge evidently thought otherwise when they hired him, at which point his views were already on record.) The letter did not oppose itself squarely enough to the spectre of universities terminating academic employment on the basis of complaints about extramural speech. It did not canvass the possibility that students have a right not to be taught by someone who is on the record expressing the view that, if a student is Black, they are almost certainly less intelligent – let alone make an effort to distinguish that matter from the question of whether the university has the right to fire Cofnas from his research post. I didn’t especially like some of the company I would be keeping if I signed the letter: the other signatories include a philosopher whom I’ve repeatedly and publicly criticised for having a weird obsession with defending the permissibility of killing disabled people, and a talking head who was an associate of Jeffrey Epstein. And the letter did not tie the defence of academics’ speech in the Cofnas case to the broader principle that is being ravaged in the UK, US, Germany, Israel and elsewhere.

I signed it nevertheless. Six months ago my objections to the framing of the letter might have stopped me. But I thought about Jodi Dean, her suspension from teaching, and the investigation she is undergoing on the grounds that she may make some of her students feel unsafe. I thought about the German Jews who have been disciplined by the state in their protests against Israel’s war, on the absurd grounds that they are being antisemitic. I thought about the students who have been arrested while peacefully protesting against an inhumane war, because they have been deemed by university administrators to be a threat to the safety of their fellow Jewish students (never mind that many of the protesting students are themselves Jewish). I thought about the former presidents of Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, who were both forced to resign in a Republican witch hunt ostensibly about antisemitism but really about right-wing anger at university autonomy. I thought about colleagues at state universities in Florida, who are barred from teaching on their general education courses that ‘systemic racism, sexism, oppression and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States.’ I thought about colleagues in Texas, who can now have their tenure revoked because of ‘moral turpitude’. I thought about colleagues in Israel who wrote to me, soon after their government began its attack on Gaza, about the choice they faced between speaking out and keeping their jobs. I thought about Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, the Palestinian legal scholar and Israeli citizen, who was suspended by Hebrew University for calling for the abolition of Zionism, and later detained by Israeli police, strip-searched and handcuffed, and subjected to questions about her published views on international law and colonialism. I thought about Israa University, the last remaining university in Gaza, demolished by Israel in January.

The point is not that Cofnas is just the same as the many people in the crosshairs of the right’s war on academic freedom and free speech. The point is not – noxious as he is – Cofnas at all. Rather, the point is simply this. Do we think that students should be able to trigger investigations into academics on the grounds that their extramural speech makes them feel unsafe? Do we want to fuel the right’s sense of grievance towards the university, when their minority presence within it is owed to the robust correlation between education and political liberalism, not some Marxist plot? Do we want to empower university administrators to fire academics on the grounds that they are attracting negative publicity? Do we think there is any guarantee that a further strengthened institutional power will only be wielded against those whose views and politics we abhor? If we say yes, what picture of power – theirs and ours – does that presume?

To which​ a devil’s advocate might say: isn’t that a mug’s game? Maybe. As I’ve argued in the LRB before, ‘free speech’ and ‘academic freedom’ are, for many on the right, ideological notions, weapons to be wielded against the left and the institutions it is (falsely) believed to control, the university most of all.* Some conservatives have, admirably, stood up for academic freedom in recent months, even where it presumably hurts them to do so; both the Princeton professor of jurisprudence Robert P. George and Sohrab Ahmari, the editor of Compact, spoke out against the suspension of Dean while objecting strongly to her views. But notably absent from the letter in support of Dean were the signatures of many prominent free-speech warriors, including Steven Pinker, Greg Lukianoff, Jonathan Haidt, Conor Friedersdorf, Jordan Peterson and Bari Weiss.

The free-speech brigade has also found justifications for the draconian repression of student protest. Weiss, citing the appalling, albeit rare, instances of antisemitism in the student protests, has complained that universities are going soft on them because of left-wing bias. Peterson has cheered on university presidents as they order the dismantling of what he calls ‘pro- Hamas’ encampments. Lukianoff, in a piece for the Sunday Times, offered a lukewarm defence of students’ right to free speech, before arguing that the current protests aren’t exercises of free speech directed at an inhumane war, but rather the expression of ‘groupthink’ cultivated ‘through ideological filters on hiring, promotion and even teaching’. Pinker has called Harvard’s student protesters ‘poisonous’ to the university’s ‘mission’, and argued that it would be justified in calling the cops on them. Like Lukianoff, Pinker draws a contrast between genuine free speech and the speech of the student protesters: ‘A university should be a forum in which people offer arguments backed by reason and guided by the search for common ground,’ he says, not ‘a place where they issue “demands” chanted in rhyming slogans’. Ctd....