Jonathan Marks, Ursinus College

In 2021, I published an optimistic book about the state of higher education. Yes, the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel sought to propagandize college students. Yes, the main organizations behind academic BDS aimed to end Israel as a Jewish state and embraced violence, despite their loud avowals of nonviolence. But academics had made some headway against such tactics by using their proper tools, argument and evidence. Although BDS had won over many student governments, it had fared poorly in academic professional associations. Favored by a minority of far-left academics, BDS, I thought could be defeated by academics willing to stand up to them, organized by groups like AEN and Scholars for Peace in the Middle East.

The aftermath of October 7th  on our campuses taught me that things were worse at many of our colleges and universities than I had thought. I was surprised when National Students for Justice in Palestine brazenly called on October 8th for a Day of Resistance and declared the slaughter “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” That their sympathies were with Hamas was no surprise to close observers, for whom the BDS movement’s approval of terrorists tactics was well known. But they had previously tried to keep it under the radar. Was it possible they thought that opposition to Israel on campus could grow after the murder of hundreds of Israeli civilians, after the abduction of others? Did they think that in the supposed home of reason, Israel’s response would be judged as if it had been unprovoked?

If that is what they thought, they were probably right, at least about the near term. 

I cannot celebrate the late recognition, under pressure, by some university administrations, that protest isn’t always a sign of campus good health, that antisemitism merits attention, and that colleges and universities should avoid, in official statements, the appearance of partisanship. The willingness of universities to cave to pressure is hardly new or a sign that they are take their missions or the concerns of Jewish faculty and students seriously. It is only fair that Jews will be heard better when they appeal to authorities who had already shown themselves inclined to ignore academic freedom and freedom of speech to protect other targets of “hate speech.” But it is unlikely—indeed early returns on efforts by universities to get things under control suggest that it is impossible to believe---that the kinds of regulations intended to control “hate speech” won’t end up suppressing or chilling speech that falls well short of harassment or incitement. Administrators have no business regulating at institutions supposedly devoted to the free exchange of ideas.

Still, university faculty, with many honorable exceptions, cannot easily escape the charge that more of them kept their heads down, or blithely praised protest without considering its substance, or reflexively assailed administrators and the right, while letting “scholar activist” colleagues off the hook, than spoke in opposition to “glory to our martyrs” declarations and the like on their campuses. Defenders of higher education who, like me, thought that fence-sitting professors could be moved to defend the integrity of their institutions once they understood a movement seeking to turn colleges and universities into bases for assault on Israel and the United States must reckon with a hard fact. On October 8th, National Students for Justice in Palestine ripped off the mask that hid their support for terrorism from casual observers. Although that woke administrators and donors, faculty seem mostly to have rolled over and gone back to sleep.