BY MALICK W. GHACHEM

In the weeks since writing my recent piece for Academe magazine on last year’s Israel-Palestine campus conflict, the atmosphere on my own campus (MIT) has become, if anything, even more tense. The pressures bearing down on both administrators and students remain all too apparent, as does the war of attrition about which I wrote in my essay. The approaching November election casts a long shadow over an already troubled state of political discourse, both on campus and off. And the violence in the Middle East has escalated yet further, beckoning a wider regional war. Meanwhile, our military and foreign policy leadership stands by as if helpless, seemingly unable to fathom that our own policies bear significant responsibility for the unfolding chaos.

Readers both sympathetic to and critical of the perspective reflected in my essay have observed that I inject a partisan political note into the campus conflict. It is hard to write about the assault on academic freedom and free expression in higher education today without highlighting the instrumental role of Republican politicians in the culture war that has now come to the doorsteps of our leading private universities. Nonetheless, the deeply misguided support for Israel’s war on Gaza (and, increasingly, the West Bank) is a function of policies and positions taken by the federal government more broadly. These dynamics go beyond party politics, and indeed now implicate even the federal judiciary, which is being asked to arbitrate the Israel-Palestine campus conflict, thereby enmeshing judges in the domestic politics that shape our foreign policy. Those who believe that a Democratic-controlled legislature is more likely to take a stand in favor of academic freedom, or that a Republican president is more likely to take a stand in favor of Palestinian equality and self-determination, should think again.

American academic leaders, for their part, are in a bit of a holding pattern, increasingly cautious about associating academic freedom and free expression with student protests as the national political winds continue to blow in unpredictable directions. The shutdown of last spring’s encampments seems to have damaged, perhaps fatally, the prospects for restoring trust between administrators and student protesters. The former have dug in their heels, and the latter are increasingly in retreat and on the defensive. The political battle lines are hardening. I believe the dynamics laid out in my article are responsible for this outcome.

I write these words from Bielefeld, Germany, home to a university that was born (in 1969) of another pivotal era of international student protest. It is a bit of a reprieve to be in an environment where (as best I can tell) the controversy over student protests, and student protest itself, seem relatively absent. No doubt the history of twentieth-century Germany and German universities hangs heavily over this contemporary scene (see Michael Grüttner’s essay in this volume). Exhausting as the conflict in American higher education has been, however, it is essential to resist the pressures seeking to marginalize, if not repress altogether, today’s student-led protests of the devastation in Gaza. Even those academic leaders who do not share the antipathy to pro-Palestine student protest are subject to its gravitational force, which marshals a broad spectrum of American political discourse, from left to right, secular to religious, and in between.

At a time when one of the most right-wing, racist governments in Israel’s history has been unleashing a brutal war on a stateless, brown, largely Muslim population with the indispensable support of our government, American universities have an indispensable role to play in keeping lines of communication and debate open. They must do so even while remaining vigilant about the specter of antisemitism, which must be defined, in accordance with First Amendment values, to leave adequate room for political criticism of the policies and ideologies of the state of Israel. It is all a matter of getting the balance right in light of the larger political context within which higher education must operate. Readers of my article, which also contains a message for student protest leaders, can judge for themselves whether I have done so. But however we come down on this issue, all of us should be worried about the present trend towards marginalization and repression of the student movement that culminated in last spring’s encampment drama. We will all lose if this movement, which is disproportionately composed of Black and brown students whose numbers are declining owing to recent changes in admissions policies, concludes that it does not have a place on American university campuses.

If you find yourself shrugging your shoulders at this prospect or, worse, celebrating it, consider the fate of this young man. In a better world, he would have come to an American university like mine to study, and then returned to help his people build a new future. Our government professes to mourn his death while providing the very military support that enabled it. The unavoidable message of our foreign policy is that brown, Palestinian-Arab lives matter less than others. In complicated but discernible ways, the Israel-Palestine campus conflict has had to accommodate this deeply rooted historical prejudice for fear of unleashing another one. We can and must do better—as a country and as citizens of the academy.

Malick W. Ghachem is professor of history and head of the history faculty at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is teaching a seminar this fall titled Free Expression, Pluralism, and the University.