After Their Abysmal Response to the Hamas Attack, Universities Face a Reckoning

By Marc Sarnoff

Monday, October 23, 2023

 

On the quiet morning of October 7, 2023, the Palestinian terror group Hamas opened a barbaric new chapter in the history of terrorism, murdering 1,400 Israelis and taking more than 200 hostages. Attacking defenseless kibbutzim and young revelers at a music festival, Hamas hunted down women, children, and the elderly. Countless bodies showed signs of torture, with children’s eyes cut out and fingers cut off before they were executed. Hamas has murdered or taken hostage citizens of more than 40 countries.

 

No sooner had Hamas’s unspeakable atrocities come to light than scores of university student groups publicly and solely blamed Israel, expressing their solidarity with Hamas. Free speech is a core principle of universities. But there are others — such as dialogue, fairness, and tolerance — that universities have for too many years ignored.

 

The problem begins with spineless university administrators, who have consistently bowed to the woke tide of hateful speech from radical socialists. Universities that would fall over themselves to cancel a white-nationalist student group for excusing the murder of minorities have platformed student groups that blame Hamas’s attacks on the victims. Yale University, which allowed a professor’s career to be ruined for suggesting that students should be tolerant of each other’s Halloween costumes, has so far stood by a professor who wrote that “Israel is a murderous, genocidal settler state and Palestinians have every right to resist through armed struggle.”

 

Thankfully, this has not been the case in several Florida universities. The day after Hamas’s attack, Kenneth Jessell, president of Florida International University, of which I am proud to be a trustee, was among the first public university leaders to condemn the barbaric attacks unequivocally. “FIU stands with U.S. leaders, leaders from around the world and the people of Israel in condemning the Hamas terrorist attacks on Israel that have claimed hundreds of innocent lives, including children,” Jessell said. A few days later, former U.S. senator Ben Sasse, now president of the University of Florida, spoke with similar moral clarity. “I will not tiptoe around this simple fact: What Hamas did is evil and there is no defense for terrorism,” Sasse said. These simple and clear statements contrast sharply with the ambivalence or silence expressed by the leaders of other universities.

 

Free speech is the underpinning of a free society. But with free speech comes responsibility. Members of a university community should express their views and be open to civil debate. Even as they remember that we are all fallible, they should own and stand by their speech, and not hide behind the anonymity of student groups. Some of the students’ statements have been so reprehensible that potential employers may want to know whether job applicants made them — and innocent students have a right not to be associated with such statements. Many employers doubtless share financier Bill Ackman’s understandable desire not to “inadvertently hire” somebody with the poor character and judgment necessary to sign such a statement.

 

The University of Pennsylvania will justly feel the long-term consequences of its leadership’s ambivalence in the face of Hamas’s crimes, especially after standing by the antisemites who gathered at the Palestine Writes Literature Festival it hosted. Donors have closed their wallets, including the Huntsman Foundation, whose CEO, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman, wrote:

 

Moral relativism has fueled the university’s race to the bottom and sadly now has reached a point where remaining impartial is no longer an option. The University’s silence in the face of reprehensible and historic Hamas evil against the people of Israel (when the only response should be outright condemnation) is a new low. Silence is antisemitism, and antisemitism is hate, the very thing higher ed was built to obviate.

 

Similar reactions have followed the silence or ambivalence of school administrators across the country.

 

This reckoning has been decades in the making. For too long, university administrators across America have embraced a radical agenda that has corrupted admissions, hiring, and research; fomented intolerance and censorship of political and religious beliefs; and diminished due process. These universities seem more worried about appeasing the latest radical fashion trend than about teaching students and improving students’ lives.

 

Difficult topics need to be debated. For example, those who believe that Israel’s response is disproportionate have every right to say so. But they should be prepared to own this view and to debate it with an open mind, so that they can learn about the laws of war. Then one hopes they will understand what too many people don’t: that proportionality under international law turns on the military objective, not on the level of force the aggressor used, and that after Hamas’s crimes, the disarmament and eradication of Hamas has become a legitimate military objective. We should give students a chance to understand that those who care about Palestinian civilians should be calling for the surrender of Hamas, not a cease-fire that would effectively be an Israeli surrender.

 

Universities should encourage all students to be active on issues and causes they believe in. But the primary mission of a university is teaching, and the primary responsibility of students is to learn. That’s particularly true for divisive topics such as the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.

 

This is a teachable opportunity to inculcate the values of compassion, freedom of inquiry, and respect for the opinions of others — the values on which America’s great universities were originally founded.