American commentators today are saying with increasing regularity that the nation is more polarised now than at any point since its 1860-65 Civil War. In some ways, this is an exaggeration – although mass murders have spiraled in recent years, fueled by Americans’ deep identity issues with guns, overall levels of violence are still well below the brutal 1960s and 1970s. Race relations are nowhere near as bad as they were 50 years ago, and significant progress has been made in that time toward building greater equality and respect across gender and identity lines.
Nonetheless, significant structural injustices persist across a wide variety of demographics, and a straight white American male still enjoys not-so-hidden prerogatives that his peers do not, sparking ongoing – and much-needed dissent. At the same time over the last 50 years, the white population of the United States has dropped from over 80% to under 50%, provoking an ethno-nationalist backlash against immigration and non-white mobilisation among some white Americans that the Republican Party has stoked for political gain. Meanwhile, middle-class incomes have largely stagnated since the 1980s, while globalisation has taken jobs from large segments of the US economy. Even though the economy is back on track with high growth and lower inflation after the COVID-19 shocks, Americans are angry and increasingly divided along liberal and conservative lines, which also reflect racial and gender divisions as well.
Not surprisingly, then, college campuses in the US reflect this hyper-polarisation in the wider society, and more and more policy issues are being filtered through the lens of the political left and right. Views of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been emblematic of this extreme divide, and no issue seems to reflect that lately more than the debate over Hamas’ attack on Israel and the subsequent Israeli invasion of Gaza. US public opinion tends to be strongly pro-Israeli in general, and so it was initially after Hamas’ brazen attack and hostage-taking on October 7th, but as the Israeli counteroffensive in Gaza has brought increasing numbers of civilian casualties – more than 10 times the numbers of Israelis who died – American sympathies have been shifting slowly in the Palestinian direction, especially among US liberals. Many of the largest US university student bodies – as well as their faculty – tend to be more liberal, and thus student mobilisation calling for a ceasefire in Gaza has increased. Some of the more radical students among them have used the word genocide to describe Israeli actions in Gaza.
Sensing an opportunity to criticise what conservatives see as hyper liberality in US universities, and to draw Democrats into a situation where they would have to criticise some of their key constituents, Republicans in the House of Representatives invited several university presidents to testify on the matter before Congress. The situation came to a head when one of the Republican representatives asked the presidents if they would punish these students for calling the Israeli invasion genocide. When the Ivy League presidents of Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) would not openly commit to doing so, they faced an uproar of criticism on campus, leading the UPenn president to resign, while Harvard’s president survived an inquiry from her Board.
Some of the most powerful criticism of these presidents came from rich donors, who wield enormous influence on American campuses and make critical discussion of Israel extremely difficult across the country. Pro-Palestinian speakers and conferences often face difficult barriers to being heard, as campus administrators fear that key funders will withdraw their financial support. It is important, however, not to see this simply through an ethno-religious lens. Some of these donors are indeed Jewish and strongly pro-Israel for identity reasons, but many others are fundamentalist Christians, who are also extremely pro-Israel under an end-of-day theology that sees the state of Israel as a key part of the sequence of events leading to the second coming of Christ outlined in the Book of Revelation. Many Jewish and Christian donors, on the other hand, are extremely critical of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank.
Consequently, the university presidents faced an almost impossible question when asked to punish students for calling the Gaza invasion genocide. A favorable response to punishment would almost certainly lead to a student and faculty revolt over issues of free speech and academic freedom, core values of the university, while a failure to punish would draw the ire of many powerful donors. When the presidents of Harvard, MIT and UPenn floundered in their responses without giving a clear sign that they would punish such students, Republicans on the committee pounced. Harvard’s Board, sitting on the nation’s richest university endowment, stood by its president, while UPenn’s bowed out under the pressure.
Although we feel it is deplorable to call Israeli actions genocide, we stand by the Harvard Board in defending its president: universities must be staunch defenders of free speech and open debate, even when it borders on the offensive. American law is very clear that hate speech, which must be punished, must involve a clear incitement of violence directed against an individual or group. The students were calling for Israeli government leaders to be hauled before global judiciary bodies for the crime of genocide. This is a viable opinion, which many in Nigeria and worldwide share. It deserves to be spiritedly debated in light of the evidence and, ultimately, a democratic society has to come to a policy decision about what to do within the confines of the law. Without these freedoms, American youths have no way to subject their opinions to rigorous scrutiny and feedback, no matter how unpopular, and society as a whole loses a key, if not the most important, source of new ideas and creative responses to difficult problems. We can only hope that these recent debates will lead to a more open discussion of Palestinian concerns on US campuses and a more critical view of US support for Israel overall, based on principled and reasoned debate, not upon shutting it down.
