The treason of the intellectuals — again

On 11 December the historian Niall Ferguson wrote an essay on “The Treason of the Intellectuals” for the online platform The Free Press, taking his title from the famous work by the French intellectual Julien Benda, La Trahison des Clercs (1927). Benda’s book was an all-out attack on how European intellectuals who should have upheld the values of the Enlightenment had instead descended into extreme nationalism and racism. They had ushered in “the age of the intellectual organisation of political hatreds”.

Almost a century later, writes Ferguson, American academics have also betrayed their vocation:

“For nearly ten years, rather like Benda, I have marvelled at the treason of my fellow intellectuals. I have also witnessed the willingness of trustees, donors, and alumni to tolerate the politicisation of American universities by an illiberal coalition of ‘woke’ progressives, adherents of ‘critical race theory’, and apologists for Islamist extremism.”

Ferguson’s piece could not be more timely. It followed soon after an Open Letter on the Misuse of Holocaust Memory in The New York Review of Books, signed by a  number of distinguished historians of the Holocaust and antisemitism (20 November), which attacked “political leaders and notable public figures invoking Holocaust memory to explain the current crisis in Gaza and Israel” (see my piece in TheArticle on 25 November). Two other rejoinders followed, both signed by leading historians, one in The Jewish Chronicle and the second in The New York Review of Books

Undaunted, the signatories of the original letter replied to their critics. Unfortunately, their response had the same problems as their first letter: lots of assertions but surprisingly little evidence. Who are these political leaders and “figures in the media” who refer to the attacks on 7 October as “a Holocaust” or to Hamas as “Nazis”? It is inappropriate to compare 7 October with the Holocaust, but would they consider it more reasonable to compare 7 October with pogroms in the past, or with individual atrocities during the “Shoah by Bullets” by the Nazis and their allies? We don’t know because they don’t say. They continue: “If the current war is conceived of as a battle between ‘the children of light and the children of darkness’, between the civilised and the barbarians, between the Jews and the Nazis, then every act of violence is a priori justified as preventing a second Holocaust.” Are they saying this isn’t “a battle between … the civilised and the barbarians”? Are Hamas not “barbarians”? Really? Is Israel, the home of the Weizmann Institute, The Hebrew University and Yad Vashem, not “civilised”? Again, they don’t make the argument.

Then they say “over 6000 children have been killed to date”. Have they? Again, no sources, no evidence. They later write, “The writers’ [responding to their original letter] claim that ‘Hamas has had a state in Gaza for seventeen years, five years longer than the Nazis controlled Germany’ is specious and tendentious.” But isn’t it also true? So how can it be “specious and tendentious”? This is just another assertion with no argument or evidence. In the final paragraph, they assert that Israel has caused “massive death and destruction” since the brief ceasefire. Of course, they don’t mention who broke the ceasefire and they don’t define what they mean by “massive death” since they don’t offer any figures or sources.

However, what prompted Ferguson’s article was not this exchange, but the extraordinary cross-examination in Congress of the presidents of U Penn, MIT and Harvard. The complacency of the presidents of three of America’s most prestigious universities was astonishing. Asked straightforward questions about whether calls for genocide were acceptable at their universities they twisted and turned, unwilling to give a straight answer to a straight question. Claudine Gay, President of Harvard, was asked, ‘at Harvard, does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment, yes or no?’ The university administrator replied: ‘It can be, depending on the context.”

Donors have been quick to withdraw huge sums (one withdrew $100 million), the President of U Penn has been forced to resign after her abysmal performance and Claudine Gay, the President of Harvard, has faced calls for her resignation (though over 500 Harvard faculty members wrote a letter to the board of trustees supporting Ms. Gay). Gay’s ‘has done more damage to the reputation of Harvard University than any individual in our nearly 500-year history,’ said Hedge Fund manager Bill Ackman, who has become a figurehead of Jewish resistance to the Ivy League leaders.

Writing on X/Twitter, Ackman said: “Because of her failure to condemn the most vile and barbaric terrorism…, for supporting rather than condemning 34 Harvard-branded student organizations who hold Israel ‘entirely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric acts, for failing to enforce Harvard’s own rules on student conduct, and for her other failures of leadership, President Gay catalyzed an explosion of antisemitism and hate on campus that is unprecedented in Harvard’s history.”

In her response, Ms. Gay admitted: “I failed to convey what is my truth.” Of course, this is exactly the nature of the problem. College presidents should not be speaking about “my truth”. There is just the truth, demonstrated by rational argument, backed up by evidence.

What was astonishing was the rush to defend these college administrators in newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times and magazines like New York, where Jonathan Chait, a regular contributor for more than a decade, wrote a piece, “The College Presidents Were Right About Antisemitism”: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/12/college-presidents-antisemitism-campus-free-speech-congress-stefanik.html. Chait writes that the questions put to the college presidents were “largely impossible queries”. Really? Actually, they were very straightforward and the presidents failed to grasp the significance of what Rep. Stefanek and her colleagues were asking. First, the presidents failed to make the distinction between speech and conduct. That was obviously what they should have done, so why didn’t they? Second, their manner was so offensive: smirking (especially President Magill from U Penn), failing to take the questions seriously and replying in an appropriate manner.

Then Chait went on to say, “there’s no good answer” to Rep. Kiley’s question:

“If you were talking to a prospective student’s family, a Jewish student’s family right now, could you look them in the eye and tell them that their son or daughter would be safe and feel safe and welcome on your campus?” Is that an impossible query?  How about: No one can absolutely guarantee anyone’s safety but I could assure these parents that everyone at Harvard is absolutely committed to student safety and we do everything in our power to ensure student safety at Harvard. Here are our statistics for Jewish students and what we have done about antisemitism on campus?

Chait also wrote, “Globalise the intifada” is “deliberately ambiguous” as a phrase. Jews have no doubt whatsoever about the threat implied in this slogan, so how can it be “ambiguous”? The ambiguity lies in the failure of so many non-Jews in positions of authority to take these slogans seriously. It’s a failure of will, not the ambiguity of language. The same applies to “from the river to the sea”. All Jews I know understand this to be a call to genocide against Israelis living between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea.

Chait and others who supported the luckless college presidents failed to address a number of key questions. If white students marched around these campuses calling for the genocide of Black, gay or Trans students without actually attacking any of them, would that be considered acceptable at Harvard, Penn or MIT?

Then there’s the question of double standards, which they rarely address. In his book, The Tyranny of Virtue, the American literary critic Robert Boyers writes about all the things that professors are no longer allowed to say at Skidmore College where he has taught since the 1960s. For example, they cannot say they have to run for a train because what about disabled students who can’t run?  Expressions like “stand up for”, “turn a blind eye to” and “walk in someone’s shoes” are all considered examples of “ableist language” at Skidmore. A student protested to him, Boyers writes, against “the screening of a ‘disturbing’ 1960s Italian comedy that may trigger, in a person with her background, traumatic memories.” Boyers was courteous and sympathetic, but then she tells him “that as a man you’ll never understand the problem.” Game, set and match. Another student complains to Boyers about a set text by the white South African writer, Nadine Gordimer. It was “a bad idea” for a “privileged” white woman like Gordimer (a lifelong critic of apartheid) to be dealing with [Black] people about whose lives “she was bound to be clueless”. Were there particular instances in the novel, Boyers asks her, where Gordimer seemed to her “clueless” and had got things wrong? She couldn’t say. “I felt very uncomfortable about the direction we were heading in,” she says later in the conversation. She didn’t like “the usual Western prejudices”.

On countless British and American campuses there have been marches and calls to boycott visiting speakers whose arguments are considered to be offensive to people who support trans rights or who oppose colonialism. Countless texts are considered “triggering” so shouldn’t be read or taught. Call for genocide and journalists or lawyers become very concerned about free speech. Call to boycott visiting speakers or accuse a teacher of microaggressions or triggering, and free speech goes out of the window. Some forms of speech are considered intolerable in British and American universities; others, apparently, are not. You can call for genocide against Jews but not debate the issue of trans rights or the rights of Palestinians and yet these inconsistencies get left out of the argument over the First Amendment.

A few days ago, I saw a video clip of a scene at MIT where a young Black student stood up and kept standing during a complex Maths lecture. When the young professor finally noticed him and allowed him to speak, he just started on an anti-Israel rant and others joined in. For Jewish students in the hall this would have been an extremely intimidating atmosphere. Who knew if and when violent speech would lead to violent acts (a key distinction made by academic defenders of the three college presidents)? Why should such aggressive and crazy speech be free? It was disrupting a class. The young teacher had clearly lost control or was intimidated and perhaps he was afraid to call security in case he was accused of racism. This isn’t free speech; this was intimidating and aggressive behaviour in a context in which professors are often no longer in charge and it would seem are not confident that they would receive support from the college authorities if they asked such students to leave the hall.

At many American universities the problem with free speech is that there isn’t any  — except, it seems, when it comes to calls for Palestinians to kill Jews from the river to the sea.

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