A Radcliffe Institute discussion on repression and free speech

Describing the October 7 Hamas attacks as a “watershed moment,” Asim Ijaz Khwaja, the co-chair of Harvard’s task force on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab, and anti-Palestinian bias, spoke on Monday evening with Aslı Ü. Bâli, a Yale scholar of international and human rights law and president of the Middle East Studies Association, about the profound consequences of the past 13 months on American college campuses and American Muslims. The two painted a sobering picture of renewed negative attention and harassment directed toward people of Middle Eastern descent. They also outlined what they saw as a worrying retreat by university administrators amid political attacks against their students and their mission.

The event was hosted by the Radcliffe Institute, as the second of a two-part discussion about this still-unfolding tumultuous period; earlier this month, Radcliffe dean Tomiko Brown-Nagin talked with Frankfurter professor of law Noah Feldman about his newly published book, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People.

Hamas’s attack on Israel sparked a war in the Middle East and set off a massive wave of pro-Palestinian protests in the United States, perhaps most visibly by students on college campuses, including Harvard’s. Student activism provoked an intense and powerful backlash: donors at multiple universities, as at Harvard, have rescinded their donations or threatened to stop giving; students involved in protests across the country have been arrested and in some cases charged with crimes, and many have been doxed or seen employment offers withdrawn. Investigations into antisemitic incidents and charges of antisemitism on American campuses have included highly publicized Congressional hearings, with politicians interrogating prominent university presidents; some of those administrators, including former president Claudine Gay, have lost their jobs. In the wake of this backlash, many institutions, including Harvard, are rethinking campus policies regarding speech and protest, adopting new stances of neutrality on global events, and redoubling efforts to facilitate critical inquiry and open dialogue.

In addition to all these consequences, Khwaja, the Sumitomo-FASID professor of international finance and development at the Harvard Kennedy School, noted the heightened focus and suspicion that Muslims and people of Arab descent have faced during the past year. He also noted that it isn’t the first time that’s happened: 9/11 was a similar watershed moment, with monumental and lasting effects, and it is the backdrop, he and Bâli said, for everything that’s happened since October 7.

Bâli recalled how, in the days after 9/11, the U.S. government used selective enforcement of immigration laws to sweep up Muslim immigrant men in mass arrests. They were released only after they’d been cleared of suspicion of involvement in the terrorist attacks, “reversing the presumption of innocence.” Other steps soon followed: prohibitions on speech—including pro-Palestinian speech—and coercive re-registration requirements for visa-holders from the Middle East. “There was an exponential increase in mass surveillance,” she said, “with intense scrutiny on Muslim American communities in particular, and government racial profiling practices, which singled out Muslims and people of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and Arab descent,” and led to presumptions of disloyalty and increased criminal punishments. Hate crimes rose, and Muslims, who were now intensely policed, became a racialized community—although one that, ironically, was not entitled to formal protections against racial discrimination, Bâli noted. These events so stigmatized Muslims that in 2017, decades after 9/11, the Trump administration instituted a ban on Muslims entering the country, which was later declared constitutional, albeit in an altered form, by the Supreme Court.

Those reverberations can be seen, Bâli argued, in the current upheavals over Israel and Palestine. Bâli noted the numerous armed conflicts, many with direct U.S. involvement, that have erupted in the broader Middle East in the years since 9/11—in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Libya, Tunisia, Yemen, Syria—and the “waves of grief and trauma” for the Muslim diaspora watching from abroad, who experience their connection to the region as a source of their own insecurity. “I think part of what explains what’s happening on our campuses is that there’s a growing awareness among Americans of all backgrounds of some of the things that have been truly unjust consequences” of these wars and their effects on American Muslims. “So what we saw in the last year is the broadest, widest mobilization ever in support of Palestinian rights in the United States. And that occurred…because non-Arab, non-Muslim students were making common cause very broadly in solidarity with a community they don’t identify with on any ethnic basis.” It’s important to remember, she added, that today’s students grew up almost entirely in the shadow of 9/11, watching its effects unfold. “There is really a reckoning with the long-term relationship that the United States has had to many of the destabilizing events in these regions, and an understanding that there is some responsibility.”

The punitive response against the Muslim community after the latest watershed moment, when Hamas terrorists killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel, raped women, and took more than 200 others, including children, hostage, alarmed Bâli in its vehemence. She compared the repression of dissent and protest on American college campuses, which has at times included violent arrests, to “the extreme authoritarian excesses” in the Middle East and North Africa, including in Turkey, her home country. She noted the appearance of “sudden, ad hoc policies that are selectively enforced and viewpoint-specific,” using ostensibly neutral criteria such as trespass laws to exclusively disallow pro-Palestinian protest, as well as harsh disciplinary sanctions for “disfavored political views.” She also decried the “inquisitional” Congressional hearings like the one that toppled Gay’s presidency, and pressure from donors and political actors on universities to crack down on students. Some of the neutrality statements adopted by administrators on numerous campuses strike Bâli as “misguided in the particulars of what they’re going to be neutral about,” and new restrictions on how and where students can assemble now make it nearly impossible, she said, “to engage in meaningful protests in ways that can be heard by one’s fellow campus members.”

Months of these kinds of measures, Bâli worried, have succeeded in shutting down viewpoints and “teaching the lesson that…you are better off being silent or finding ways to accommodate power, because power will crush you—even in campus communities that are designed to be laboratories in which students are supposed to be able to experiment with free inquiry and free expression and association.”

In response, Kwaja asked the question he saw lurking in Bâli’s depiction: “You raise a deeply troubling view of the world,” he said. “Is there a buyer for free discourse? Is there a market where people really value free speech and academic freedom?…Every campus now has a ‘candid conversation something-or-other’”—at Harvard it is the Open Inquiry and Constructive Dialogue Working Group, which Brown-Nagin co-chairs—“but I don’t understand where this demand is to come from. And if it doesn’t, then it worries me even more.”

Bâli answered that producing that market for free speech is the business of universities—including not just wealthy private ones like Harvard, but all institutions of higher learning, many of which are deeply embedded in their communities. She called on administrators and academics to defend democracy, and to defend themselves. “Universities have a role, not just to their internal communities, but also as spokespeople in our democracy.” This has to be true, she said, even when an institution faces financial and reputational risk. “As public intellectuals, we have an obligation to offer that defense constantly.” Importantly, she added, “We have to push back by persuading our fellow citizens. I don’t think there’s a way to imagine out-lawyering, or out-financing…or that we’re going to conquer some group. No, I think we have to persuade.”

She blamed much of the difficulty in maintaining this kind of institutional fortitude and independence on decades of government disinvestment from higher education, which has left universities increasingly beholden to individual donors.

She emphasized the necessity of strengthening universities’ ties to their communities and to their alumni. And she pushed back on the sharp criticism of universities that has consumed the national discussion during the past year. “We should be wary,” she said, of falling for “populist narratives about universities,” which she described as inaccurate and disingenuous. “The notion that we’re just made up of elites in fancy quarters having jargonized conversations with one another…is pretty far from the reality of what the work of higher education is in this country,” she said. “And that work has been the engine of one of the most powerful economies in the world, and has been producing not only leaders among our own citizenry, but globally, [and] has made the last three quarters of a century possible as a period of human flourishing.”

Khwaja asked Bâli where she saw reason for hope, both for free inquiry in institutions, and for the future of the American Muslim community. In students, she answered. “There are real problems” she said, of anti-democratic harassment and repression and even violence, “but the fact is that this debate [over free speech and public policies affecting Muslim life] has become such a much broader set of questions.

Source: Harvard Magazine