Story by mberg@insider.com (Madeline Berg)
Tensions are running high at America’s elite colleges, as students, professors, and well-connected, wealthy alumni respond to Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel.
The long — and very complicated — story short: Backlash is brewing against a campus culture that some people say is taking open dialogue or free speech too far.
Israel has long been a contentious issue on college campuses, causing protests and counter-protests covered by college newspapers and discussed by alumni. But the brutal attack on Israel, and the war that has followed, has brought the conversation off the quads and into the spotlight.
As is often the case, Harvard took the main stage. On Sunday, following Hamas’ terrorist attacks, a group of more than 30 student organizations, together dubbed the Harvard Palestine Solidarity Groups, released a joint statement that said the Israeli government was “entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”
While the statement ignited dialogue among the Cambridge community Monday, it reached a fever pitch Tuesday, when billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, a Harvard alum and donor, called on the university to release the names of students in the groups that signed the letter, “so as to insure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members.”
Other CEOs echoed Ackman’s sentiment, and by Wednesday, a truck was seen driving through Harvard’s campus with a digital billboard claiming to display the faces and names of students associated with the letter, calling them “Harvard’s leading antisemites.”
The University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy, has also been at the center of the conversation.
The CEO of Apollo Global Management — and a major Penn donor — Mark Rowan called on his fellow Penn alumni to “close their checkbooks” until the school’s president and chairman of its board of trustees stepped down. His denouncement followed a month-long back-and-forth between the alumni, students, and the university around the Palestine Writes Literary Festival that took place on Penn’s campus last month.
Other schools have also been caught up in the discourse, which shows no sign of stopping.
An online petition calling for the removal of a Yale professor who seemed to celebrate Hamas’ attacks on Twitter has garnered more than 40,000 signatures; Stanford suspended a lecturer who was accused of singling out Jewish students in class; and opposing protests at Indiana University ended in a tense clash, according to the school’s student newspaper.
At Columbia University in New York, an Israeli student was beaten with a stick after he said he confronted a woman who was tearing down flyers with names and pictures of Israelis kidnapped by Hamas, the campus’s student newspaper first reported. A New York Police Department spokesperson confirmed the report to Insider. Police arrested and charged a suspect with one count of assault, the spokesperson said.
The very “real world” backlash to these campus conversations has, itself, caused a backlash.
Former US treasury secretary Larry Summers, a Harvard alum who also served as the school’s president, criticized the school for its “silence” around Hamas’ attacks and the student groups’ letter. But Ackman, Summers said, was “getting a bit carried away.” He called the investor’s request for a list of names “the stuff of Joe McCarthy” during an appearance on Bloomberg TV.
Harvard economic professor Jason Furman also criticized Ackman, saying that “two wrongs do not make a right” and that a number of the students in the groups that signed the statement likely had nothing to do with it. He pointed to one Harvard alum who claimed they were harassed after being accused of contributing to the statement — despite graduating in 2021.
Call it cancel culture, consequence culture, or an attack on free speech, the public backlash has already resulted in changes.
At Harvard, the much-maligned student letter has been deleted, after several student groups retracted their support for it. An NYU law student publicly lost their post-grad job at a blue-chip firm after penning a statement blaming Israel for Hamas’ attacks over the weekend. And at the University of Arizona, a pro-Palestine group cancelled a planned protest after it was condemned by the school’s president.
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As long as the war rages on in Israel and Gaza, so will the conflict on college campuses.
“If a university takes any position on these issues they’re going to make people angry,” Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, told Insider. “But worse than that, they move themselves away from their core mission, which is to be the host of debates on campus.”
(source UN website)
It was in January 2006 that the Palestinian territories held what turned out to be their last parliamentary elections. Hamas won a bare plurality of votes (44 percent to the more moderate Fatah party’s 41 percent) but, given the electoral system, a strong majority of seats (74 to 45). Neither party was keen on sharing power. Fighting broke out between the two. When a unity government was finally formed in June 2007, Hamas broke the deal, started murdering Fatah members, and, in the end, took total control of the Gaza Strip. Those who weren’t killed fled to the West Bank, and the territories have remained split ever since.
In other words, Hamas’ absolute rule of Gaza is not what the Palestinians voted for back in 2006. In fact, since the median age of Gazans is 18, half of Hamas’ subjects weren’t even born when the election took place. Since they have known no alternative, have absorbed little information but Hamas propaganda, and have witnessed periodic outbursts of violent conflict with Israel throughout their lives, it is impossible to know what they really think about their rulers.
A little bit of history
Before Israel, there was a British mandate, not a Palestinian state.
-To the British Mandate
existed the Ottoman Empire, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Ottoman Empire, there was the Mamlyuk Islamic State of Egypt, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Islamic State of Mamlyuk of Egypt, the Empire of Ayubid existed, not the Palestinian State. Goffrey IV of Bulonsky, known as Godfrey de Bouillon, conquered Jerusalem in 1099
-Before the Empire of Ayubid, there existed the French and Christian Kingdom of Jerusalem, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Kingdom of Jerusalem, the empires of Omeyad and Fatimid existed, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the empires of the Omeyad and Fatimid, there was the Byzantine Empire, not the Palestinian State. -Before the Byzantine Empire, there was the Roman Empire, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Roman Empire, there was the Hasmonees State, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Hasmoneysk state, it was the Selevkid state, not the Palestinian state.
-Before the Selevkid Empire, there existed the Empire of Alexander of Macedonia, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Empire of Alexander of Macedonia, there was the Persian Empire, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Persian Empire, there was the Babylon Empire, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Babylon Empire, there existed the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Kingdoms of Israel and Judea, the Kingdom of Israel existed, not the Palestinian State.
-Before the Kingdom of Israel, there was a theocracy of the twelve knees of Israel, not the Palestinian state.
-Before the twelve generations of Israel’s theocracy, there was an agglomeration of independent Canaan cities-empires, not the Palestinian state.
In fact, this piece of earth was everything except the Palestinian state.
These young adults and faculty at these universities are free to express their beliefs and thoughts as they see fit. Just knowing, that what they say and do may have undesirable effects on their lives, short and long term. Companies have to right to put their money and into whatever they choose to support. They also have the right to screen new hires. Social media can make or break a career in a few short posts.