Since the Israel-Hamas war broke out, a campus bridge at the University of Indiana-Bloomington has become a de facto protest site. On 21 October, a student painted “Free Palestine. Educate yourself. End the Occupation” on one side of the structure. Less than a day later, someone else painted over the original message with stars of David, a smiley face and the words “from Hamas”. After this, other students painted prayers for peace in Hebrew and a message to “support survivors”. Then a fourth group painted over these words with the phrases “pray 4 peace”, “free us” and “stop the genocide”.
What began as a genuinely felt act of civil disobedience – a way for some students to be heard when they felt no one was listening – devolved into a passive-aggressive symbol of pent-up frustration.
“There’s a lot of disconnect and misunderstanding,” said the editor-in-chief of the Indiana Daily Student, whose team has been covering student responses to the Israel-Hamas war. “They might be painting on a bridge about freedom, and someone interprets it completely differently and feels attacked. We see all these students with all these different perspectives who are hurting a lot.”
Like the bridge, the national conversation about campus responses to the Israel-Hamas war has been an angry tit-for-tat, driven by misunderstanding and accusations of antisemitism and Islamophobia. But missing from this conversation is precisely what the bridge demonstrates: the need for campus spaces where students can safely express themselves and feel heard.
To tackle these painful rifts and combat misunderstanding on college campuses, experts say, schools must prioritize bridge-building and cooperation. One route is a civil dialogue movement, which teaches students how to talk constructively across experiential and ideological differences, and has been steadily growing across higher education over the last decade or so. But proponents say these efforts haven’t received the institutional prominence or support that movements for racial and social justice programs have. They hope that tensions unleashed by the current war will change that calculation.
“I recognize the inequities in American life and want those addressed,” said Eboo Patel, director of the non-partisan, non-profit Interfaith America. “And sometimes the way to do that is protest politics and even resistance politics.” But, Patel says, it’s the “rare campus” whose diversity office is staffed by people who also “excel at cooperation across difference”. In short, he argues, schools have worked their antiracism muscles so hard that they’ve allowed their cooperation muscles to atrophy.
‘How do you ask a question that results in a narrative, not an argument?’
Even now, many students are trying to talk to each other – or want to.
“Are there other stories where people are genuinely disagreeing and are still in relationship with one another?” asked Najeeba Syeed, a conflict resolution expert and executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg, an institute that teaches interfaith leadership on the campus of Augsburg University in Minneapolis. “Are there stories we are missing?”
Angry demonstrations receive a lot of press, but not the students who have crossed protest lines – even while others shouted – to speak calmly with each other. Students told me they’ve witnessed this at Indiana and the University of Chicago; surely it has happened elsewhere. Multiple campus chapters of the depolarization non-profit Bridge USA have hosted events about the conflict. At Elon University, a small liberal arts college in North Carolina, over 200 students attended a presentation and facilitated workshops about the war. At Dartmouth, a few protesters were arrested for “trespassing” – but more than 1,600 students livestreamed a public dialogue event co-sponsored by the Jewish studies and Middle Eastern studies programs. At Queens College in New York, the Hillel leadership has been counseling Muslim students, because the school is currently without an imam.
There are many other examples, of course. Syeed says the challenge is to “saturate the campus with conversation”. Everybody knows that a one-off event for Black History Month or a singular diversity training won’t teach students to see the world through an antiracist lens. The same is true for bridge building. Offering an elective in constructive dialogue or hosting an inter-department conversation in response to a major global conflagration won’t fundamentally teach students to empathize with each other.
Patel strongly feels that diversity and inclusion offices have an obligation to lead this work. This doesn’t mean jettisoning their equity mission, but reframing the conversation they’re asking students to have with each other. “What’s the language – call out, cancel,” Patel said. “If you have built a skill of protesting against a group of people, how do you get these groups of students to stop screaming and go to class together? To sit and listen? How do you ask a question that results in a narrative and not an argument?”
It may be harder than ever to teach these skills. Campuses are not isolated bubbles. Campuses are the outside world, compressed. It’s reasonable to expect that brutal and traumatic events might turn such insular communities into pressure cookers.
“A college campus is a place that brings together people in a formative point of their lives when they’re encouraged to express all kinds of thoughts and feelings,” said Patel. “You should expect conflict.”
College has always been the first time that many students from across religious, racial, geographic, socioeconomic and political backgrounds are asked to engage intimately with each other. But campuses have also become more diverse at a moment when the country is more ideologically and geographically polarized, according to Jacqueline Pfeffer Merrill, director of the Campus Free Expression Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. Further, she said, students are taking their cues from adults who have utterly failed to model cooperation and compromise. Or as two friends – one Jewish and one Palestinian – whom I interviewed at Stanford put it, outside influences, from the news coverage to social media to meddling interest groups, had made the campus climate “unnecessarily hostile”.
It’s why, well before 7 October, a sizable segment of the student population reported feeling either uncomfortable or unsafe on campus because of something a community member said in reference to race, ethnicity, religion, gender or sexual orientation.
Some schools are trying to combat all these outside forces and institutionalize bridge-building, as they have antiracism. The University of Connecticut recently introduced a “dialogue competency” requirement for all undergraduates alongside foreign language proficiency and writing. Virginia’s state council of higher education now requires all students at two- and four-year public colleges to engage in “civil discourse and collaborative work on real-world public problems”. Twelve schools in the state have partnered with the Constructive Dialogue Institute, whose programs have been able to reduce “affective polarization” – dislike, distrust and avoidance of people with different political views – and increase “intellectual humility”, or the willingness to recognize the limits of one’s knowledge and seek out new information.
‘It’s OK, we disagree’
But in the middle of a crisis, what’s a university to do? A handful of schools, including Brandeis and Columbia, have taken steps to quash protest – particularly demonstrations against Israel – and suspended Students for Justice in Palestine chapters. Other schools, like Williams College, overtly declined to make an institutional statement about the war, hoping to avoid (usually without success) enraging any particular group of students.
The University of Chicago fell back on longstanding principles: first, its policy of institutional neutrality, in which the administration does not comment on current events, and second, its commitment to free expression, which gives students significant latitude to speak their minds, including with speech that’s divisive or inflammatory.
“Students come to Chicago knowing we won’t coddle them as much,” said Tom Ginsburg, director of the University’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. But just because Chicago students are more accustomed to a permissible speech environment doesn’t mean they’ve felt safer on campus or better equipped to engage constructively about the war. “Some of the things being said on campus, which are perfectly legal to say, are chilling to some,” Ginsburg said.
And yet the speech he described as “chilling” – pro-Palestinian students chanting “from the river to the sea” and pro-Israel students chanting “I stand with Israel” – are all about interpretation. Is the former inherently antisemitic? Is the latter inherently anti-Palestinian?
“People who participate in bridge-building programs tend to have more nuanced interpretations of other people’s views, identities and intentions,” Patel said, because the programs “encourage developing multidimensional relationships with people, rather than only meeting on opposite sides of a heated protest”.
I spoke with one student who used “from the river to the sea” in an op-ed he published in the campus newspaper. “I meant freedom for the Palestinian people,” the student told me. “I was sure it would probably make some people angry, but I certainly did not mean it maliciously.”
Or as Michael Roth, president of Wesleyan University, told me: “I find that phrase deeply offensive, but not everyone who says it has Judenrein in mind,” referencing the Nazi term designating an area cleansed of Jews.
Roth is Jewish and a longtime critic of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement. After 7 October, he published two posts on his personal blog (which lives on the school’s website), decrying Hamas’ brutality and one, a while later, that mentioned Palestinian suffering. He knew his largely “pro-Palestinian and even anti-Zionist” student body would be upset. But when the Wesleyan Students for Justice in Palestine accused him of “blatant disregard, placation and abstracting of atrocities”, Roth took their feedback in stride. “It’s OK, we disagree,” he told me.
He said his mission as president was to help students feel “safe enough”, meaning “you don’t get harassed, don’t get intimidated – but you’re not so safe that you don’t encounter offensive comments or invigorating debate”. This isn’t new for Roth. Back in 2014, he invited the pro-BDS academic Judith Butler to campus after the Jewish Museum canceled her appearance there.
In some ways, the war has been a test of the “safe enough” ethos. Over the last seven weeks, multiple student groups have held protests. Departments and offices have hosted speakers across the ideological spectrum. Campus chaplains have been working overtime. So far, Roth said, there’ve been no major incidents.
But part of being safe enough, Roth told me, is knowing that your community is looking out for you. Safe enough requires empathy. It’s why he assured faculty that he would respect their academic freedom but cautioned them “to use your head when taking a position”, because “you might be marginalizing some students in a way that’s really unfair to them”. And it’s why he’s invited Jewish and Muslim students to sit down with him and talk about their concerns.
In fact, the very morning I spoke to Roth, he’d met with a group of Jewish students who were quite upset. They wanted Roth to say more, to put his finger more firmly on the scale, to stop their peers from shouting “from the river to the sea”. Roth said he empathized. He too was angry and grieving. But he wasn’t going to shut down conversation, because other students had a legitimate point of view, too.
“I’m trying to model this openness that has limits,” he told me. “And what those limits are in a given situation?” He shook his head. “I told the students, it’s very hard to have the conversation you and I are having across political differences in a time of war.”
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November 25, 2023 at 09:00PM
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‘Students are hurting’: how can we heal the political rift at America’s universities? - The Guardian US
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