Student Protests

Since December 3, 2023, when the presidents of MIT, UPenn, and Harvard appeared before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, they have become the antithesis of what the model for college and university presidents should be. With protesting students on their campuses, presidents can’t distinguish between protest and hate speech, they call police rather than engage with students, and they try to stifle faculty and staff leadership.

While protests can include hate speech, they are not the same thing. And most protests do not include the behavior of hate speech.

The United Nations Strategy and Plan of Action on Hate Speech provides a clear definition of hate speech that can be used by any college president.

Hate speech is “any kind of communication in speech, writing or behaviour, that attacks or uses pejorative or discriminatory language with reference to a person or a group on the basis of who they are, in other words, based on their religion, ethnicity, nationality, race, colour, descent, gender or other identity factor.”

During the Obama administration, Brenda Girton-Mitchell and I managed the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge for the White House. By the end of the Obama administration, more than 500 colleges and universities enrolled in a program that supported community service projects with interfaith engagement. Congress had not appropriated any money, so we only offered bragging rights if institutions were part of a presidential initiative. This turned out to be an important reason for the success of the program.

Because there was no money involved, school development offices were not assigned the task of designing a program. It turned out that hundreds of schools have staff in place who are experts in interfaith dialog and understanding. Higher education institutions also have expert staff who know about engaging students in fixing the world. These experts know that the secret to a successful program to help students understand each other is to have students involved in planning.

It is not surprising that the presidents of MIT, Harvard, and UPenn first worry about money and particularly how their billionaire contributors will respond. They have been followed by other presidents who also do not start with how their institution can best help students understand the complex issues of Israeli and Palestinian politics and history. However, most colleges and universities have faculty who have studied the Middle East. And, as we learned with the President’s Challenge, hundreds of colleges have experts in helping students learn how to have dialog across lines of religion, national heritage, and political perspectives.

Brown, Northwestern and other universities took small steps in this direction. The president of Brown, Christina Paxson, met with student supporters of Palestinians and is helping them make a presentation to the university’s governing body to divest from Israel. Students correctly claimed this as a victory, but it leaves unaddressed that the campus is divided by those who support the religious Zionist vision, the Hamas vision, the dreams of non-Zionist Jews, the majority of Palestinians in Gaza, and more.

If presidents had started with discovering the resources available in their faculty and staff to help students navigate divergent convictions, we would not have experienced more than a thousand students expelled or arrested and taken to jail. College and university presidents could have started in January to work with the expertise of their faculty and staff to develop programs to help students deal with the trauma of identifying with or even knowing people who are being killed by the thousands. And, equally important, there are other students who are traumatized when more than a thousand people were killed because they were Israeli Jews, and there are still Jews being held as hostages. Plus, there are other students who can’t make any sense of what is happening.

At the beginning of January, every president of a higher education institution should have seen that they needed to clarify the definition of racist and hate speech. Then they should have been clear on what speech is not tolerated. And they needed to put into place programs to help students understand the war in Gaza.

In April, I visited a friend who works at a university in the northeast. His institution was a participant in the President’s Interfaith and Community Service Campus Challenge. He still administers a successful program that includes opportunities for students to learn skills of interfaith dialog and conflict resolution. The university also has well tested programs where students engage in projects across lines that often divide us. He was afraid to talk to me about an encampment to support Palestinians because the school administration has told staff and untenured faculty to refrain from engaging with student protesters or face possible job loss. Campus police completely surrounded a small encampment. As I left the campus a few blocks away, I saw a large contingency of city police gathered. It didn’t take much imagination to guess they were standing ready to attack and arrest the protesters.

There is no reason for university presidents to be surprised by student protests. This is particularly true for Columbia University. In 2020, I went with my grandson on a campus tour for prospective students. On the tour, the student guide emphasized that “Columbia is a protest school.” What was President Minouche Shafik thinking when she recruited students telling them that they will be in an environment where they are encouraged to protest? Why didn’t she make sure that there were safe and productive ways for students to protest?

Higher education institutions have the resources to provide their students with the tools to become a generation of leaders with skills to understand complex issues, to engage in civil dialog, and to work with others across differences to accomplish shared goals. President Obama’s campus challenge demonstrated the possibilities.

Today, presidents can begin by being clear about the definition of hate speech and speech advocating violence as distinct from protected free speech. 

Then they can set up processes for expelling those who persist in advocating violence or hate speech while guiding those who want to protest in productive ways. 

Finally, they can establish an environment where all students have opportunities to learn how to avoid falling into polarized camps on campus and after graduation. 

Higher education presidents have an opportunity, maybe a moral responsibility, to transform American society.