Since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, protests and disruptions have proliferated on college campuses. Institutional statements have flopped. Speakers have come under fire. Events have been canceled. Leaders of elite institutions have resigned from their posts.
As colleges have struggled to appease their students and faculty at home and donors and politicians from afar, a key question emerged: Can colleges fulfill one of their fundamental missions by fostering spaces for civil discourse?
To answer that question, The Chronicle tracked events that were organized by individuals or groups affiliated with colleges and that aimed to provide information about or a forum to discuss the conflict in the Middle East. These events were distinct from the other occurrences related to the Middle East that happen on campus, like protests or demonstrations by students and advocacy groups.
We examined the goals of more than 60 such events from the early days of the war to the first few weeks of the spring semester, looking at who hosted them, how many perspectives the speakers represented, and, ultimately, how the events turned out. Common factors and recurring points of contention emerged, and The Chronicle distilled which strategies seemed to be effective and what factors contributed to backlash. We then asked colleges and experts what lessons could be learned from those moments. Here’s what we found.
Yes, dialogue is taking place.
While much of the public and media attention has focused on protests led by students and faculty, and by speakers being shouted down, colleges are hosting events that aim to promote education and discussion around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The lion’s share of such events in The Chronicle’s sample were organized by colleges or departments, as opposed to faculty, students, or outside groups. While canceled events have dominated headlines, The Chronicle found the majority of the events in its analysis had proceeded, even when pressure to cancel events arose.
Concerning efforts to promote civil discourse, “there is a lot that’s actually going on right now,” said Tom Ginsburg, the faculty director of the University of Chicago’s Forum for Free Inquiry and Expression. Part of overcoming the challenges of discussing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the short- and long-term, he said, is “elevating examples” of success. “Celebrate the people who do this well,” Ginsburg said. “Take this seriously in terms of providing spaces outside the curriculum.”
Still, The Chronicle’s analysis found that campuses frequently faced backlash for hosting certain speakers or permitting what some saw as controversial viewpoints, resulting in negative press and counterprotests. In more extreme cases, events led to sanctions or were cited in federal investigations. In The Chronicle’s analysis, all events that faced substantive calls for cancellation or were definitively canceled — a dozen events in total — were centered around Palestinian perspectives or were highly critical of Israel.
The sample and analysis are neither comprehensive nor scientific, but common flash points — such as perceived bias, a lack of balance of speakers or events, unclear goals, and clashes between institutional values — spotlight both the complex dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and larger frictions surrounding campus speech and civil discourse.
Experts and campus leaders encourage colleges to lean into complexity and recognize the potential pitfalls even when events are planned with the best intentions. Ultimately, experts and others engaged with this work said how campuses respond to this particularly fraught moment has implications not just for today, but for how colleges will move forward.
Subject-matter expertise and multiple perspectives are a good place to start.
Events that specifically aimed to foster constructive conversations and civil discourse — in a variety of forms like debate, deliberation, or dialogue — made up about half of The Chronicle’s sample. A majority of the events proceeded without major incident.
“This is a university, so opportunities for people to learn about the history of the ongoing conflict, to hear different perspectives, to have chances to ask questions, and, in an ideal world, even engage with each other in a way where people can do active listening and then be able to respond, it’s absolutely important,” said Michelle N. Deutchman, the executive director of the National Center for Free Speech and Civic Engagement at the University of California.
Of the events in The Chronicle’s sample, two key features stuck out: attempts to provide a variety of perspectives and a focus on subject-matter expertise. How colleges went about implementing those elements looked different. Some events were jointly hosted by various departments and relied on in-house faculty expertise, such as a series of events at Dartmouth College that received significant national media attention. Another example is Delta College, a community college in Michigan, which turned to its faculty to host a roundtable discussion, drawing attendees from on and off campus.
“We really wanted to go for subject expertise,” said Michael Evans, an assistant professor of history at Delta who helped organize the event. Organizers sought out faculty across a variety of disciplines, from political and social sciences to philosophy and history. “We thought it’s not our role to have a debate, to have people arguing about the issues.”
Other colleges looked off campus to bring in subject-matter experts or dedicated groups to explore the topic, such as a discussion at Syracuse University that featured the Parents Circle-Families Forum, an organization of Palestinian and Israeli families that strives to reconcile differences to achieve peace. While many colleges offered one-off events about the war, an increasingly common approach is a series of events, each one addressing different topics and perspectives, like a multipart series at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University.
“When we first started thinking about this, we thought, ‘OK, we’ve got too much insanity on campus, frankly, and we’ve got to just try to interject some kind of relatively dispassionate, informed dialogue,’” said Melani C. Cammett, the director of Weatherhead Center. “I don’t want to pretend that we’re all wearing white lab coats and we’re perfectly objective. There’s no such thing as that on the planet, but we’re trying to be as dispassionate as possible.”
Drawing on subject-matter expertise made sense to the experts who spoke with The Chronicle, because it facilitated learning about the situation. While the public tends to have a base-level understanding of other hot-button issues, like affirmative action or abortion, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict generates “extremely passionate views, unencumbered by any knowledge of history,” Ginsburg said.
Building a common base of information is how Timothy J. Shaffer and his colleagues approached some of their first events at the University of Delaware. “Sometimes we just need to process. Sometimes we just need information,” said Shaffer, who holds an endowed chair in civil discourse. “We don’t have to kind of infuse it with our own sets of values and views.”
This approach also reflects what colleges do best, said Rachel L. Wahl, an associate professor at the University of Virginia who studies how individuals’ beliefs help or hurt dialogue in education. “Historically, we exist to educate,” she said. “What comes most naturally to us is to start with providing information and then try to create space within those forums for engaging with other people’s stories and perspectives.”
But colleges can’t necessarily rely on sharing subject-matter expertise alone to foster healthy discussions. Too much of the information is reliant on interpretation. “Expecting information-sharing to solve the normative questions of living together in a community is like expecting an umbrella to stop bullets,” said Aaron Yarmel, the associate director of Ohio State’s Center for Ethics and Human Values. “That’s not what it was designed for.”
For example, a lot of contention on campuses has had to do with the meaning of certain phrases or words — like “intifada” or “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — to different groups. While sharing information can help provide historical context behind the phrases and survey data can illustrate how different groups view the slogans, Yarmel said information alone doesn’t tell listeners whether the meaning attributed by an individual speaker or group is what it should mean in that context, or how to communicate and live among people with different views on the meaning of contested phrases.
“Facts are really important, but they don’t speak for themselves,” Shaffer said. “They have to be understood and interpreted. If we can help create space for that to be part of the conversation, I think we’re better for it.”
Individual speakers can be flash points.
When events elicited backlash, The Chronicle’s analysis found, it often stemmed from a common cause: perceived bias or imbalance in perspectives. The complexity of the conflict and the life-or-death stakes for those experiencing it mean that emotions run high and consensus about what counts as neutral information diverges quickly along ideological lines.
Solo speakers, even those with subject-matter expertise, can incite backlash because their views aren’t seen as counterbalanced by another voice. At the University of Texas at Arlington, Morgan Marietta, the head of the political science department, hosted a Q&A in mid-October with just one speaker, Brent E. Sasley, a professor who studies Middle East politics.
Marietta told The Chronicle that the event quickly drew criticism for a lack of multiple perspectives and because of its framing. Tensions erupted at the event, with students asking charged questions and shouting over each other until someone was escorted out by security. In the days after, Marietta’s dean said he had “mismanaged” the event and the process for planning it. Marietta resigned as chair in protest. In hindsight, Marietta told The Chronicle, it was a mistake to have just one speaker, instead of a panel, because of the pressure it put on one person.
But offering multiple speakers at an event doesn’t necessarily resolve these issues, either. For example, at Barnard College, in New York City, administrators kicked off the spring semester with a “Day of Dialogue,” selecting speakers who “exemplified the importance of coming together across differences,” organizers told The Chronicle. Instead, pro-Palestinian demonstrators gathered outside the event and encouraged individuals to boycott it; on the other side of the spectrum, a Washington Free Beacon story lambasted the college a few days later for hosting Hatem Bazian, who about 30 years ago was one of the founders of Students for Justice in Palestine and now is a lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley.
We know we’ll never make everybody happy. That’s not the goal. The goal is to really provide deep, informed perspectives that vary.
Barnard’s event echoes what has become a common dynamic of the critiques from both sides. Events that are seen as centering Palestinian voices or that are very critical of Israel are panned by conservative publications and donors on the grounds that such events sanction antisemitic speech. In some incidents, colleges have shut down such events, citing concerns like safety, as was the case with two high-profile cancellations at Indiana University.
Events seen as pro-Israel tend to arouse criticism from pro-Palestinian perspectives, chiefly among students, who sometimes engage in a heckler’s veto to shut them down. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, an event featuring Bari Weiss, the founder of The Free Press, prompted the university’s chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine to protest the gathering. The student group characterized Weiss as a “right-wing U.S. political commentator who has spent her career egregiously attempting to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism.”
The Carolina Journal reported that protesters stood up about 25 minutes into the event featuring Weiss and displayed Palestinian flags, yelling at the stage. About 45 people who disrupted the event were asked to leave, the university told The Chronicle. Speech First, a free-speech organization that focuses on students’ rights, has filed a complaint with the university about the event, which is currently under review.
The university told The Chronicle its response was “consistent” with its free-speech policies, adding that campus leaders have provided opportunities for conversation and support, including a series of events this spring that aim to “raise understanding and provide peaceful dialogues on difficult topics regarding events in the Middle East.”
Where speakers’ backgrounds and commentary have become lightning rods for controversy, it’s clear that their insights and perspectives are interpreted very differently, based on the eye of the beholder.
“There will be plenty of speakers — not just on this issue, but on many issues — who might perceive themselves as advancing a view that is only intellectually threatening, but that students experience as calling into question their right to exist at all on the campus or in general,” said Wahl, the associate professor from the University of Virginia.
Striving for balance may help reduce accusations of bias, but won’t eliminate them.
Colleges have tried interpreting the facts by providing multiple perspectives, frequently in the pursuit of the goal of offering balance. The logic is that the more perspectives represented at events, the less susceptible colleges are to critiques of bias. But, when it comes to this conflict, balance may be unachievable.
“It would be great if you could have a balanced perspective, but then it’s almost impossible to satisfy everyone’s definition of what balance is — precisely because passions run high and knowledge so low,” Ginsburg said.
For example, a George Washington University event sparked criticism from the New York Post after a panelist said Hamas had a “right of resistance.” In response, the university’s dean of diversity and inclusion, Yolanda Haywood, apologized for the lack of balance. In response to The Chronicle’s inquiry about the incident, a spokesperson pointed to the university’s three-pronged plan, which was developed in response to “lessons learned over the past several months” and highlights “fostering productive dialogue” as a focus area.
In other cases, questions of balance across multiple events can come into play. Take Emerson College, a small private college in Boston, where administrators declined to sponsor a faculty-led “teach-in” on Gaza along with any other official events on the conflict.
Faculty organizers of the event — which would have featured speakers from a pro-Palestinian activist group — told The Chronicle that the university’s initial response and withdrawn sponsorship made it so they could not host the event as planned in December. Nigel C. Gibson, a professor at Emerson’s Marlboro Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies and one of the organizers, said the campus has developed a “phobia of dialogue” on any issues surrounding the conflict. “We’re kind of blocked at really having open discussions,” Gibson told The Chronicle. “I think it’s very much like other universities and colleges.”
There are not two camps. There’s not the Palestinian view, and then there’s the Israeli view. There’s a lot more nuance. There are these significant gradations.
Echoing Gibson’s concerns, a letter signed by 30 faculty members asked the college’s president for definitions on policies, clarifications on the contours of debate, and how the institution would “distinguish a safe environment from an uncomfortable one, as a learning space inevitably can be.”
Emerson’s administration told The Chronicle in a statement that the organizers were permitted to host the event, but without sponsorship or funding from the college. “The college encourages collective inquiry and public dialogue,” the statement reads, “but in this instance, the college preferred to plan a larger community educational forum in the spring semester to include multiple perspectives.”
Next week — more than three months after the original event’s cancellation — the college’s Marlboro Institute will sponsor the event that Gibson and other faculty organized. Emerson, too, will sponsor its first campuswide event, “Reclaiming Nuance: Polarization and Framing Post October 7th — A Conversational Approach,” which will be followed by several small-group discussions in April. An email from campus leadership promoting the event said it is “not about the history of the conflict,” but rather “what makes it so challenging to productively discuss this issue.”
While colleges have gravitated toward attempting to organize events and series as equally matched point-counterpoint sessions, there is an inherent danger with the approach: oversimplification.
“There are not two camps. There’s not the Palestinian view, and then there’s the Israeli view,” said Shaffer, the Delaware professor. “There’s a lot more nuance. There are these significant gradations.”
The solution isn’t necessarily adding and seeking out more perspectives to achieve balance. Rather, Shaffer said, avoiding oversimplification can be as easy as acknowledging how complex the conflict is.
“Saying that something is going to be balanced, you might be setting yourself up for failure because that is sort of a subjective inquiry,” Deutchman said.
Distinguishing dialogue from activism is key.
Colleges and speakers should also make clear what the aim of their events is — a line that sometimes has been blurred.
For example, an event hosted by a student group with faculty panelists at Syracuse University was described by its organizers as a space for open dialogue where “all voices” could be heard, according to an article in the campus’s student newspaper. But then the article also noted that the discussion would explore the “U.S.-based Israeli colonization of Palestine.” An Instagram post (now taken down) promoted the session as “a great way to introduce people who may be intimidated by the scale and severity of the genocide in Palestine and don’t know where to start or for those already involved to have conversations with like-minded individuals.”
Dialogue cannot — and should not — replace activism, but faculty members and colleges can make a clear distinction between the two, said Yarmel, the Ohio State faculty member.
“What’s dangerous is when faculty purport to be engaging in information-sharing but they’re actually engaging in activism,” Yarmel said. “That is a blurring of roles that is irresponsible and part of the reason why there’s sometimes a lack of trust in our institutions of higher education by many members of the population.”
Another response from campuses in the face of criticism: to stand by their principles and accept what can sometimes feel like inevitable disagreements about bias or balance. Even with thoughtful attempts to calibrate perspectives and subjects at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center, Cammett still receives critiques bemoaning a lack of balance. However, those complaints are in the minority of feedback — and, in her view, miss the point of the event.
“We know we’ll never make everybody happy,” she said. “That’s not the goal. The goal is to really provide deep, informed perspectives that vary.”
The same goes for Daniel Diermeier, the chancellor of Vanderbilt University, where a series of events under the recently launched Dialogue Vanderbilt initiative drew ire from some students and alumni. The Vanderbilt Alumni for Justice in Palestine group posted on social media about what they perceived as bias and a lack of balance that they framed as contradictory to the series’ aim to “encourage debates” and promote “free speech and open dialogue.”
Diermeier, however, told The Chronicle he doesn’t “lose a lot of sleep” over those critiques. These events, he argues, shouldn’t be an exercise in precisely balancing viewpoints. Instead, he said colleges should seek out speakers who can talk about issues in a “coherent, intelligent fashion” and people who “break out of the mold” — even if that means eliciting backlash.
“At the end of the day, people say, ‘Well, according to my score charts, two people were over here and three were over here, and that’s not balance,’” Diermeier said.
“They don’t like certain speakers,” he added, “and that’s OK.”
How colleges react now will set the tone for the future.
Beyond colleges’ immediate reactions and attempts to plan events, experts and campus leaders who spoke with The Chronicle said one of the most important things colleges should strive to do is build structures and relationships before crisis strikes. That could include investing in programs specifically aimed at fostering dialogue, developing more training for faculty who may not be pedagogically adept in how to facilitate difficult conversations, and creating spaces for discussions where the campus community can talk about what they value.
Colleges will be expected to provide opportunities to learn at this moment, Deutchman said, but such complex issues require more than one-time events and deeper structures that build students’ “tool kits” for dialogue. “It has to be something between responding in a moment that’s heated and building longer-term relationships that we hopefully can then draw on in the tense moments,” she said.
That is what grounded Dartmouth’s approach, said Elizabeth F. Smith, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences who co-leads the Dartmouth Dialogue Project. Smith credits the university’s long-term vision with its ability to host conversations about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Its recently launched Dartmouth Dialogues programming offers events specifically on the Middle East in tandem with skill-building sessions geared toward both students and faculty. She said the institution’s partnership between its Jewish and Middle Eastern studies departments also provided an “incredibly strong foundation” for the campus’s response.
“It’s all about relationships,” Smith told The Chronicle.
Lots of other campuses appear to be taking steps to build better infrastructure to respond to crises, with new initiatives for dialogue and discourse popping up at colleges across the country in the wake of October 7.
“We could collectively do better as colleges and universities,” Shaffer said, “if we can have systems in place that we can actually have these kinds of conversations that are familiar and known before the shit hits the fan.”
