Recently, the University of Minnesota tarnished its reputation by caving to community pressure over the hiring of a director for its Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies.
On June 5, an offer was made to the Israeli historian Raz Segal to lead the center. Segal is Jewish, Israeli, and an expert on the Holocaust; his first book was published by Yad Vashem, Israel’s official Holocaust memorial institution. None of this mattered to his critics, who deemed him beyond the pale for his description of Israel’s prosecution of the war in Gaza as a “textbook case of genocide.” Two members of the center’s advisory board, Karen Painter and Bruno Chaouat, resigned in protest. The Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, which lists Israel advocacy among its main activities, successfully lobbied the university to rescind its job offer. On June 14, the university’s interim president, Jeff Ettinger, unilaterally revoked the offer, citing community concerns. When the university renews its search for the director position, Ettinger said, it will include “the participation of community members on the search committee.”
This is not the first time the Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies has come under pressure from an outside community group. But on a previous occasion, the outcome was quite different.
In 2011, the center found itself embroiled in controversy over the Armenian genocide. The forced displacement and killing of Ottoman Armenians between 1915 and 1923 claimed as many as a million and a half Armenian lives, but its status as a genocide is not without dissent. It is a highly charged issue for Armenians and Turks alike. The Republic of Turkey officially denies the Armenian genocide, and the State of Israel does not recognize the genocide either.
The Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies published a list of what it deemed untrustworthy sources on the subject, including the website of the Turkish Coalition of America, which promotes the Turkish government’s denialist position. Unhappy with the center’s actions, this Turkish community group sued the university, its president, and the center’s director at the time, Bruno Chaouat.
The university and the center stood up for the value of academic freedom against community pressure. Chaouat — the same professor who recently protested the hiring of Raz Segal — lamented the Turkish community group’s attempt to pressure the center. The university’s general counsel, Mark Rotenberg, agreed. He stated that the “administration does not condone any coercion or influence peddling by a donor to an academic program to alter the academic viewpoints of the students and scholars that work in the program.”
In the end, the lawsuit was dismissed. The judge sided with the university, noting that taking a stance on the Armenian genocide contrary to the Turkish community’s expectations is “within the purview of the university’s academic freedom to comment on and critique academic views held and expressed by others.”
The university is not a community center. Its independence must not be subverted by subjecting it to “community” control. It has a mission: to produce knowledge and advance scholarly inquiry, even when controversial — perhaps especially when controversial. The university plays a key role in the public sphere as a site where ideas can be contested. For Immanuel Kant, this exercise of public reason — questioning received wisdom, challenging dominant ideas — is the very essence of the Enlightenment.
The university’s responsibility, in other words, is to the public, not to “communities.” What’s the difference?
In the case of Segal’s rescinded job offer, the university’s interim president recognized the necessity of academic freedom for faculty but claimed this case was different “because of the community-facing” nature of the role. In fact, it is precisely with respect to such public roles that the principle of academic freedom is most needed. Kant distinguished between private and public use of reason. It is the latter, in which scholars address their critical views to the public, that constitutes the paramount freedom which is the basis for the Enlightenment. Communities are inherently limited, but the public is — at least potentially — universal, comprising multiple communities.
Giving “the community” veto power over the university has seriously negative consequences for academic freedom.
When the University of Minnesota administration rescinded Raz Segal’s job offer in the name of “the community,” it did not take the trouble to define its key term. The directorship search had been announced to more than 3,000 individuals outside the university, who were invited to attend job talks and offer feedback, but evidently they do not constitute “the community.” Segal was chosen not only on the basis of his scholarship, but because he had the most compelling vision for public engagement among the candidates. But clearly Segal, despite being Jewish, Israeli, and a descendant of Holocaust survivors, was not considered to be a member of “the community.” Nor, it seems, were the signatories to a petition in support of Segal’s hiring — among them many self-identified Jewish alumni and community members — nor the Twin Cities chapter of Jewish Voice for Peace. One political advocacy group, the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, cannot and does not speak for all Jews in Minnesota, as Segal points out in a recent interview.
Giving “the community” veto power over the university has seriously negative consequences for academic freedom. The university’s own lawyer said as much back in 2011, after the lawsuit brought against it by the Turkish Coalition of America was dismissed. Had the community group been successful, he worried, it would have jeopardized the ability of scholars and research centers to carry out work that may be controversial or subject to dispute — as the study of genocide inevitably is.
On Wednesday, the University of Minnesota Faculty Senate approved a vote of no confidence in Ettinger and Rachel Croson, the provost, following a similar vote by the College of Liberal Arts faculty assembly. (Ettinger’s term as interim president is scheduled to end on Monday when Rebecca Cunningham begins her term as Minnesota’s 18th president.) If the University of Minnesota does not reverse its decision, this incident threatens to have a chilling effect on academic freedom on campus, to undermine faculty norms of university governance, and to jeopardize the university’s role in serving the public.
