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Those events have been much discussed in up-to-the-minute reports, op-eds, and quick takes on social media. We wanted a longer view. So we asked 22 Chronicle Review contributors: In light of the campus protests and police crackdowns that have swept campuses across the country, what is the one book you’d recommend colleges adopt as required reading for all incoming freshmen?
Their responses are below.
— The Editors
Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest, by Steven Kelman. The book is a genuine classic: A near-contemporaneous view of the student protests of 1968 from the viewpoint of an engaged socialist undergraduate at Harvard. It is at once a compulsively readable, minute-by-minute account and a deep meditation on how things fall apart.
Noah Feldman is a professor of law at Harvard University.
Poems: New and Collected, 1957-1997, by Wisława Szymborska. “After every war someone has to tidy up / Things won’t pick themselves up, after all” reads the opening line of a poem by Szymborska, winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature. From her home in Krakow, Poland, she turned her experiences in the Second World War and the rise and fall of Communism into stunning reflections on how to understand the horrors that “torturers, dictators, fanatics, and demagogues” commit — and how to move beyond them. Eighteen-year-olds might learn as much about such matters from her work as from any book of history. As her fellow poet William Carlos Williams wrote: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / Yet men die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there.”
Michael Kazin is a professor of history at Georgetown University.
Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine is an indispensable source for understanding the Palestinian perspective on what has happened to them as a people since 1917. It strikes the right tone between scholarly rigor and accessibility, and is ideal reading for general education in a liberal-arts setting.
Mohammad Fadel is a professor of law at the University of Toronto.
If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and the Missing Revolution, by Vincent Bevins. Bevins’s book is about the activists, hackers, punks, martyrs, and millions of ordinary people whose small acts of bravery spurred the mass protests of the last decade. The promise of those protests is unfulfilled; Bevins’s book might help us to fulfill them.
Merve Emre is a professor of creative writing and criticism at Wesleyan University.
Rules for Radicals, by Saul Alinsky. Not because I think all of Alinsky’s rules are wise strategy but because he thought hard and systematically about how to organize an effective protest movement. Today it’s relatively easy to organize a big protest through social media, but it is still hard to be effective — maybe harder than ever, because today everyone is used to protest movements, and institutions and opponents have developed well-worn counter-strategies. For instance, movement organizers should at least consider the risk that some of their actions are feeding a well-established narrative about “out-of-control college students” that might make it easier for politicians to ignore their legitimate concerns or help their enemies gain power. Alinsky challenged movement leaders to think hard about their ultimate goals — Are they realistic? What do you really want? — and he pressed activists to think strategically about how to keep control of their messaging and make sure any provocations were worth the effort and the risks.
Richard Thompson Ford is a professor of law at Stanford Law School.
Once Upon a Country: A Palestinian Life, by Sari Nusseibeh, to bring subtlety and complexity to the students’ search for peace. Nusseibeh, the former president of Al-Quds University, in East Jerusalem (he still teaches philosophy there), has carried on the search for cooperation, mutual understanding, and a principled peace with unparalleled integrity, even when both sides threatened him, and he still exemplifies reasoned hope.
Martha Nussbaum is a professor of philosophy and law at the University of Chicago.
I recommend that incoming freshmen read St. John’s Gospel. The protests and the destructive ideologies driving them are a manifestation of the deep spiritual crisis in our nation. St. John’s rich, beautiful, and multilayered account of the Gospel story would provide an excellent springboard for incoming freshmen to turn away from Dostoyevsky’s demons and toward the eternal questions, fostering life-sustaining spiritual development and freeing them from possession by the terrible ideologies that are causing this unrest.
Dorian Abbot is a professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.
In The Liberal Tradition in America, which came out in 1955 in the wake of another crackdown against the American left, the great and troubled political scientist Louis Hartz asked the question: What happens when liberalism becomes the instrument or ally of reaction? That is what is happening, in part, today on our campuses, against the pro-Palestine left, and though I don’t expect liberal university administrators to take up Hartz’s question any time soon, his answers should trouble their sleep.
Corey Robin is a professor of political science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
It’s not the students who need a reading list; it’s the presidents, administrators, boards, and donors. Here’s a start: Henry David Thoreau, “Civil Disobedience”; Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter From Birmingham Jail”; and Immanuel Wallerstein, University in Turmoil: The Politics of Change.
Laura Kipnis is a professor emeritus at Northwestern University’s School of Communication.
What I think would be helpful for undergraduates to read these days are two novellas written a good four decades ago. The first is Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, which simultaneously expresses empathy for the loss of home and family by a Palestinian couple who fled Haifa in 1948 and for the Holocaust survivors who adopted their baby boy left behind in the chaos of flight and raised him as an Israeli. It’s a classic by one of the most important Palestinian writers of his generation.
The second is the Israeli writer A.B. Yehoshua’s early story “Facing the Forests,” about the confrontation of an Israeli student with the remnants of a Palestinian village covered up by a newly planted forest on Mount Carmel, in which an elderly mute (!) Arab eventually sets fire to the forest the student was supposed to guard. Yehoshua’s story, written in the 1960s, is an early Israeli confrontation with the subconscious awareness of the destruction of Palestinian life in 1948. It’s also a classic of Israeli literature and a more progressive encounter with the past than anything we might find today in Hebrew. These are two rather short texts and can be read in tandem.
Omer Bartov is a professor of history at Brown University.
Martin Luther King Jr., “Letter From Birmingham Jail” (1963), paired with Lewis F. Powell Jr., “A Lawyer Looks at Civil Disobedience” (1966).
Randall Kennedy is a professor of law at Harvard Law School.
I would assign a short speech rather than a book. In June 1968, a few weeks after the police had cleared a student occupation from Hamilton Hall, the Columbia historian Richard Hofstadter gave the commencement address to a broken university. In the face of rising hostility toward the protesters, he defended their freedom to confront “difficult and inflammatory things,” including “the most troublesome questions of politics and war, of sex and morals, of property and national loyalty.” But he also warned that freedom, if it is to prevail in the long run, “requires restraints” that are “self-imposed and not forced from outside.” “The very possibility of civilized human discourse,” Hofstadter said, “rests upon the willingness of people to consider that they may be mistaken.” If I had to pick a single sentence for incoming college students — or, for that matter, faculty members and administrators — to read today, I’d pick that one.
Andrew Delbanco is a professor of American studies at Columbia University.
The anthropologist Maya Wind’s Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom couldn’t be more timely: It offers a forensic examination of what U.N. experts are now calling “scholasticide” in Palestine, through the complicity of Israeli universities in settler colonialism. Wind’s attention to the details of Israeli campuses as Jewish settlements of replacement in occupied lands, and their role in servicing the local military industry and as sites of Palestinian intellectual suppression, all speak to the current struggles being waged on U.S. campuses, where we are being forced to name higher education as a critical political and economic battleground in the broader fight for global freedom.
Davarian Baldwin is a professor of American studies at Trinity College in Connecticut.
“Before the Law,” a parable by Franz Kafka. It will prepare them well for the academy’s doorkeepers, and they will enjoy counting the fleas in their collars.
Silke-Maria Weineck is a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine. Erakat provides a brilliant critical history of a century of struggle over Palestine, as well as an excellent primer on the evolution and application of international law. She delivers a nuanced analysis of how law was contested ground: a tool for dispossession, settler rule, and occupation, as well as a tool of resistance and an archive for historical reconstruction. And she introduces some brilliant comparisons, notably the case of Namibia.
Robin D.G. Kelley is a professor of U.S. history at the University of California at Los Angeles.
Domenico Losurdo, Non-Violence: A History Beyond the Myth. Even as states are clearly not done with violence, abroad and at home, protest has generally taken the form of “nonviolence.” This edgy book tells a disquieting history of nonviolence, raising the possibility that it may have its own problems as a strategy, even if it avoids the mistakes of violence.
Samuel Moyn is a professor of law and history at Yale University.
I recommend Edward Said’s Out of Place: A Memoir because it will introduce the reader to the exilic poetry of Palestine.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University.
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor, by Yossi Klein Halevi. The protesters who have disrupted American universities since October 7 — from the Stanford lecturer who forced a Jewish student to stand in a corner to the throngs of activists who barred “Zionists” from common campus spaces — share an empathy for Palestinian suffering yet often lack an accurate knowledge of the history of Israel and the Jewish people. In lyrical and accessible prose, Yossi Klein Halevi, an acclaimed journalist who has migrated politically from right to left, reaches out across the political and ethnic divides to offer to an imagined Palestinian neighbor an insightful Israeli perspective on the conflict. Many Palestinians have found this book to be an olive branch, a basis for reviving the spirit of the 1990s, when a two-state solution seemed nigh. Pro-Palestinian students may find it opens their eyes — and their hearts — as well.
David Greenberg is a professor of history and of journalism and media studies at Rutgers University at New Brunswick.
William Gardner Smith’s recently republished 1963 novel The Stone Face chronicles the vibrant and close-knit Black American expatriate community in Paris during the time of the Algerian Revolution, and is one of the very few contemporaneous narratives of the 1961 massacre of Algerian protesters by the French National Police. For the novel’s protagonist, Simeon, life in Paris is unimaginably good. But when Simeon witnesses the persecution of the Algerian population by the French state, he is faced with a choice: Stay quiet in the face of injustice, as his expat friends choose to do, or speak up and risk losing his newfound freedom in Paris. Simeon chooses the latter — paying the “price of the ticket,” in James Baldwin’s memorable phrase.
Vaughn Rasberry is an associate professor of English at Stanford University.
Eddie Cole, The Campus Color Line: College Presidents and the Struggle for Black Freedom. When it comes to accountability for leaders of all sorts, the old maxim goes, “The buck stops here.” The historian Eddie Cole shows how much this is true for college presidents. He documents how, throughout history, college presidents have wielded their power in ways that further disenfranchised already vulnerable communities as well as other colleges, especially those that serve historically underrepresented groups. The book forces us to confront how hollow current gestures toward racial and social justice are when, just a generation ago, college presidents were key players in shaping policies that undermined both.
Anthony Abraham Jack is an associate professor of higher-education administration at Boston University.
Amahl Bishara’s Crossing a Line: Laws, Violence, and Roadblocks to Palestinian Political Expression. A Palestinian anthropologist looks to sites of political practice across the Green Line that separates Palestinian citizens of Israel from Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank.
Lila Abu-Lughod is a professor of anthropology at Columbia University.
Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s, by Robert Cohen. This authoritative biography of Mario Savio shows the deep links between the civil-rights movement and the struggle for free speech and academic freedom at Berkeley in 1964. Savio was relentless in his advocacy for political rights but also clear that with freedom came responsibility, both for democracy and for the institutional life of the university.
Nicholas Dirks is president of the New York Academy of Sciences and a former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.