To the Editor:
In “The Rise and Fall of the Campus Left” (The Chronicle Review, March 21), Robert S. Huddleston traffics in the kind of false equivalencies that have become all too common in both liberal and far-right rhetoric. Rather than confronting the moral and political urgency of condemning state violence — specifically, the Israeli government’s ongoing assault on Gaza — he fixates on the supposed “fracturing” of the left, as though internal discord is the primary crisis at hand. This rhetorical sleight of hand is not merely evasive; it actively shifts the spotlight away from the structural and genocidal violence Palestinians are enduring and instead pathologizes those who dare to raise their voices in protest.
By foregrounding concerns about unity and political cohesion, Huddleston effectively depoliticizes urgent demands for justice — treating pro-Palestinian dissent not as a necessary confrontation with power, but as an inconvenient disruption. In doing so, he mirrors a broader liberal impulse to neutralize resistance under the guise of civility, to reframe righteous anger as political liability, and to collapse complex ethical struggles into mere strategic calculations. Worse still, he suggests that the slaughter of over 50,000 Palestinians by Netanyahu’s far-right government should be spared critique by the left — because to do otherwise would be too strident, disaffecting, or alienating. This is not an essay about the crisis of politics; it is about rhetoric in the service of the collapse of conscience.
At a moment when the Trump administration is reviving fascist modes of governance — punishing dissent, criminalizing solidarity, and accelerating authoritarian policies — Huddleston’s essay is not merely disingenuous. It is complicit. By refusing to name or confront the disintegration of democracy, the erosion of academic freedom, and the repression of movements grounded in international solidarity, his argument functions less as analysis than as deflection.
To reduce pro-Palestinian protests on campus to signs of a fracturing coalition is to fundamentally misrepresent their purpose. These protests are not distractions; they are principled acts of resistance against settler colonial violence and in defense of human dignity. To cast them as liabilities is to echo the rhetoric of those who have always preferred order to justice, silence to truth, and compliance to courage.
Henry Giroux
Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest, English, and Cultural Studies
McMaster University
Hamilton, Ontario
Robert S. Huddleston responds.
