The Review

What is going on at Indiana University at Bloomington? Two recent stories, the first reported by Kathryn Palmer in Inside Higher Ed and the second by Zachary Small in The New York Times, suggest that something like a formal “Palestine exception” to academic freedom is being introduced in Indiana. Palmer reports that Abdulkader Sinno, a political scientist, was suspended for two terms after booking a room for a campus talk by Miko Peled, an Israeli-American activist who advocates for a one-state solution and is critical of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. And Small reports that Samia Halaby, an 87-year-old Palestinian artist, had her “first American retrospective ... abruptly canceled by officials at Indiana University in recent weeks.”

The political content of Peled’s talk, and the fact that it was hosted by the Palestine Solidarity Committee, a student group critical of Israel, were not the reasons given by administrators for Sinno’s punishment. His official sins were all bureaucratic ones concerning the process by which rooms are reserved at Indiana. Sinno’s not buying it: “The administration couldn’t find a single policy violation to leverage against me, so they made up a hodgepodge of frivolous accusations without merit as a pretext to impose severe sanctions on me,” he told IHE. The university’s actions sound a lot like what Suzanne Nossel, in our pages, called “proxy reprisals,” trumped-up non-speech-based charges used to discipline faculty members who have run afoul of one or another taboo. A petition circulated by Indiana faculty members objecting to Sinno’s suspension likewise finds it to be a “pretextual and unwarranted punishment.”

In the Halaby case, administrators offered no reason at all for the retrospective’s last-minute cancellation, unless you can locate a reason in this piece of gobbledygook produced by Mark Bode, a university spokesman: “Academic leaders and campus officials canceled the exhibit due to concerns about guaranteeing the integrity of the exhibit for its duration.” David Brenneman, director of the university’s Eskenazi Museum of Art, where the retrospective was to have been held, gave Halaby a more specific explanation: Some of the museum’s employees, Brenneman said, had expressed concern about Halaby’s Instagram posts, which include phrases like “HIROSHIMA / NAGASAKI / GAZA” and “GAZA equalls [sic] AUSCHWITZ.”

IU’s treatment of Sinno and Halaby might seem to reflect its leaders’ fear of political reprisals. In November of last year, U.S. Rep. Jim Banks, an Indiana Republican, sent IU-Bloomington’s president, Pamela Whitten, a letter threatening to withhold federal funding “if IU administrators condone or tolerate campus antisemitism.” The letter includes only one instance of alleged antisemitic harassment: A campus “vandal ripped mezuzahs, a Jewish symbol, off IU students’ dorm doors” in 2022. All of Banks’s other objections are to instances of plainly protected political speech having to do with Israel and Palestine.

The darkest irony of December’s congressional hearing on campus antisemitism is that under the sign of a concern for free speech, some Republicans are in fact working to introduce fierce new constraints on what can be said on public college campuses. In response to Banks’s threats, Whitten and her administration might remind him of what his fellow Republican, Rep. Joe Wilson of South Carolina, said during that hearing: “The solution for close-minded intolerance is obvious: to liberate academia from denial of free speech, respecting the First Amendment.”

From the Mailbox

In a letter to the editor, Jim Moore of USC writes in to object to my characterization of an incident from 2020. Moore writes:

In “A Decade of Ideological Transformation Comes Undone” (The Chronicle Review, December 22), Len Gutkin calls “farcical” the case of a “white professor of clinical business communication at the University of Southern California, Greg Patton,” who “used the Mandarin word ‘nèige,’ which means ‘that,’ in a lesson on filler words (nèige can be used similarly to ‘um’ in English but sounds vaguely like the N-word).” A group called “Black MBA students” complained.

It was no farce when Patton’s business school dean, Geoff Garrett, removed him from the class he was teaching, nor when former USC Provost Charles Zukoski defended this step to an incredulous USC Academic Senate as necessary while investigating the complaints against Patton, nor when Garrett’s faculty formally admonished him for his actions.

In contrast, Gutkin declares the case of University of Michigan distinguished professor of music Bright Sheng a fundamental threat to academic freedom. Sheng, who is Asian, “showed a 1965 film version of Othello in which Laurence Olivier appears in blackface.” Again, students complained. Music school dean David Gier removed Sheng from his class because Sheng’s actions “do not align with our school’s commitment to antiracist action, diversity, equity, and inclusion.”

There is no meaningful distinction between the two circumstances. Both directly threaten the academic freedom of deeply accomplished faculty experts using their respective skills and best judgments to communicate with their students, some of whom prefer to maneuver rather than learn. Both faculty members were morally, academically, and intellectually in the right, and both were betrayed by virtue-signaling administrators who care more about maneuvering their career opportunities through a pernicious institutional DEI maze than they do about truth or the welfare of the students their faculty members were trying to serve. What matters is diversity of ideas, not phenotypes; equal opportunity, not equity; and inclusion based on merit, not identity. There is much for us to undo; it is past time we proceed.

I concede the point. By “farcical” I only meant that the case was ridiculous. But I certainly agree with Moore that it was a genuine violation of academic freedom.

Recommended

• “If we relax the assumption that only orders created by nation-states are worth studying, then there is plenty of international relations material in history outside of Europe and before modernity that we can investigate.” In Aeon, Ayşe Zarakol on the pre-Westphalian Asian world order.
• “Nihilism is an expression of religious melancholy; certainly, it is still caught in a religious framework — the very conceit that the world is meaningless or life is meaningless attributes meaning-making to something other than ourselves.” In The Nation, Wendy Brown talks with Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins about her recent book, Nihilistic Times: Thinking With Max Weber. For more of Brown’s thinking about Weber, check out her essay in our pages from last year.
• “People seek out narrow misinformation because they distrust institutions (science, public health, mainstream media, etc.), not vice versa.” On Substack, Dan Williams writes about the misinformation “moral panic.”

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin