A university president makes a case against cowardice
(newyorker.com)398 points by pseudolus a day ago
398 points by pseudolus a day ago
Some personal highlights:
"They’re excellent schools, and they have excellent scientists, and if one of Vice-President Vance’s kids is sick, he’s going to want the doctor to have gone to one of these schools; he’s not going to want them to have gone to Viktor Orbán’s university."
"People have said to me, “Well, you take all that money from the government, why don’t you listen to them?” The answer is, because the money doesn’t come with a loyalty oath."
"I don’t have to agree with the mayor to get the fire department to come put out a fire. And that’s what they’re saying to these international students: “Well, you came to this country. What makes you think you can write an op-ed in the newspaper?” Well, what makes you think that is, this is a free country. "
Consider that any competent manager will value polite debate and constructive criticism far more than the empty words of "yes" men.
Guess which category "reasonable ... consideration and appreciation" falls into.
Put another way, if you read North Korean state media, you will find that they always have a reasonable level of consideration and appreciation for their government.
Oh hey, Wesleyan on HN! I’m an alumnus (matriculated a year or two after Roth became president). Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).
I’ve had a few opportunities to speak with Roth since the Gaza war started, and I’ve always found him particularly thoughtful about balancing freedom of expression with a need to provide a safe and open learning environment for everyone on campus. In particular, he never gave in to the unlimited demands of protestors while still defending their right to protest.
In part, he had the moral weight to do that because—unlike many university presidents—he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020, which then were turned against the left over the past year.
I don’t see any particularly good outcome from any of this; the risk of damaging the incredibly successful American university system is high. Certainly smart foreign students who long dreamed of studying in the US will be having second thoughts if they can be arbitrarily and indefinitely detained.
But I hope the universities that do make it through do with a stronger commitment to the (small l) liberal values of freedom of expression , academic freedom, and intellectual diversity.
What unlimited demands are those? Every protest I have read about asks at most for divesting from Israel, which is arguably (and more likely than not) engaged in genocide. If these United States cannot divest from a country that did not exist 70 years ago, we have a huge problem. We won WW2 with Israel being a mythical state taught in myths and religious books, since it did not exist until after WW2. I swear someday Atlantis will be formed by billionaires as a resort for their progeny, and the rest of us will be compelled to fund it. Ridiculous
People are being abducted off the street for writing tame op-eds and we're still complaining about the left chilling speech post-2020? What are we doing here?
The government may be within its legal rights. As an expression of values however it's hard not to see the expulsion of these students as petty politicalized retaliation. The sort of thing you would see in an electoral autocracy as opposed to a liberal democracy.
> The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations.
What comes before “filter[ing] immigrants” is due process. Resident aliens have the right to due process which the current US administration is not providing.
Alien residents with every right to be here are being removed from the US illegally and mistakenly.
If there's no due process for everyone, that distinction literally does not matter in the slightest!
Dozens of citizens could have been sent into slave labor for all we know, and no judge has been able to provide the constitutionally mandated oversight. It has been upheld many times and for hundreds of years that the Due Process clause applies to non-citizens for this reason.
> The US has the prerogative to filter immigrants based on their views and affiliations.
Just to point, the prerogative to "filter" immigrants does not allow the US to keep them in jail, torture, or send them to foreign countries non-supervised labor camps.
The left banning the use of certain words and the right banning the use of certain words are flip sides of the same coin.
Of course, if you point that out, you get yelled at by both sides.
Except one side of the coin complains on twitter and maybe gets you fired from your job whereas the other side of that coin systematically removes over a hundred million dollars of research grants based on language and is literally disappearing people for their writing
but yeah, same thing. sorry someone put you through the absolute hell of saying they/them at work
One ban consists of the exercise of their right to... Not associate with you.
The other sends you to a Salvadoran gulag. (The silence from all the 'free speech' folks on this point is deafening.)
It's odd that one ban operates within the constraints of freedom (the freedom to associate requires the exercise of the freedom to not associate), while the other does not. It's almost like there's a categorical distinction.
It's utterly pointless to say that the starting point is the same, when one is an utter sabotage of all of society's rights and values... While the other is people affirming those rights.
That's because the extent of the illiberal behavior of the radical left was yelling and "cancel culture" while the present behavior of the illiberal right is abductions and overseas slave camps. You can see why people might find having the two equated a little ridiculous, right?
Everything is a flip side of the same coin if you abstract away from all the important details.
Oh the right say that some things are bad? Well the left say that some things are bad too!
These lazy equivalencies only breed cynicism and give intellectual cover to the Trump administration’s executive power grab. By all means criticize the left as much as you like. But the specifics are important. The current administration’s deportation of green card holders without due process isn’t somehow a mirror image of whatever excesses of left wing ‘cancel culture’ you may be upset about.
> Wesleyan has a rich history of activism and protest, and not always entirely peaceful (Roth’s predecessor, Doug Bennet, had his office firebombed at one point).
Arson is not protest. Arson is a VIOLENT type of activism, which is legally classified as terrorism.
Trump (or anybody) shouldn't be allowed to punish folks for speech or peaceful protest. Unfortunately, folks are calling VIOLENT acts like arson and battery "protest", and threats of bodily harm "speech" ("harassment" or "assault" under most US criminal law) -- we should be in favor of the government stepping in to protect people from arson, battery, and assault/ harassment.
> he did not give in to the illiberal demands of the left to chill speech post-2020,
Roth has been president since 2007. What was his response to Nick Christakis's struggle session (plenty of video of that) or Erika Christakis leaving Yale, after she penned an e-mail that students should be able to handle Halloween costumes they find offensive?
The American Left has been illiberal and going after speech for decades; it didn't start post-2020.
If the state is illegitimate then it is permissible or perhaps an obligation to topple it, according to people like the revolutionaries that founded the USA. That is, it doesn't necessarily matter what is legal or not, if the state misbehaves then you should put it to the guillotine or fire or bear arms or whatever suits you.
As an outsider it's always funny to see people write about the "American Left", as if there were any leftist movements of national importance in the US. As if Food Not Bombs had at some point had a majority in congress or something, it's just a ridiculous idea. If that happened there would be a bloody purge, Pinochet style but bigger.
Ok, I'll bite: in your view, what were the illiberal "demands" post-2020? Reading tfa, this kind of rendering feels a little too pat for him. Namely, its one thing to argue against the kind of knee-jerk moralism of well-meaning woke liberal arts kids, its quite another to imply a kind of "capital L" program to "chill speech."
Like, c'mon, are we really still doing this now? Roth himself is sensible enough to not be, in his words, "blaming the victim" at this point, what calls you to essentially do it for him anyway? It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse but conspiratorial noise. If I may assume a rough age based on your forthrightness, any single kid in school in 2020 was and is a lot less culpable for this current moment than you or I. We can set an example and be mature enough to own that, instead of, I don't know, forever being tortured by the real or perceived condescension of kids.
It is a smaller step to further the justifications than to deal with the often severe implications (to the self-image) of having been wrong. The more obvious it becomes having been wrong, the more necessary the justifications are and the more absurd they become. As having someone accepting your absurd justifications becomes proof of being blameless.
I should add that I'm not referring to beepbooptheory, but in response to "are we really still doing this now?".
It's nothing but out of touch at this point, and adds nothing to the discourse
Exactly. Its a communications problem.
Its hard to have a decent critical conversation when one side has a biased view about $symbol. Both communicating parties need to reach the same interpretation of a message, otherwise the conversation is broken. Thats why you shouldnt say the N-word or throw out a heil heart on stage (unless you want to hide behind this ambiguity). Or why its so difficult to have critical conversations with strong believers, for you its just evolution or vaccines but for the other side it may affect the core of their identity and the ape goes defense mode.
The result is that the discourse does not deal with differentiated cases but _only_ with simplistic labels like "chill speech", "woke", etc. because the more biased side drags it down into the mud.
For instance, the "chill speech" label is actually dependent on the "racist" label that initiated it. If a case shows clear racist behavior, then dismissing the lefts reaction as censorship is unjustified or biased. The other way works too, if there is no racist behavior, the censorship blame would be justified.
And since you cant look into peoples heads to clearly identify racist intentions, it falls back to interpreting messages. The problem with biased people is, they are not aware even of their unawareness. If you would ask Musk whether he is a neo-nazi, his response would be something like "hell no". Fast forward the dystopian timeline and his response might be "always have been".
The left has IMO more unbiased awareness about systemic issues -- but is not free of bias either. The right is in its core biased indentity politics about $culture -- but is not totally host to tribalism either.
My advise, avoid popular symbols at all cost and if you come close to using one, augment it with case specific background, even a vague "_unjustified_ chill of speech" would suffice. If someone opens with "the woke left" and shows no signs of differentiation -- or even better, acknowledgement of core leftist topics -- i mentally turn away. The comment you replied to was about personal anekdotes and projections and the one symbol that rubs me the wrong way too, even before trumps abuse.
It's not that hard as a foreign student to not join political protests in favor of terrorist groups. Also this isn't that unusual of a standard. Many countries completely ban non citizens from joining political protests, even ostensibly western countries.
>It's not that hard as a foreign student to not join political protests in favor of terrorist groups.
I obviously don't support terrorism, but people unambiguously have the right to protest in favour of terrorist groups. It's only when they provide material support to these groups that they actually commit a crime.
Who is supporting terrorist groups? Pro-Palestinian protesting is not support for terrorism.
Nothing in that article implies supporting terrorism. They support Palestine.
People conflating supporting Palestine with supporting terrorism should be ashamed of themselves, as Israel is the biggest terror state in the world.
Maybe Palestine should stop supporting Hamas. It looks like they couldn’t get enough of it.
This guy perhaps?
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
> Many countries completely ban non citizens from joining political protests, even ostensibly western countries.
Which ones?
In the UK we don't discriminate based on citizenship, or even if the protests are political or not !
Protest marches - no wait, the term is less specific: "public processions" - can have restrictions imposed for basically any reason. Restrictions can be imposed if (this is just a selection):
- They basically generate noise
- May cause prolonged disruption of access to any essential goods or any essential service
- May cause the prevention of, or a hindrance that is more than minor to, the carrying out of day-to-day activities
- May cause the prevention of, or a delay that is more than minor to, the delivery of a time-sensitive product to consumers of that product
Not forgetting there are probably 10-20 general Public Order Offences that can be used against a person, such as wilful obstruction of a highway or public nuisance.
Then we also have Serious Disruption Prevention Orders (SDPOs). SDPOs are civil orders that enable courts to place conditions or restrictions on an individual aged over 18 (such as restrictions on where they can go and when) with the aim of preventing them from engaging in protest-related activity that could cause disruption. Breaching an SDPO is a criminal offence.
And the cherry on the cake: by law you must tell the police in writing 6 days before a public march if you're the organiser (which is to say, get the police's permission)
Germany bans pro-Palestine protests (officially they're still legal, but they've been arresting people since it began and they've just started deporting people for participating in completely legal protests) but I think that's a slightly different criterion than the one you asked for.
Supporting Palestinians that Israel has been killing for over a year (+50k killed, most were women and children), while starving the rest and ethnically cleansing them, is not supporting terrorism.
1. Hamas bears the moral responsibility for all of the suffering in the war they started on October 7th, and the Palestinian people bear the moral responsibility of electing and supporting them (and participating in the invasion, and not returning the hostages).
2. Even Hamas now admits most deaths have been military aged males: https://m.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-848592
3. How can you argue that Gaza has been starved and ethnically cleansed when the population of the Gaza strip has increased since the start of the war?
Too many have been killed, for sure, but you should probably use sources other than the Hamas Health Ministry:
https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/hamas-run-health-ministr...
I strongly agree, unfortunately they feel strongly differently after spending a lot of money to get on the courses. Frankly the law of the land is the latter, but this is one of the problems with cladding cultures and attitudes which needs addressing rather than glossing over...
ah, some both sides claims while people are disappeared
> They'll make it through if they bend the knee. Otherwise the regime will destroy them, and the conclusion will be that it's all because of these darned radical leftists.
Well, it is, isn't it? They required complete loyalty to the ideology before accepting any faculty: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/08/us/ucla-dei-statement.htm...
They shouldn't have gone that far.
Columbia has an endowment that stands (pre- Liberation Day) at 15 billion dollars.
They kowtowed to some of the militant Zionist interests involved in that endowment in order to attain a fractionally higher return, and betrayed their students.
They kowtowed to the fascist administration on the grounds that it was threatening 400 million dollars in grants, and betrayed their students to the point of facilitating a project to unilaterally deport many of them based on Constitutionally protected quasi-private speech.
At this point I don't think they want or deserve to be called a university. Let's go with "Tax-exempt investment fund".
Do you think calling for the genocide of Jews violates Columbia's codes of conduct on harassment and bullying?
I think people were upset about the hypocrisy. For years, every minor transgression against a marginalized group was met with swift disciplinary response and thorough investigation. And now they can't even offer a straight answer on a simple question and suddenly turned into free speech absolutists.
It's fine to be either one, but don't piss on me and tell me its raining.
There is an ongoing genocide in Gaza and genocidal language is commonplace in Zionist discourse. If there are cases of hate speech on the pro Palestinian side, they pale in comparison to speech from the other side.
Regardless we shouldn’t be rounding up and imprisoning folks if they disagree with your politics. This is what is getting lost in this specific case.
Your argument is so out of touch I can only assume it’s being made in bad faith.
Many of the pro-Palestinian protesters are also Jewish. Equating all Jewish people with Israel and Zionism is insidious and misleading.
What on Earth? How is their argument out of touch or made in bad faith? It's a reasonable and popular line of reasoning that you disagree with strongly. Assuming the best possible interpretation is one of our community guidelines, please follow it.
Except they're not mainstream Jewish. Jewish Voice for Peace has been linked to known terrorists and receives support from anti-Jewish interests. At best, they're "useful idiots" but more realistically they were long corrupted by anti-semitic interests.
https://www.adl.org/resources/backgrounder/jewish-voice-peac...
> What you're looking for is a town square where everyone can protest to their hearts content. You're not looking for a place of quiet contemplation and study.
The university quad, a multipurpose public space designated for students, is basically the only type of public, physical town square left in this entire country.
As another Jew, the way non-Jews are using us as a cudgel to crack down on free speech certainly doesn't feel like "support". As one of history's leading targets when it comes time to scapegoat a minority, I get more antisemitic vibes from the "we have to sacrifice our American ideals to protect the Jews" folks than the "stop killing Palestinians" ones.
A significant number of Columbia students are Jewish and were largely protesting the genocide. Almost the entirety of this movement had zero issue with Jews, only with the actions of Israel and Zionism. A significant number of outside agitators were older Jewish Zionists or (often) Zionist evangelicals who lived within driving distance and wanted to start a fight. 50 year old drunk men wearing Israeli flags and pushing into the crowd in groups.
I watched this narrative get created and promoted without any evidence; Video after video showed peaceful and surprisingly media-savvy students (I mean, it is Columbia). Every politician and most media organizations taking direct input from Israeli government officials or AIPAC. On MSNBC and CNN we heard voice after voice after voice pronouncing expert opinions on the shame of this protest/terrorism in an Israeli accent. Administration officials trying to expel anybody caught on camera who was identifiable. While the bombs dropped on Gaza.
I can't say with any confidence that there was absolutely zero conflict, but the absolute confidence that every figure of authority immediately brought to bear on the subject of all Jews being purged by Hamas terrorists from Columbia and needing the National Guard to be called out to protect them? It was beyond the pale.
All of the video I watched of actual Zionist students (or student-aged people) had them victim-posing for social media after throwing themselves into the protest and being largely ignored.
What bothers me the most about all these protests and going-ons at universities and colleges is that they are generally by 18-22 year olds who are pre-adults still in their formative years who still have a lot of learning and growing up to do.
Harvard's rolling over was particularly annoying, they have a 52 billion dollar endowment! If any university could afford to make a stand and lose funding over it it's Harvard. What's the point of this massive pile of money if you never dip into it in exceptional circumstances?
I don't see much talk of donors? My impression is that, as in many situations, the super-wealthy are forming a dominant class - as if it's their right - rather than respect democracy and freedom, and attacking university freedom. Didn't some person engineer the Harvard leader's exit?
Roth says the Wesleyan board is supportive; maybe they are just lucky.
Being a super wealthy alum is a prerequisite for being a Trustee, and University Trustees are the group that University Presidents report to.
This is why I always have and always will prefer community colleges. Their boards are elected officials. Not perfect, but 1000 times better than just having wealth.
Election is a bad way to choose almost anything. The enthusiasm of Americans for adding yet more elected roles rather than, say, having anything done by anybody competent is part of how they got here. The only place elections are even a plausible choice is political office - with an election and as close as you can to universal suffrage now the idiots running things are everybody's fault, although Americans even managed to screw that up pretty good. Sortition would probably be cheaper, but elections are fine for this purpose.
https://archive.ph/a9ie5