Hamas brutality illuminates college officialdom’s broken moral compass

In recent years, America’s campus mandarins have been given one opportunity after another to lead by fostering constructive discourse. They have manifestly failed at that task. When disputes or events focused attention on abortion, policing, race, gender, and more, college officials have rushed to issue statements to declare their fealty to the progressive cause (whatever that happens to be).

Rather than acknowledge good-faith disagreement or offer up their institutions as places where we might seek mutual understanding, campus leaders choose to perform for the cheap seats. In doing so, they’ve undermined the ability of their institutions to serve as credible forums. They’ve marginalized scholars and students who don’t embrace these dogmas. But they’ve insisted on speaking up for those “brutalized” by Supreme Court rulings on abortion or free speech for bakers, if only to ensure that all feel safe and welcome on campus.

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Well, over the weekend, the Palestinian terror organization Hamas launched a truly brutal assault on Israel, slaughtering parents in front of their kids, raping women and parading them in the streets, kidnapping civilians from their homes—all while live-streaming much of it. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre
had it just right
: “Our condemnation belongs squarely with terrorists who have brutally murdered, raped, kidnapped hundreds—hundreds of Israelis. There can be no equivocation about that. There are not two sides here.” Indeed, President Biden noted that Hamas’s “stated purpose is the annihilation of the state of Israel and the murder of Jewish people.”

Meanwhile, campus chapters of Palestinian student groups—including at campuses like Ohio State and Harvard University—issued congratulatory statements and insisting that Israelis deserved this (the
Harvard statement
was co-signed by more than two dozen student groups). Campus officials who’ve been so deeply concerned of late about nuanced microaggressions were here confronted with a vicious case of macroaggression, one that involved campus members cheering a direct threat to Israeli exchange students, any student or faculty member with relations in Israel, and, more generally, Jewish members of the campus community.

And how did college leaders respond? Mostly with silence. Four days after the attack, the Chronicle of Higher Education
had found
only 14 colleges that had said anything at all. Even the Chronicle, which tends to operate as a cheerleader for American higher education, noted that Hamas’s assault drew a “more-neutral response from significantly fewer colleges” than other, less horrific incidents and that most “responses walked a thin line” and opted for banal encomiums urging “all-around peace.”

The president of George Washington University, Ellen Granberg, offered a typically milquetoast bit of bothsidesism, saying, “Violence, discrimination or harassment against any member of the Jewish, Israeli, Palestinian, Arab or Muslim communities will not be tolerated at GW.”

At Babson College, President Steve Spinelli
regretted
that, “during a long weekend meant” for “continued reflection on the importance of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging on Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” there’d been some “tragic events,” including “new conflicts in Israel and Palestine” and a “disastrous earthquake in Afghanistan.”

At Harvard University, where President Claudine Gay issued a shaken, tearful rejoinder to the Supreme Court ruling on race-based admissions earlier this summer, Gay this time mustered such a tepid
response
that she was later compelled to offer a second statement clarifying “that I condemn the terrorist atrocities perpetrated by Hamas.”

Johns Hopkins international affairs scholar Yascha Mounk may have said it best, in commenting on his institution remaining silent after issuing a string of statements on previous hot-button issues. “I actually think universities should not be in the business of issuing these kinds of statements,” Mounk
wrote
. “But since they do issue statements about all kinds of events all of the time, it sends a very clear message if they then happen to fall silent when the victims are Jews.”

Look, campus leaders would do better to just stop issuing declarations which putatively speak for their institution. They should stop dabbling in politics and instead focus on actually doing the work of fostering discussion and understanding. Putting the campus community on one side of fraught debates makes that more difficult.

If campus officials do choose to speak up, and then do so on some issues rather than others, they should hardly be surprised when observers take note. If they weigh in on court rulings, policy decisions, or individual tragedies, their silence on gruesome rampages will be hard to miss. And if they somehow feel okay about approaching abortion, race-conscious policies, and policing as simple morality plays, and only discover complexity in a moment like the present one—well, one can only conclude that their moral compass is broken.

But that, I fear, has become increasingly evident of late.

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This article was originally published by the American Enterprise Institute. It is republished with AEI’s kind permission.