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PROFESSOR CRAIN SOUDIEN argues that, unlike in South Africa, antisemitism in the United States is widely weaponised, especially on university campuses, to silence voices that speak up for Palestinian human rights.
In early December 2023 and at the beginning of January 2024, two of the foremost university presidents in the United States stepped down from their positions, Elizabeth Magill at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn) and Claudine Gay at Harvard University. How should we understand and begin to explain these decisions by Gay, the first black person and second woman to be appointed as the president of Harvard, and Magill, one of Penn’s few female presidents? Why is what has happened in the American university scene important for us here in South Africa?
At stake, I argue here, is the politics of truth-making. The issue is now about Palestine but involves a wider-ranging attack on freedom of speech and the right of intellectuals to stand up against political authority. Universities represent for us in modern times one of the few institutions able to stand up against dogma – dogma of all kinds, ideological, political, religious, cultural, linguistic or whatever. Dogma is when you are told what the truth is and are prohibited and even persecuted for daring to speak against it. There is an attempt in the United States, and now also emerging in the United Kingdom and Germany, global powerhouses of higher education, to turn universities into sites of ideological obedience. Academics are being punished, even expelled from their positions, for challenging authority.
The context for the resignations of Magill and Gay was a United States Congressional investigation into allegations of antisemitism at Harvard, Penn and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hearings conducted as part of the investigation required Magill and Gay to respond to Congressional Representative Elise Stefanik’s claim that antisemitism had been condoned at their institutions. Stefanik said to Gay “… does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules of bullying and harassment?” Gay replied, “It can be, depending on the context.” Both Magill and Gay’s responses were deemed to be incorrect. The answer should have been ‘yes’, said Stefanik. She demanded that they resign immediately. Magill did. Gay, stood her ground, supported by the Board of Harvard.
Gay’s ‘depends’ approach is important to understand. It opened the possibility of a ‘truth’ to emerge which was different to that of Stefanik. That she did not concede to the antisemitism charge infuriated the powerful establishment in the US. They had decided that she should go. Not many weeks later the accusation was made, supported by a large donor, that Gay had committed plagiarism in writing her doctoral dissertation. She then resigned.
The hell that has broken loose in the wake of the resignations, particularly that of Gay, is important for South African readers to understand. Comment has flowed thick and fast in a range of different kinds of media from politicians, intellectuals and the lay public. The respected magazine, The Atlantic, described Gay’s story as “a story about some of the oldest values of academia.” The resignation, it said, was just really ‘an old-fashioned scandal.’ They were referring to the plagiarism accusation. Gay had broken the sacred rule of academic honesty. She had cheated. She stole the writing of someone else and presented it as her own.
Intellectual activists in the American progressive community explained the resignation differently. The magazine Politico said that “conservatives who have long been at war with elite academic institutions have pointed to these universities’ responses to the conflict between Israel and Hamas as the latest example of the ivory tower’s skewed values. On Tuesday, the right got a strong dose of satisfaction by engineering the departure of the head of the most influential university in the world.” Kim McLarin, a professor at Emerson College, said that what was happening was part of a “backlash against civil rights and diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.”
That Gay should have been more careful in how she managed herself as a scholar is hardly a matter of debate. If you want to be an academic, you should never use other people’s knowledge without acknowledging them. That she was, and is, a dishonest cheat, is sheer exaggeration. Several scholars make clear that it wasn’t the plagiarism for which she was harassed. It was the fact that she, a black woman, chose not to toe the line that any criticism of Israel is antisemitic, which the German establishment is taking.
At stake here, I argue, is the role universities are expected to play in society. The political establishment refuses to work with a world in which debate is encouraged. It is uncomfortable with saying ‘it depends’. As significant commentators are pointing out in the USA, there is an onslaught on universities which takes us back to the McCarthy era when the American establishment sought to prohibit that which they deemed ‘un-American’ – that is, actually, anything that didn’t conform to their ideals of racial, class and gender dominance. Anything that even remotely looked like embracing Communist values was immediate cause for condemnation and persecution.
In the current era this dominant establishment is slightly different. It is rhetorically committed to the values of ‘freedom, right’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’. Crude discrimination – racism, for one – is no longer permissible. What ‘freedom’, ‘right’, ‘justice’ and ‘equality’ are, however, is not a matter of debate. Those principles are what the powerful political establishment says they are: “You can say what you like, but you cannot criticize the idea of a Jewish state.”
Gay took an ostensible ‘truth’, ‘antisemitism’, and upon being asked what it was, said, ‘it depends’. To the political establishment, this was morally repugnant. The right-wing in America is seeking to shut down the instinct in the university to question. The question in this instance is that of how antisemitism is being used to prohibit a discussion of the complex truth of power and privilege.
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That question is as relevant in American politics and institutions like universities, as it is in South Africa. It is particularly noteworthy that the question will remain ever-relevant with respect to the outcomes of two key developments, both in South Africa and the USA: the 2024 elections and the judgment, on January 26, 2024, in the genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Professor Crain Soudien is former CEO of the Human Sciences Research Council and former Deputy Vice-Chancellor at the University of Cape Town.
