Wall Street Journal OPINION | COMMENTARY
By Michael Segal
April 30, 2024 12:50 pm ET
Cambridge, Mass.
With Harvard Yard closed to non-Harvard press, it was hard to know what was actually going on with the pro-Gaza encampment. Having a meeting in the yard Monday, I decided to check it out for myself. What I found was far less confrontational than I expected, and the mindset was intellectually timid. That combination points to a very Harvard-type solution that could appeal to both the demonstrators and the administration.
From limited press coverage and videos, I expected that rank-and-file demonstrators would decline to talk and would refer me to designated spokespeople. I expected demonstrators to hold up keffiyehs to hide their faces. Instead, I found a semicircle of 10 people who spoke with me for an hour. I asked them to help me understand why they were in the yard. Initially they referred me to their banner, with three demands focusing on divestment from Israel-related companies. I told them this was small-bore thinking, useless because others would replace any withdrawn investment, and also intellectually timid because they weren’t engaging on the big ideas of how to solve the conflict. They replied that they are only students. I pointed out that they are Harvard students and should be able to engage intellectually.
They seemed skeptical, so I told them what we did when I led the major pro-Israel group at Harvard in the years following the 1973 Yom Kippur War. We boldly labeled our group the Harvard Committee on American Foreign Policy. We sponsored talks covering a range of views, including those of Noam Chomsky, whose book opposing Israel many of us dutifully read beforehand. We also published a petition from 76 professors and more than 700 students opposing the United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. We described Zionism as a national liberation movement and cited the “right of all people to national and cultural self-determination.” The argument sounds obvious today, but the Israeli Consulate got wind of the text and sent someone to talk us out of it. We held our ground, confident that our views were well-reasoned.
Today’s demonstrators aren’t showing the same intellectual vitality. In our discussions, they professed a vague vision of Arabs and Jews all living together in peace, sharing the land. I told them that this vision died on Oct. 7, and that outsiders interpret their “from the river to the sea” signs as calling for the brutality of that day to be repeated throughout Israel. They told me that the slogan was years old, but I pointed out, and they agreed, that the original version was “from the water to the water, Palestine will be Arab.”
They told me that original slogan wasn’t anti-Jewish because the Jews of the Middle East once referred to themselves as Arab Jews. I allowed that such a vision wasn’t entirely crazy, recounting my experience with how Arab doctors, nurses and patients get along fine with their Jewish counterparts in Israel’s hospitals. But although this is a cheery vision, the events of Oct. 7, which many groups at Harvard rushed to praise, and similar events going back a century, killed that vision.
I was surprised by how much the students didn’t know. None had heard of the Farhud, the 1941 slaughter of Jews in Baghdad—something that can’t be blamed on the 1947 partition plan for the Palestine Mandate. Even one Jewish student with ancestors from Baghdad hadn’t heard of it. I then shared the hair-raising stories I’ve heard from many survivors.
Although the encampment was far less confrontational than I had imagined, students needed more of the intellectual vitality that I experienced at Harvard in the 1970s. We didn’t grow up cocooned in like-minded groups on the internet, or with the one-sided teach-ins of the 1960s. Conservatives were heavily outnumbered but acted with the intellectual resilience that was expected from Harvard students in those days. My fellow student Grover Norquist recalled in 2005 that there was “a ‘Boy Named Sue’ quality to being a libertarian or conservative at Harvard.” Conservatives at Harvard were mocked by others, but they learned to be “tougher than anyone else,” he said. In that era everything could be discussed, and many leaders on the right arose from this resilient cohort.
In 2021 Harvard College Dean Rakesh Khurana started an Intellectual Vitality Initiative, which he described to me as a covert effort prompted by requests from students. It became public in April 2023. It is the quintessentially Harvard solution of promoting the kind of serious public discussion we had in the 1970s. On my way into the yard, Mr. Khurana was entering the back of University Hall, and we had time for little more than my asking him how he was holding up; he thanked me for asking and asked me to make an appointment so we could talk. But as I spoke later with the students on the other side of the building, Mr. Khurana reappeared there. I tried to wave him over, but he was deep in a conversation, and I had already gotten another administrator to join us. I was pitching to the students Mr. Khurana’s Intellectual Vitality Initiative, and I hoped he could make that pitch himself.
Serious public discussion is the win-win solution to the current mess at Harvard. The students get acknowledged and challenged to think boldly but constructively. Harvard gets to restore its brand of intellectual vitality. Before my visit to the encampment, I thought Harvard was too far gone for this to work. But with students willing to discuss the issues and a dean committed to intellectual vitality, it could be the best path forward.
Dr. Segal is a neuroscientist and neurologist.
Appeared in the Wednesday 1 May 2024 print edition of the Wall Street Journal
https://www.wsj.com/articles/harvards-protesters-arent-as-obstinate-as-you-might-expect-267b13d2
Copyright ©2024 Michael Segal