College Is All About Curiosity. And That Requires Free Speech.

I have served happily as a professor at Yale for most of my adult life, but in my four-plus decades at the mast, I have never seen campuses roiled as they’re roiling today. On the one hand are gleeful activists on the right, taking victory laps over the tragic tumble from grace of Harvard’s president, Claudine Gay. On the other is a campus left that has spent years crafting byzantine and vague rules on hate speech that it suddenly finds turned back on its allies. For those of us who love the academy, these are unhappy times.

The controversy began with criticisms of some universities, Harvard included, for soft-pedaling their responses to the horrific Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, and for then ignoring the overheated rhetoric of many pro-Palestinian protesters on campus. It has since spiraled into a full-bore battle in the never-ending culture wars.

There’s something sad but deeply American about the way that the current crisis stems not from the terror attacks but from a subsequent congressional hearing at which the presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave such cautious responses that it was hard to understand their positions. It was all very embarrassing; and, in its way, very McCarthyist.

Still, some good may yet come of the debacle. I have in mind not, as the left might think, a fresh rallying of the angry troops; nor, as the right might think, an eager readiness for the next battle. Rather, the controversy provides us with an opportunity to engage in a serious debate about what higher education is for.

The Oct. 7 attack was hardly an auspicious moment to unfurl campus demands that the world pay attention to the context underlying the vicious assault. Measured by casualties, the Hamas attack is the third-deadliest terror incident in the half century for which we have data; measured in per capita terms, it was by far the worst, with more than 1 in every 10,000 Israelis killed. I have a fair degree of sympathy — quite a lot, actually — for many aspects of decolonial theory. I have taught, for example, the works of Frantz Fanon and Talal Asad, both of whom seek, in different ways, to offer an explanation for anti-Western violence that most observers find inexplicable. I have no sympathy whatsoever for the intentional targeting of children and the weaponization of sexual violence. Drawing a distinction between civilian and military targets might benefit the more powerful side, but the distinction is nonetheless correct.