By Bret Stephens
As college students return to campus, this is what I hope a university president might say to them about how their school intends to handle future protests.
Dear students,
Welcome back. As you all know, last year our campus, like many others, was racked by protests that began right after Hamas attacked Israel on Oct. 7 and intensified as the war in the Gaza Strip unfolded. We are not going to allow those protests to happen again, at least not in the aggressive, disruptive and sometimes lawless ways in which they were conducted last year.
I'm here to tell you why.
Some of you may suspect the reason is pressure from big donors and angry alumni, or fear of lawsuits, judicial rulings, congressional subpoenas and Title VI investigations. I won't pretend these things don't matter to us, above all when it comes to our responsibility to follow the law and protect our students from discrimination and harassment. Jewish students who believe in the Jewish state's right to exist are as entitled to that protection as everyone else.
But I don't want to leave it at that, because the reason we intend to strictly enforce restrictions on campus protests has less to do with pressure from the outside and more to do with what we owe to ourselves as an institution dedicated to discovery, scholarship, teaching and learning. Our central concern is not with reputation -- how others see us. It's with integrity -- how we remain faithful to our foundational purpose.
What is that purpose? The main clue comes from the word "university," derived from the Latin "universitas": the whole, everything, the universe.
We are a university not merely in the sense of being a type of corporation that brings together many programs and departments. We are also a university in that each of us is part of the same truth-seeking enterprise -- an enterprise that believes in the universality and interconnectedness of knowledge itself. Here at this school, a historian can learn from a geologist, a neurologist can collaborate with a musicologist, and a freshman student can question and challenge the most senior member of the faculty. Here, students with different backgrounds and perspectives can, with a bit of effort, discuss and debate ideas without descending to name-calling, intimidation or ostracism.
This is what ought to make -- what used to make, what could still make -- universities wonderful places to be. We were not meant to be a collection of antagonistic interest groups presided over by a vast administration. Nor should we be a battleground for political conflicts imported from beyond the campus gate. Politics is something we study. If it drives what we do -- as it has sadly done in some earlier times -- we would forsake knowledge-seeking for advocacy and partisanship, and therefore cease to be who we are.
What we are meant to be, rather, is a community of learners guided by the spirit of inquiry. It's that spirit that I want to talk about today.
What is the spirit of inquiry? At its root it is the virtue of curiosity, along with the many habits of mind that spring from being curious. It is a spirit that believes in insistent questioning, even at the risk of irritating those who claim to have the answers. It is a spirit that delights in conversation, which is the exchange of thoughts, not a contest of wills. It is a spirit that is aware of its own ignorance, an ignorance that only grows the more we learn. It is a spirit that cultivates the art of listening patiently and intently; of processing an idea, a fact or an argument before we respond to it. It is the spirit of second-guessing ourselves and reexamining settled convictions, including those of the ideological, religious or cultural communities to which we belong. It is, in Learned Hand's famous phrase, "the spirit which is not too sure that it is right," a spirit that is willing, even happy, to be proved wrong.
What I have just described is the spirit of Socrates in Plato's Apology, a short text that most undergraduates used to read as a matter of course. I recommend it. But no matter where the spirit of inquiry came from, our responsibility as a university is to pass it on to you, our students. When we are doing our jobs well, we do this in several ways, large and small.
Some of you may have heard the term "institutional neutrality." It is the belief that universities like ours should avoid taking political positions of any kind, either through investment decisions or political declarations by administrators or by academic boycotts of foreign scholars, except when the interests of the university are directly affected -- like when the Supreme Court weighs in on our admissions process.
You may also have heard about the Chicago principles, which make the case for universities to embrace an almost unfettered principle of free expression as "an essential part of the university's educational mission," even when the speech is seen by most members of the community as "offensive, unwise, immoral or wrongheaded."
Our university embraces both institutional neutrality and the Chicago principles. We do so not because they are ends in themselves but because they are necessary ways to cultivate the spirit of inquiry. That spirit cannot be fettered by formal or informal speech codes that might stop us from asking uncomfortable but important questions, or by university policies that preclude fruitful exchanges with scholars from other countries. At our university you will find scholars from Israel, China, Turkey, Russia and other countries whose policies you may not like; we do not hold them responsible for their governments, nor do we ask them to make political declarations as the price of belonging to our community.
But necessary isn't sufficient. If all we accomplish by adopting the Chicago principles is that everyone gets to speak and nobody bothers to listen, those principles will have fallen short. If we embrace institutional neutrality at the topmost level while remaining indifferent to the one-sided politicization of classrooms, departments and administrative offices, we will have done little to advance the pedagogical benefits of neutrality, which is intended to broaden your exposure to the widest variety of views and ideas.
And if we permit protests that inhibit the speech of others, or set up no-go zones for Jewish students, or make it difficult to study in the library or pay attention in class, we may have upheld the right to speak in the abstract while stripping it of its underlying purpose. The point of free speech is to open discussion, not to shut it down. It's to engage with our opponents, not to shut them out. It's to introduce fresh perspectives, not to declare every perspective but our own to be beyond the moral pale.
I'd like to add a personal note as a Jew. Many people objected to last year's protests, with their chants of "from the river to the sea," as antisemitic. I find that calling for the elimination of Israel -- indeed, of any state -- is inherently repugnant, since it would almost inevitably entail an almost unimaginable level of violence, dispossession and destruction.
But antisemitism is not what I found chiefly offensive about the protests. I accept that most of the protesters are not antisemitic, or at least don't think of themselves that way.
What bothered me, rather, was watching members of our community turn off their critical faculties. It was listening to students and faculty whom we had admitted or hired for their intellectual sophistication, their capacity to understand complexity and nuance, reduce their own thinking to a handful of slogans and mantras written for them by others. It was the absence of intellectual humility and its replacement with moral certitudes. It was the substitution of serious political thought with propaganda. It was the refusal to engage with difference and criticism in any way except denunciation and moral bullying.
In short, the way in which these protests unfolded was an insult to the spirit of inquiry that this university has an institutional responsibility to protect and champion. So does this mean we will brook no form of protest? Of course not. But we do expect that protests, so long as they happen on our campus, on our property, conform with the aims of education as we see them.
That means, at a minimum, that we will enforce clearly established "time, place and manner" restrictions, so that the rights of those who protest are never allowed to impinge on the rights of those who don't. It also means we will invest in serious programming about the Mideast conflict, including by inviting Israeli and Palestinian scholars to campus and hosting moderated debates where you can cheer your own political side but must at least listen to the other. Our goal is never to make you think one way or the other. It's to make you think, period.
The spirit of protest will always have a place here, as it must in every free society. Our job is to harness it to the task of inquiry so that knowledge may continue to grow, and human life may be enriched.