On Moral Error

12-23-2023

Roger Berkowitz

The embarrassing testimony of three top college presidents before the House Committee earlier this month led to the firing of one president. Another, Harvard’s Claudine Gay, is now embroiled in multiple scandals. Some see the testimony, in which the Presidents refused to say that chanting for a Jewish genocide would violate college policies, as an inflection point, a chance for higher education to pull itself back from the brink of a self-inflicted death spiral. That these elite college presidents simply could not see that calls for Jewish genocide devalue and ignore Jewish lives and Jewish suffering in ways that are fully incompatible with a culture of academic freedom is a sign of the problems on our college campuses. I’ve written about these problems here and here. The question is, how can our institutions of higher learning reinvent themselves as institutions of intellectual seriousness. 

Virginia Foxx, the Congressional Committee Chairwoman who convened the hearings, called in her opening statement for a reconsideration of the dominance of a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion bureaucracy that she argued is “a grave danger inherent in assenting to the race-based ideology of the radical left.” There are, of course, important goals pursued by the DEI frameworks on campuses. But as the recent lawsuit at Harvard around the exclusion of Asians in admissions and now the spotlight on the way that DEI bureaucracies don’t count Jews as a group to be protected both show, the DEI bureaucracy is not actually doing what it ought to do, making our campuses more pluralist, more tolerant, and more thoughtful. As a result, the DEI bureaucracy needs to be reimagined and rethought. 

Danielle Allen has offered an essay that acknowledges the serious problems with our current DEI framework and seeks to begin a conversation around productive and positive solutions. Allen writes, 

While I stand by the goals of inclusion and belonging for college campuses — and consider those goals valuable for America writ large — I agree with Foxx that we have lost our way in pursuing them. We have gotten lost both in the thicket of debates about the First Amendment and in the swamps of particular tenets of anti-racism. How do we find our way back?

Allen deserves enormous credit for taking seriously the flaws in our approach to DEI and for thinking clearly about how to re-create a better approach. Allen goes through a number of easy and more ambiguous scenarios, offering common sense advice on how we can better create an inclusive and academically rigorous culture on our college campuses. 

On the easy side, Allen writes that protests inside a classroom that interfere with academic freedom are not allowed. Similarly, while protests of speakers are permitted, disrupting academic talks is not allowed and must be subject to sanction. And targeted threats or harassment of individuals based on race or religion is clearly forbidden. 

But what about the harder cases, when students or faculty march through campus or occupy libraries and dining halls while chanting slogans like “White Power” or “From the River to the Sea” or “Jewish Genocide.” In a country that values free speech, such speech—even offensive and morally insipid speech—is permitted. It should be (except when it is a direct incitement to violence). But what about on a college campus where people must learn to talk to each other across differences with respect? In an academic environment, there is a custom of speaking with humility and respect since the discussion is aimed at the eventual uncovering of truths, or, at the least, of agreeing on better and more considered and more reasonable opinions.  Shouting slogans can at times make injustice visible, but it rarely furthers the pursuit of either truth or meaning; most often, shouting slogans leads to what Allen calls a “culture of intimidation.” 

When Allen writes about a culture of intimidation, she means something specific and yet hard to pin down. For a black student to have to walk by students shouting “White Power” or to have to go to school where the n-word is hurled at them as an insult means that the campus becomes not only potentially unsafe and uncomfortable, but also ceases to be a place where all students and faculty are empowered to engage with difficult and opposing opinions in an intellectually meaningful way. Similarly, when Jewish students must listen to students screaming about “Jewish Genocide,” “bring back a global intifada,” and for some “From the River to the Sea,” there is little space to engage in an intellectual conversation. One can say that students should grow a thick skin and should learn to converse with others who are calling them racial slurs. One can say that it is part of free speech to shout slogans and is a limit on racist and pro-Palestinian speech to prohibit such slogans. One can say that these slogans can be used to mean different things. White Power, some argue, can simply mean to take pride in white culture and not a disparagement of black people. Similarly, some use "From the River to the Sea" to mean simply a call for a one-state solution. There is an argument that college students should be able to have difficult and provocative discussions. That is true. But colleges and universities are, above all, spaces for intellectual discovery.  For this reason, Allen argues that college campuses must be willing in extreme situations to put the interests of academic freedom and intellectual debate above the purity of the freedom of speech. I worry that the devil is in the details and that punishing students for speech—even speech that is intimidating—opens the door to an unending effort of different groups to ban unpalatable speech from their opponents. While I share Allen's concerns, I would bend over backwards to allow the maximum of speech possible. But Allen is right, there are limits, and we need to do a better job of articulating and enforcing those limits in a respectful and pluralist way. 

At the core of Allen’s proposals is the need and willingness to insist on preserving our colleges as a place for rigorous, open, plural, and challenging intellectual debate while, at the same time, insisting that students and faculty be free from a mind-numbing culture of intimidation. That means that we must be willing to tell students, and faculty, when their opinions are simply wrong, based on either false facts or what Allen calls “moral error.” It is a moral error, Allen argues, to embrace Palestinian liberation and national self-determination in a way that would require the elimination of Jews in that state. To chant “From the River to the Sea,” celebrates one national liberation while calling for the destruction of another people. Such thinking is not only fully lacking in historical knowledge and political nuance; it is also inseparable from the view that Jews simply don’t have equal rights or equal worth, and thus is morally wrong.  

When morally abhorrent slogans are made the basis of campus protests, they are inextricably linked with a weaponized racism or antisemitism that cannot but lead to a culture of intimidation for blacks and Jews and their allies on campuses. What is more, such slogans threaten to destroy the culture of inquiry and mutual respect at the heart of the academic enterprise. 

I am very close to being a free speech absolutist in politics. But Allen’s point, one that I also share, is that academic freedom is not always the same as freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is an essential part of a democratic politics. It is also part of academic freedom insofar as the speech is made part of the academic practice and offered in a way consistent with academic practices of collective and respectful inquiry. Disagreement and protests are part of academic freedom. But while slogans and protests are at home in democratic politics, they can corrode the basic customs of reasonable discourse that is the lifeblood of educational institutions. As a result, colleges must, Allen writes, insist on teaching students their moral error and, in rare instances when it is necessary, disciplining them when they continue to act in ways that create a culture of intimidation. In my view, the discipline as well should follow pedagogical as opposed to punitive norms whenever possible. But this is something to be worked out. Allen’s proposals are wise and deserve to be considered carefully. Allen writes: 

We know how to handle harassment, threats and intimidation when they target individuals — when students, for instance, leave racist or antisemitic or anti-Islamic fliers at the doors of specific students. Such behavior is subject to discipline. As laid out by the Supreme Court, the legal framework for discriminatory harassment requires that it be “targeted, unwelcome and ‘so severe, pervasive, and objectively offensive that it effectively bars the victim’s access to an educational opportunity or benefit,’” FIRE said. As someone who had the n-word shouted at me from a dorm window late one night on Princeton’s campus in 1993, I appreciate our nondiscrimination frameworks. But it’s important to note that this legal requirement — that acts handled this way be targeted at specific individuals — is what tangled up the three presidents last Tuesday.

A culture of intimidation is a different challenge. It’s the very opposite of the culture of mutual respect necessary for learning and, for that matter, a healthy democracy. (By the way, Congress, what are you modeling these days?)
This is the problem we are struggling with right now. Clearly, we cannot allow a culture of intimidation to develop and perdure on our campuses. Regardless of what initial intentions student protesters might have for chants such as “globalize the intifada,” or any of the other slogans associated with eliminating Jewish people from Israel’s land, they can no longer pretend not to know that their use causes many people a reasonably felt sense of intimidation. On this matter, the Age of Innocence is behind us. If college campuses regularly had groups of kids chanting “White power,” I would not be comfortable sending my children there, even if those chanters never took a “targeted” action against a specific person.
That gets at the core question: How do we reverse a culture of intimidation without violating commitments to academic freedom and free speech?

Avoiding violations of academic freedom should be the easier part. In the classroom and out, it is perfectly within our rights to tell people (kindly) that their arguments are bad or their views weak or erroneous and then to work with them to correct them. We correct students’ math; we can correct their reasoning, and that includes correcting moral errors. Does a student think it’s reasonable to expel Israelis from their country as a part of freeing Palestinians? That’s a moral error that a teacher should require the student to confront and learn from. Does a student think the conflict can be addressed without asking how both peoples can thrive in this land they share? Ignoring that question is also a moral error requiring correction.

The idea of moral error is unfashionable and must be employed judiciously. But it is indeed one of our tools for improving reasoning. It’s always best if people think through their arguments and reach self-correction themselves, through forms of Socratic questioning. Nonetheless, put bluntly, academic freedom does not protect people from intellectual correction.

Avoiding violations of free-speech rights while correcting a pattern of generalized intimidation is much harder. But it’s not impossible. We should not just protect students’ speech rights but also insist that they exercise those rights in accordance with campus norms for a culture of mutual respect. Students should be put on notice in a fashion something like this:

While protest, within acceptable limits, is protected by free speech, on this college campus those acceptable limits include that your method of protest not cause intimidation to other members of our community. Intimidation is behavior that involves a threat of violence to deter or coerce others. If the communications you use while protesting would constitute harassment if targeted at a specific individual, the presumption will be that the protest method is likely to create a pattern of generalized intimidation incompatible with a culture of mutual respect.

You will first be informed that your protest has crossed the line and asked to modify your approach to communicating your view so that it also clearly communicates that you are committed to the safety of everyone on this campus. If you continue to use forms of communication that would be taken by a reasonable person as harassment if targeted at a specific individual, you will be sanctioned through customary disciplinary procedures.

We are an educational institution, so our scale of sanctions begins with an opportunity for learning and correction; it can, however, end in expulsion.