Only one day after the Ontario Confederation of University Faculty Associations warned that the Ontario government’s threat to start monitoring campus groups who criticise Israel would have a chilling effect on academic freedom, Western University in London Ontario announced that a campus imam had been fired for “divisive” speech. How someone is to take a coherent position on a war (i.e. a fundamental political division) without being ‘divisive’ is a question I would like the Western administration to answer. I would also ask how they convinced themselves that firing an imam is not divisive. I assume that the Islamic students and faculty might find this move all too familiarly divisive.

This attack on the imam’s right to articulate his own position on the war is the latest act in a drama playing out on campuses across North America. Major donors have threatened to pull funding from universities in the US judged insufficiently critical of Hamas and not uncritically supportive enough of Israel. In Florida, the state government has effectively dissolved campus Palestinian solidarity groups, while back in Ontario both Toronto Metropolitan University and York are investigating and threatening to sanction student governments and campus groups because of statements in support of the Hamas attacks.

I have made my position on Hamas’ tactics clear in my earlier posts on the war. Anyone who understands the Palestinian struggle as a moment in the broader struggle for human freedom has to condemn attacks on Israeli civilians, for both moral and political reasons. Being a member of a nationality or a citizen of a state is not a capital offence. While contradicting the life-value justification for the struggle for national liberation, the Hamas attacks, as they are now finding out, were also monumentally politically stupid. They seem to have been based on a number of miscalculations: that the Israeli government would be willing to exchange Palestinian prisoners for the hostages, that they would eschew the medieval tactic of imposing a complete siege, and that Iran and Hezbollah would be able to deter the complete destruction of Gaza. Instead of negotiations, Israel has been on an arrest rampage that has doubled the number of Palestinian prisoners. The people of Gaza are literally the targets of genocidal violence, while Iran and Hezbollah talk tough but lack the power to decisively alter the conflict. The recent meeting between Hamas and Hezbollah to discuss their “final victory” over Israel was otherworldly in its failure to understand the political reality in which they find themselves.

The intensity of the violence in a region that is no stranger to war has provoked heated rhetoric on both sides of the conflict. University campuses have been flashpoints for solidarity rallies. As it always does, the Israeli state tries to short-circuit criticism of its policies by attacking anyone with the temerity to question its goals as an anti-Semite. They have been joined this time by the billionaires pulling funding and governments and university administrators threatening student groups. Their combined assault on academic freedom reveals a three-fold problem with the contemporary university.

First of all, it reveals the danger of relying upon private funding. Billionaires giveth and billionaires taketh away. When they give, they give on their terms, so that if the university becomes addicted to those donations they will find themselves, like all junkies, having to sing whatever tune the dealer wants them to sing. Major US institutions are now facing the loss of tens of millions of dollars in donations because some of their donors have decided that the universities’ statements about the Hamas attacks and resulting war have not been sufficiently critical of Palestinians. University policy thus finds itself hostage to outside forces who lack any academic standing and should have no input into the intellectual life of the institutions.

The second problem is that universities as corporate bodies feel the need to intervene one way or the other in the first place. Since the murder of George Floyd it has been de rigeur for university PR departments to selectively issue saccharine bromides in response to world events. These interventions are as unwelcome as they are ineffective. Universities are complex networks of students and researchers engaged in the difficult, open ended work of trying to understand our world in all of its multiple dimensions (physical, political, etc). University administrators do not speak for the whole, because there is no whole in whose name determinate political positions can be expressed. The active members of the university, faculty and students, necessarily have different perspectives on complex problems, and they all must be free to argue pro or contra on any issue. The role of administrators should be confined to ensuring that the work of research and teaching carries on; they do not speak for the “university community.”

The third problem is the most serious. This problem stems from a misunderstanding of the political value of universities. Activist academics and student groups typically mistake academic freedom as their academic freedom to be critical of established structures of power. They are jealous in their defence of their right to speak but, over the last decade or so, quite willing to sacrifice opposed groups’ academic freedom. As I have argued in a number of earlier posts, academic freedom is not a personal right to say what one wants to say, it is an institutional right necessary for the functioning of the university as an intellectual institution. The university cannot function as a space for free inquiry and argument if billionaires, governments, administrators, or one-sided campus political movements determine what can be said and not said, questioned and not questioned. By its nature inquiry questions, opens up a field of problems for critical scrutiny and debate.

The only legitimate means of “shutting an argument down” is to articulate an opposing argument so powerful that the opponent feels compelled to revise their position. Everyone who works or studies at a university must be committed to this principle on pain of performative contradiction. A performative contradiction (Habermas) is a form of speech that undermines the institutional conditions of its being made. If members of the university owe their ability to speak to the principle of academic freedom, then any attempts to deprive opposed groups of this right contradicts the institutional conditions of their making that argument. Academic freedom presupposes and justifies the university as a site of intellectual exchange of positions and argumentative conflict. Those who cannot bear the argumentative burden of proving their conclusions against opponents are not fit to remain members of an institution of ‘higher’ education.

Sadly, even though it typically has the most to lose when academic freedom is threatened, elements of the campus left have led the charge against academic freedom. Childish demands to ban speakers, cancel events, and boycott publications because they run afoul of some dogma have become too common. These movements are both intellectually cowardly and politically suicidal. When real conflicts like the Gaza war break out, state and administrative powers exploit the weakened commitment to academic freedom to threaten to ban and fire anyone who does not toe the party line.

Universities are not revolutionary parties. No one is obligated by party discipline to take one position as opposed to another, but to reason their way to their own conclusion and– crucially– to defend it against opponents and revise it if found wanting on grounds of insufficient evidence or self-contradictory reasoning. The job of the revolutionary is to make the revolution, as Che said, but the job of the academic is to prove their argument. No one needs be an academic: if argument seems too thin a practical contribution to the resolution of complex problems, one is free to leave the academy and organize a more kinetic struggle against whatever structure is supposed to be the problem. But if one remains an academic or a student one’s duty is first of all to the truth, which is rarely obvious. The truth will out and set us free (one hopes) but only through a process of exchange of arguments.

Bad arguments are exposed by better arguments. Which is better and which is worse cannot be determined if one side is simply banned by state or administrative power or silenced by political movements afraid to defend their position against critics.