This situation seems, to me, to illustrate some key flaws in deferential standpoint epistemology that always takes the “side” of the oppressed. Insistence on two and only two irreconcilable sides, defined by their essences as good or evil, with one side targeted for violent elimination, is obviously black-and-white thinking; it’s often characteristic of those who have been traumatized (among others), but it’s not good thinking. The oppressed can be wrong! They become oppressors all the time, including in the geopolitical case in question. It’s neither closeness to experience of oppression per se nor distance (“objectivity”) that improves thinking, but relationality, context, humility, openness to the humanity of all. Institutions that openly encouraged that substantive baseline of mutual coexistence on a shared and finite planet, rather than a hands-off free speech free-for-all, would be more coherent. But that would entail a big shift.
The most interesting thing to me about Dean's essay was her citation of people like Edward Said who certainly did not agree with the absolutist position she advocates; Said unequivocally condemned acts of violence against Israeli civilians by Palestinian militant groups. But acknowledging leftist Palestinian activists who reject her identification of Hamas with the Palestinian cause would not go well for her so she pins it all on Butler...
A big issue with Jodi Dean as you note is that she pretty much becomes Exhibit A of the right-wing parody of the Ivory Tower radical intellectual who likes to throw rhetorical bombs comfortably from her cozy campus office and home. She is not putting boots on the ground to deliver aid to Gaza or even take up arms for Hamas.
I'm fairly certain that most academics are rather conventional liberals-Democrats in their political viewpoints and probably dislike Bibi and his revisionist right-wing cabinet. They generally do not support the slaughter that occurred on October 7th. However, during the most inopportune times, these cartoons of academia appear to show up. And there is a multi-billion dollar right-wing industry on the prowl for them. Hombart & William Smith is a very small college with few than 2300 students and this is the first time I heard this story for what it is worth. Amy Wax teaches at one of the top law schools in the United States. It appears that both have received similar punishments. I found a Reddit thread that stated Dean was relieved of her teaching responsibilities. Amy Wax was prohibited from teaching first year courses (all of which are required in law school). Essentially, they are not being fired but being put in sanitation corridors as harm mitigation.
Now what I can never figure out is why someone can't figure out that sounding like the cartoon ivory tower radical hurts their cause more than it helps but it might fall in under Orwell's "there are some things so stupid that only intellectuals believe in them."
“There is no third point from which to assess the situation”. Peak historical illiteracy. Militant radicals have been arguing among themselves since forever about the morality, not to mention political efficacy, of killing non-combatants. Even Arafat denounced some of the al-Aqsa intifada massacres (he had mixed motives, presumably). Her celebration of Oct 7 is just more stupid noise that serves nothing and nobody except Israeli propaganda, and it’s definitely professionally incompetent to airbrush out of history the endless debates on the left about political violence and civilians. Personally, I’d fire her for that.
"The fact is that there are very few people who would defend both Jodi Dean’s rights and those of, say, Amy Wax, the UPenn law professor who regularly espouses virulently racist views."
I feel like there are kind of a lot of them actually? Not a majority in number or certainly in volume, but both from a sort of blase "live and let live" perspective and a sincere appreciation that academic tenure is important and occasionally protecting racist idiots like Amy Wax is the cost of doing business, I think a lot of people are inclined to brush off the cancel mob and we shouldn't despair that no support for free speech as a cultural norm exists.
And hopefully articles like this show the way. Just calling them a fucking idiot, with erudition and demonstrating full comprehension of the argument, is a far more powerful response.
I totally agree about the disingenuousness of calling on the world to steel itself to mass murder and Schmittian war to the last while acting scandalized that you might face entirely nonviolent, gentle, privilege-of-living-in-a-democracy type consequences for this speech. But also, I think an overlooked part of the assumptions smuggled in in this "new McCarthyism" framing is the demand that we treat teaching responsibilities solely as a judgement about you and your views and not a decision about the students. Which seems especially salient given that she *wasn't fired,* just relieved from teaching.
I'm a college student right now. If I had a course with the author of this essay, I wouldn't feel okay ever mentioning my religious heritage or having it be inadvertently revealed, and I'm not an apologist for Israel by any non-Jodi-Dean definition. That probably goes for a lot of categories of student, based really on demographics and not views: Israeli students; people with family in Israel or any kind of connection to the October 7 attack; Palestinian students with some connection to Hamas's Palestinian victims - or just any less sanguine view about the authoritarian religious dictatorship ruling their country; diaspora Jewish students who find that kind of insanely violent language and uncritical quoting of Nazi theorists upsetting bc of some history with antisemitic violence outside Israel. I don't think the speech rights of faculty takes priority over the rights of students to not hear from *authority figures* that the mass murder and sexual assault of people like them is morally just. Dr. Dean doesn't seem malicious, I guess, just detached from the consequences of her beliefs here, but that doesn't create an environment where students can learn on an equal footing as their peers or feel safe raising complaints about their professors. It's not edifying speech when it's from some kind of campus speaker or student protest group, but it's worse when it's someone with direct power over your grades and academic prospects. Like, I'm sorry this ends up looking like "McCarthyist" repression of faculty speech, and I know that it's not great that some bad actors will use any precedent they can get to go after pro-Palestine speech in general, but I don't think being around students is a human right.
I think there are several things being missed here in all the outrage over essay. I think she is saying (reasonably enough) that the October 7th atrocities are actually part of an arc of righteous Palestinian resistance which stretches back to 1948 or before. I think it is not unreasonable to think of the October 7th terrorist attacks as a continuation of Intifada one (the Intifada of stones) and Intifada two (the Intifada of suicide bombs). In fact, Arabs started killing Jews in response to their increasing immigration and land acquisition as far back as 1928. So, as awful as the October 7th attack was, the suicide bombings in restaurants and busses were deeply awful too (I was in Jerusalem at that time) but they were not treated with the same outrage as the October 7th attacks.
It should also be said that the entire question of Palestinian suffering was pretty much off of the table as an international concern until October 7th. So in that sense they were a success, from the point of view of Palestinian aspirations. Again, I think that attack was awful, but Israel’s response was not only demonstratively worse, in terms of civilian death, but seems also to have been a military and political failure so far.
It should also be remembered that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an asymmetrical one, and it is out of asymmetrical conflicts that terrorism tends to be used by the weaker party against the stronger one, as we saw in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against American troops, or as we saw in the Jewish resistance against the British, in which Palestinian Jews used terrorism against the British (the King David Hotel bombing, which killed 91 people, being the best known example).
I thought her writing was painful and her overuse of buzz words and provocative (and not very helpful) rhetoric did not help her thesis, but her essential points were reasonable (at least to me) and ought to be included in any discussion of this volatile subject. She should not have been professionally sidelined in this way. She just should have been assigned an editor.
"...to celebrate violence and then cry out so when you are very lightly struck does not inspire my admiration or respect. She can talk, but I don’t have to listen."
More than that -- listening is giving her words the effect she wants. She is whining and flopping not because she is hurt, but because she is working the refs -- her contribution to revolutionary struggle. The refs should decline to be worked.
This is kind of why I just turn off when faced with most defenses of academic freedom and/or cries for "free speech" on college campuses. (Or closely adjacent, concerns about 'viewpoint diversity'.) There is almost no one who is actually, no-fooling, deeply consistently, a free speech absolutist. Even some of the people who kind of seem it in the sense that they defend all speech acts indiscriminately are still kind of short of the mark in that they tend to accept or not even care that some speech is far more amplified than other speech by access to dissemination, by resources and funding, and so on. Which is one reason that a certain kind of obsession with campus speech can be so weird--the kind of thing where a first-year undergraduate saying something sort of dumb about cultural appropriation and cafeteria food is made out to be a bigger deal than a named chair at Harvard writing some insane screed in the New York Times, etc.
Most of the time, the supposed free-speech absolutists who are madly gripping their pearls any time students protest against an unpopular speaker coming on to campus and who sign open letters in Harper's about the menace of cancel culture, are not in the least bit interested in heterodoxy or unconventional opinion or viewpoint diversity if it's an opinion or viewpoint that they disdain. Shit, most of them can't even be bothered to understand or thoughtfully engage the best arguments for a more restrictive approach to speech on campus, for the concept of harmful speech, etc.--they just go looking for the dumbest, shittiest advocacy they can find and take that as normal.
And yes, some campus leftists shift over hard into free speech absolutism when it's their own ox getting gored. You'd think this would show them the validity of warnings about how careful arguments concerning the range of speech that's appropriate to higher education have become dangerous weapons in the hands of administrative managers, but I'm not seeing very much awareness of that recognition. If it's valid to suggest that certain kinds of extremist thinking violate the basic purpose of academic work--or make some students feel threatened or unsafe--then it's valid in the case under discussion here as otherwise.
The entire discussion (of free speech on campuses, not Palestine) is such a thorough mess of hypocrisy and special pleading in all directions that I don't think it's at all useful any longer to approach any controversy through this lens.
The way I'd put it: no one actually believes in total free speech on campus––and rightly so. The premise of higher ed institutions is that speech is serious and constrained in various ways; that's why, even at public universities, you have to pay big buckets of money to be in the semi-public spaces of higher ed. It's not like the Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Part. The people who run a given institution have an obligation to maximize the liberty to speak but also to make sure speech doesn't seriously undermine the aims of the institution.
If you look up what Amy Wax says and claims––including about law students at Penn––there is no way the law school could require any given student to take a class from her. I don't know much about the Jodi Dean case, but by the same token I can't imagine that administrators at Hobart could tolerate a situation where students had to take a course with Dean, e.g. to fulfill a graduation requirement.
Dean's case is a bit trickier given that her discipline is politics. But academic freedom doesn't include the idea that students can be *compelled* to listen to instructional speech, regardless of the larger values and goals of the institution.
A common element of the free speech debate, and Dean's framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as almost every attempt to "cancel" someone (or defend someone against cancelation), is each side's attempt to boil things down to binary ("which side are you on?" asks Dean). The reality of course is that things are complex, and we are all engaging in a kind of moral calculus.
How much Israeli oppression and mistreatment justifies an act of mass murder? What number of collateral deaths of innocent Palestinians is an acceptable cost of Israeli retaliation? Is that person's recent post/essay/op-ed so appalling that it outweighs their past contributions to culture and justifies [cancellation]?
We do our calculations, arrive at our answers, and then people somehow become convinced not only that other answers are immoral, but lesser *degrees* of the same answer are as well.
If it's all political enmity and struggle, why should she, being relieved of teaching duties, say "ah well, only to be expected after all, good show"? Isn't she just taking the fight to a fresh venue? Her conduct (both in the initial post and now in the complaint) may well be distasteful, and the complaint may well be in bad faith, but I have a hard time seeing it as self-inconsistent, or the home of ironies.
This situation seems, to me, to illustrate some key flaws in deferential standpoint epistemology that always takes the “side” of the oppressed. Insistence on two and only two irreconcilable sides, defined by their essences as good or evil, with one side targeted for violent elimination, is obviously black-and-white thinking; it’s often characteristic of those who have been traumatized (among others), but it’s not good thinking. The oppressed can be wrong! They become oppressors all the time, including in the geopolitical case in question. It’s neither closeness to experience of oppression per se nor distance (“objectivity”) that improves thinking, but relationality, context, humility, openness to the humanity of all. Institutions that openly encouraged that substantive baseline of mutual coexistence on a shared and finite planet, rather than a hands-off free speech free-for-all, would be more coherent. But that would entail a big shift.
The most interesting thing to me about Dean's essay was her citation of people like Edward Said who certainly did not agree with the absolutist position she advocates; Said unequivocally condemned acts of violence against Israeli civilians by Palestinian militant groups. But acknowledging leftist Palestinian activists who reject her identification of Hamas with the Palestinian cause would not go well for her so she pins it all on Butler...
Said on violence against Israeli civilians: https://youtu.be/7g1ooTNkMQ4?si=S7G2Dfyk4IA67lSP&t=1970
A big issue with Jodi Dean as you note is that she pretty much becomes Exhibit A of the right-wing parody of the Ivory Tower radical intellectual who likes to throw rhetorical bombs comfortably from her cozy campus office and home. She is not putting boots on the ground to deliver aid to Gaza or even take up arms for Hamas.
I'm fairly certain that most academics are rather conventional liberals-Democrats in their political viewpoints and probably dislike Bibi and his revisionist right-wing cabinet. They generally do not support the slaughter that occurred on October 7th. However, during the most inopportune times, these cartoons of academia appear to show up. And there is a multi-billion dollar right-wing industry on the prowl for them. Hombart & William Smith is a very small college with few than 2300 students and this is the first time I heard this story for what it is worth. Amy Wax teaches at one of the top law schools in the United States. It appears that both have received similar punishments. I found a Reddit thread that stated Dean was relieved of her teaching responsibilities. Amy Wax was prohibited from teaching first year courses (all of which are required in law school). Essentially, they are not being fired but being put in sanitation corridors as harm mitigation.
Now what I can never figure out is why someone can't figure out that sounding like the cartoon ivory tower radical hurts their cause more than it helps but it might fall in under Orwell's "there are some things so stupid that only intellectuals believe in them."
The little cartoon drawing of her with her first raised in solidarity and a little communist cap is also sad and pathetic.
100% this
“There is no third point from which to assess the situation”. Peak historical illiteracy. Militant radicals have been arguing among themselves since forever about the morality, not to mention political efficacy, of killing non-combatants. Even Arafat denounced some of the al-Aqsa intifada massacres (he had mixed motives, presumably). Her celebration of Oct 7 is just more stupid noise that serves nothing and nobody except Israeli propaganda, and it’s definitely professionally incompetent to airbrush out of history the endless debates on the left about political violence and civilians. Personally, I’d fire her for that.
Totally agree. An extra irony is that in a world where Hamas is in charge, there are no lady professors.
"The fact is that there are very few people who would defend both Jodi Dean’s rights and those of, say, Amy Wax, the UPenn law professor who regularly espouses virulently racist views."
I feel like there are kind of a lot of them actually? Not a majority in number or certainly in volume, but both from a sort of blase "live and let live" perspective and a sincere appreciation that academic tenure is important and occasionally protecting racist idiots like Amy Wax is the cost of doing business, I think a lot of people are inclined to brush off the cancel mob and we shouldn't despair that no support for free speech as a cultural norm exists.
And hopefully articles like this show the way. Just calling them a fucking idiot, with erudition and demonstrating full comprehension of the argument, is a far more powerful response.
I totally agree about the disingenuousness of calling on the world to steel itself to mass murder and Schmittian war to the last while acting scandalized that you might face entirely nonviolent, gentle, privilege-of-living-in-a-democracy type consequences for this speech. But also, I think an overlooked part of the assumptions smuggled in in this "new McCarthyism" framing is the demand that we treat teaching responsibilities solely as a judgement about you and your views and not a decision about the students. Which seems especially salient given that she *wasn't fired,* just relieved from teaching.
I'm a college student right now. If I had a course with the author of this essay, I wouldn't feel okay ever mentioning my religious heritage or having it be inadvertently revealed, and I'm not an apologist for Israel by any non-Jodi-Dean definition. That probably goes for a lot of categories of student, based really on demographics and not views: Israeli students; people with family in Israel or any kind of connection to the October 7 attack; Palestinian students with some connection to Hamas's Palestinian victims - or just any less sanguine view about the authoritarian religious dictatorship ruling their country; diaspora Jewish students who find that kind of insanely violent language and uncritical quoting of Nazi theorists upsetting bc of some history with antisemitic violence outside Israel. I don't think the speech rights of faculty takes priority over the rights of students to not hear from *authority figures* that the mass murder and sexual assault of people like them is morally just. Dr. Dean doesn't seem malicious, I guess, just detached from the consequences of her beliefs here, but that doesn't create an environment where students can learn on an equal footing as their peers or feel safe raising complaints about their professors. It's not edifying speech when it's from some kind of campus speaker or student protest group, but it's worse when it's someone with direct power over your grades and academic prospects. Like, I'm sorry this ends up looking like "McCarthyist" repression of faculty speech, and I know that it's not great that some bad actors will use any precedent they can get to go after pro-Palestine speech in general, but I don't think being around students is a human right.
I think there are several things being missed here in all the outrage over essay. I think she is saying (reasonably enough) that the October 7th atrocities are actually part of an arc of righteous Palestinian resistance which stretches back to 1948 or before. I think it is not unreasonable to think of the October 7th terrorist attacks as a continuation of Intifada one (the Intifada of stones) and Intifada two (the Intifada of suicide bombs). In fact, Arabs started killing Jews in response to their increasing immigration and land acquisition as far back as 1928. So, as awful as the October 7th attack was, the suicide bombings in restaurants and busses were deeply awful too (I was in Jerusalem at that time) but they were not treated with the same outrage as the October 7th attacks.
It should also be said that the entire question of Palestinian suffering was pretty much off of the table as an international concern until October 7th. So in that sense they were a success, from the point of view of Palestinian aspirations. Again, I think that attack was awful, but Israel’s response was not only demonstratively worse, in terms of civilian death, but seems also to have been a military and political failure so far.
It should also be remembered that the Israeli/Palestinian conflict is an asymmetrical one, and it is out of asymmetrical conflicts that terrorism tends to be used by the weaker party against the stronger one, as we saw in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan against American troops, or as we saw in the Jewish resistance against the British, in which Palestinian Jews used terrorism against the British (the King David Hotel bombing, which killed 91 people, being the best known example).
I thought her writing was painful and her overuse of buzz words and provocative (and not very helpful) rhetoric did not help her thesis, but her essential points were reasonable (at least to me) and ought to be included in any discussion of this volatile subject. She should not have been professionally sidelined in this way. She just should have been assigned an editor.
"...to celebrate violence and then cry out so when you are very lightly struck does not inspire my admiration or respect. She can talk, but I don’t have to listen."
More than that -- listening is giving her words the effect she wants. She is whining and flopping not because she is hurt, but because she is working the refs -- her contribution to revolutionary struggle. The refs should decline to be worked.
This is kind of why I just turn off when faced with most defenses of academic freedom and/or cries for "free speech" on college campuses. (Or closely adjacent, concerns about 'viewpoint diversity'.) There is almost no one who is actually, no-fooling, deeply consistently, a free speech absolutist. Even some of the people who kind of seem it in the sense that they defend all speech acts indiscriminately are still kind of short of the mark in that they tend to accept or not even care that some speech is far more amplified than other speech by access to dissemination, by resources and funding, and so on. Which is one reason that a certain kind of obsession with campus speech can be so weird--the kind of thing where a first-year undergraduate saying something sort of dumb about cultural appropriation and cafeteria food is made out to be a bigger deal than a named chair at Harvard writing some insane screed in the New York Times, etc.
Most of the time, the supposed free-speech absolutists who are madly gripping their pearls any time students protest against an unpopular speaker coming on to campus and who sign open letters in Harper's about the menace of cancel culture, are not in the least bit interested in heterodoxy or unconventional opinion or viewpoint diversity if it's an opinion or viewpoint that they disdain. Shit, most of them can't even be bothered to understand or thoughtfully engage the best arguments for a more restrictive approach to speech on campus, for the concept of harmful speech, etc.--they just go looking for the dumbest, shittiest advocacy they can find and take that as normal.
And yes, some campus leftists shift over hard into free speech absolutism when it's their own ox getting gored. You'd think this would show them the validity of warnings about how careful arguments concerning the range of speech that's appropriate to higher education have become dangerous weapons in the hands of administrative managers, but I'm not seeing very much awareness of that recognition. If it's valid to suggest that certain kinds of extremist thinking violate the basic purpose of academic work--or make some students feel threatened or unsafe--then it's valid in the case under discussion here as otherwise.
The entire discussion (of free speech on campuses, not Palestine) is such a thorough mess of hypocrisy and special pleading in all directions that I don't think it's at all useful any longer to approach any controversy through this lens.
The way I'd put it: no one actually believes in total free speech on campus––and rightly so. The premise of higher ed institutions is that speech is serious and constrained in various ways; that's why, even at public universities, you have to pay big buckets of money to be in the semi-public spaces of higher ed. It's not like the Speakers Corner in London's Hyde Part. The people who run a given institution have an obligation to maximize the liberty to speak but also to make sure speech doesn't seriously undermine the aims of the institution.
If you look up what Amy Wax says and claims––including about law students at Penn––there is no way the law school could require any given student to take a class from her. I don't know much about the Jodi Dean case, but by the same token I can't imagine that administrators at Hobart could tolerate a situation where students had to take a course with Dean, e.g. to fulfill a graduation requirement.
Dean's case is a bit trickier given that her discipline is politics. But academic freedom doesn't include the idea that students can be *compelled* to listen to instructional speech, regardless of the larger values and goals of the institution.
A common element of the free speech debate, and Dean's framing of the Israel-Palestine conflict, as well as almost every attempt to "cancel" someone (or defend someone against cancelation), is each side's attempt to boil things down to binary ("which side are you on?" asks Dean). The reality of course is that things are complex, and we are all engaging in a kind of moral calculus.
How much Israeli oppression and mistreatment justifies an act of mass murder? What number of collateral deaths of innocent Palestinians is an acceptable cost of Israeli retaliation? Is that person's recent post/essay/op-ed so appalling that it outweighs their past contributions to culture and justifies [cancellation]?
We do our calculations, arrive at our answers, and then people somehow become convinced not only that other answers are immoral, but lesser *degrees* of the same answer are as well.
If it's all political enmity and struggle, why should she, being relieved of teaching duties, say "ah well, only to be expected after all, good show"? Isn't she just taking the fight to a fresh venue? Her conduct (both in the initial post and now in the complaint) may well be distasteful, and the complaint may well be in bad faith, but I have a hard time seeing it as self-inconsistent, or the home of ironies.
It’s next to zero but it’s not zero.