David Blankenhorn was once a formidable opponent of legal marriage equality. As a writer, activist, and government official, Blankenhorn, now 70, has spent much of his life devoted to strengthening traditional marriage, a commitment that inspired him to found the now-defunct Institute for American Values in 1987. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush appointed Blankenhorn to serve on the National Commission on America’s Urban Families. Two decades later, when the movement for same-sex marriage gained steam, Blakenhorn sided with conservatives. Perhaps his most important contribution to the cause was The Future of Marriage, which laid out a case for traditional American marriage between one man and one woman. 

Then, Blankenhorn did the rarest of things: he changed his mind. Though he remained committed to strengthening marriage, Blakenhorn abandoned his campaign against same-sex marriage, believing it caused more harm than good. “Instead of fighting gay marriage,” Blankenhorn wrote in The New York Times, “I’d like to help build new coalitions bringing together gays who want to strengthen marriage with straight people who want to do the same.”

Among the reasons Blankenhorn did so was that the movement against same-sex marriage depended on the mobilization of anti-gay prejudices. As he lamented in the Times, back in 2012, “much of the opposition to gay marriage seems to stem, at least in part, from an underlying anti-gay animus,” a fact he found “morally disturbing.” 

Blakenhorn saw no tension between opposing same-sex marriage and respect for gay Americans. In practice, though, he could no longer deny that the two positions were not always fused in the hearts and minds of Americans. 

Since October 7, 2023, many pro-Palestinian activists have insisted that anti-Zionism is a principled stand for an immiserated people, untainted by antisemitism. Surely it is in many cases. But like Blakenhorn, anti-Zionists should see that darker sentiments also fuel their cause.

Consider the facts. In the wake of October 7, anti-Zionist rage was coterminous with a wave of anti-Jewish attacks. Data from the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) tells the story. In the five years that preceded 2023, the ADL reported an average of 2,485 antisemitic incidents per year. Then the dam broke. In 2023, there were 8,873 antisemitic acts, a new record. The following year, there were 9,354 incidents, another new record. FBI hate crime data shows the same pattern. In the previous five years before 2023, the U.S. averaged 882 hate crimes against Jews. Then hate crimes against Jews surged to 1,989 cases in 2023 and to 1,938 incidents the following year. Both were historic highs.

Since October 7, some of the most extreme antisemitic violence has been committed in the name of Palestine. After Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were shot dead in Washington, D.C., just outside the Capitol Jewish Museum, their assailant said, he “did it for Palestine.” When a man threw a Molotov cocktail into a synagogue in Boulder, Colorado, killing one elderly woman, he yelled, “Free Palestine.” Earlier this year, when an arsonist set fire to Governor Josh Shapiro’s home while his family was sleeping after celebrating the Jewish Sabbath, he suggested that he did it for the Palestinian people. The assailant who stabbed a man just outside a Chabad in Crown Heights, Brookyln declared, “Free Palestine.” And a 69-year-old participant at a November 2023 pro-Israel rally in Thousand Oaks, California, was bludgeoned by a pro-Palestinian activist; he later died of a brain hemorrhage. 

If anything, the bloodletting in the name of anti-Zionism has been worse abroad. As the mass murder of Jews celebrating Chanukkah on Australia’s Bondi Beach underscored, the post-October 7th wave of antisemitism hasn’t yet crested. For some, this is what it means to globalize the intifada.

None of this means that today’s pro-Palestinian activists should abandon their cause altogether. Palestinians need good advocates. Their suffering is deep and widespread. And if the Jewish experience has shown anything, it is the importance of having their own state. 

But like Blakenhorn in his day, pro-Palestinian activists should be profoundly disturbed and self-reflective about the violence and harassment against Jews that has attended the growing popularity of their movement. Indeed, they have more reason to be troubled than Blakenhorn in his day. When Blakenhorn changed his mind about same-sex marriage, there had been no spike in anti-gay incidents. Hate crimes against gays and lesbians had, in fact, been decreasing.

This blood-soaked moment should prompt Israel’s critics to seek a serious course correction, one that advances the welfare of Jews and the immiserated Palestinians. They might shift their advocacy away from decrying the legitimacy of the world’s only Jewish state toward the constructive advocacy of a Palestinian one. That advocacy could recognize Israel’s right to exist, allow the Palestinians to have a separate state, and take the security concerns of the Jewish state seriously. And while this abandonment of a one-state solution would certainly alienate Israel’s most antisemitic critics who believe the last 75 years of Jewish statehood can be erased, it would also better reflect the sentiments of Palestinians in the region, rather than their Keffiyeh-wearing champions on American campuses and in the streets of Dublin and Paris. On the ground, in Ramallah and Gaza City, a plurality still seems to prefer two states.  

Blankenhorn understood that opposition to same-sex marriage emboldened anti-gay bigotry and distracted from his main cause—strengthening marriage. Thus far, pro-Palestinian activists have largely evaded this moral dilemma by denying a link between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. They have been willfully blind to violence against Jews done in the name of anti-Zionism. 

There is nothing unusual in the claims of innocence from the anti-Israeli activists. Barry Goldwater, the conservative leader, U.S. Senator from Arizona, and Republican presidential candidate in 1964, was a principled defender of state sovereignty and was not personally a racist. Goldwater even led the charge to desegregate the Senate cafeteria, ensuring his Black legislative aide would be served alongside everyone else. But Goldwater, who opposed the landmark civil rights legislation of the 1960s, nonetheless failed or perhaps refused to see that a crusade for more “states’ rights” was fueled, less by high-brow notions of freedom, than by racist sentiments in the American public.     

Israel’s most vocal critics should recognize that antisemitism and anti-Zionism often march together, however divisible they might seem in humanities seminars. That means that morally responsible activism on behalf of Palestinians should confront this reality squarely and honestly. They should follow Blankenhorn’s lead, not Goldwater’s.

The post A New Path for a Free Palestine appeared first on Washington Monthly.

If there is one commonality in our national war over the university, it is an obsession with the feelings of undergraduates. While advocates for free speech insist that a campus climate of fear makes students too anxious to express themselves, advocates for minority students (a shifting coalition that now includes opponents of anti-Semitism) say that without more robust restrictions on speech, some students will suffer psychological distress.

All parties, though, are asking a version of the same question: Do students feel safe? From racists? From woke moralists? From anti-Semites? 

As someone aligned with the free speech camp, I’m concerned that my “team” has too readily followed the lead of DEI advocates in their preoccupation with the feelings of undergraduates, a tendency that has only increased since the events of October 7. We should shift our gaze away from what students are feeling to what their professors are actually doing inside the classroom. Once we know more about the true quality of college teaching, we can construct rankings for students and parents who genuinely care about liberal education.

The partisans of psychological equipoise have engineered countless surveys to gauge the emotional state of our students. Campus climate surveys are the rage. 

Some are created—usually by those with DEI sympathies—to assess the anxieties of minority students. Since 2018, for example, the HEDS (Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium) Campus Climate Survey has been administered to some 320,000 faculty, students, and staff at more than 400 colleges and universities. It is frequently used to assess the efficacy of diversity and inclusion efforts. While universities tend not to release the full results of these surveys to the general public, they generally find that most of their students feel welcome on campus, though those from minority backgrounds are often less positive in their assessments. At my home institution, Claremont McKenna, my sense is that these surveys have tempered the claims of campus advocates who say the campus climate is terrible, even as they show meaningful differences between groups. 

Partly because these DEI-oriented university administrators have been reluctant to fold concerns about self-censorship into their inquiries, free speech advocates have eagerly built their own campus climate surveys. The king of them all is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) annual College Free Speech Rankings, an important effort to measure students’ comfort expressing ideas on campus. Last year FIRE surveyed more than 58,000 students at 254 universities and colleges. 

The students are asked a battery of questions. Some query students’ views on free speech and how often they self-censor, but many are primarily interested in their emotions. For example, FIRE asks: “How comfortable would you feel doing the following on your campus?” Then students are given a series of five follow-up questions, such as whether they would feel comfortable “disagreeing with a professor” or “expressing your views on a controversial political topic during an in-class discussion.” Students are also asked how often they feel anxious, stressed, depressed, or lonely. 

From such questions and other metrics, FIRE then gives every university and college a “free speech score.” Some institutions, like the University of Chicago, perform relatively well; others, like Harvard and Columbia, perform terribly. In 2024, these venerable places received a 0 on a scale of 100.

No doubt speech climates are too chilly in many universities and colleges, and FIRE should be commended for documenting this problem and making it too difficult to deny. But even so, FIRE’s annual rankings rest too easily on a questionable premise: that the best college is one where all students say they are never uncomfortable expressing themselves. To achieve a truly outstanding FIRE score, campuses need to become almost entirely free of social anxiety.

But this is unreasonable. Emotional discomfort, after all, is normal and inevitable, especially in a fragmented nation. And while it is sometimes a sign that there is something wrong with the campus speech climate, it can also be a sign that professors are taking risks by teaching difficult subjects and raising ideas that cause some intellectual friction and provoke discomfort. 

Perhaps that’s why universities that focus on technical subjects like engineering and science often score well on FIRE surveys. After all, fields like fluid mechanics don’t typically generate ideological debates or multiple interpretive frameworks. Two of the best universities for free speech, according to FIRE, are Michigan Technological University and the Georgia Institute of Technology, ranked second and fifth, respectively. But you shouldn’t go to either place if you’re looking for much political or philosophical discussion.

Similarly, sectarian universities and colleges often provide instruction within a relatively unified worldview and attract students already aligned with that perspective, a fact that may mute their students’ social anxiety around speech. Liberty University, a fundamentalist institution and one of the few Christian ones that still teach young Earth creationism, received a raw free speech score that was considerably higher than Harvard’s. But who thinks Liberty is better than Harvard at providing a liberal education? (This may be why FIRE didn’t rank these sectarian institutions alongside the other universities and colleges. Instead, they were quarantined in a separate listing.) 

As these examples suggest, there is a serious problem with rankings that place so much emphasis on students’ feelings: They tell us almost nothing about the extent to which different viewpoints on contentious issues are taught and discussed in college classrooms. And they don’t tell us how professors are responding to anxious students.

We shouldn’t infer that many issues don’t get discussed in a serious way merely because students express discomfort at speaking up in their classrooms. Anyone who has taught contentious issues these days, as I have, knows that great discussions can take place even when some students are deeply uncomfortable. Indeed, discomfort, as I’ve emphasized, is as much a symptom of a good education as it is an impediment to one. What matters is the extent to which classroom conversations are so crippled by that discomfort that they can’t explore topics deeply and honestly. Classrooms can be educational and marked by anxiety and self-censorship at times. And they can be closed in a relaxed, comfortable climate.

That doesn’t mean that the pervasive anxiety around some topics doesn’t matter; of course it does. And it makes our work more difficult. But just as ships can traverse rough waters, so too can liberal education succeed in a sea of anxiety.

A deeper problem than the campus climate, I suspect, is the curriculum itself, particularly in humanistic fields outside of economics and political science. I fear that the courses in many such disciplines are closing, particularly around the topics that most divide us.

That’s why, in collaboration with some colleagues at the Claremont Colleges, I tapped a database with millions of college syllabi to assess the extent to which issues like racial inequality, the ethics of abortion, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are taught in ways that expose students to broad scholarly disagreements over those issues. 

Our findings are concerning. For example, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness is often assigned to college undergraduates—as it should be, given its scholarly and political influence. However, her most prominent and serious academic critics—none of whom, I might add, consider themselves to be conservatives—are rarely assigned alongside it. These include James Forman Jr., author of Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America, which won the Pulitzer Prize, and my colleague Michael Fortner’s Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, published by Harvard University Press and selected as an “Editors’ Choice” by The New York Times. Our results show that, since their publication, Forman’s and Fortner’s groundbreaking books have been assigned roughly 3.5 percent and 1.5 percent of the time, respectively, alongside The New Jim Crow. What is missing, it seems, is a whole spectrum of non-radical perspectives. And that, we suspect, encourages an essentially Manichaean mind-set in students, one that oversimplifies the problems they will one day inherit. 

I was sensitized to this problem when I taught a course on race and inequality in 2018. To my surprise, none of my students at the Claremont Colleges—many of whom had taken multiple courses on race—had been exposed to Black authors more conservative than Angela Davis and Ta-Nehisi Coates, both of whom were familiar to them. That meant that they had never heard of the greatest Black social scientists of the twentieth century, including William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson, among others. Wilson, for example, was president of the American Sociological Association and a National Medal of Science laureate. Patterson holds a chaired professorship in sociology at Harvard and won the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award of the American Sociological Association. These are towering figures in academia. Certainly, Coates is a gifted writer and Davis is by some lights an interesting polemicist. But great social scientists, like Wilson and Patterson, will do far more to help students think in serious ways about inequality. 

The same problem can be found in the teaching of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Among the most popular authors is Rashid Khalidi, the recently retired Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia. Writing as a Palestinian American, Khalidi is a scholar-activist who insists that Jewish claims to Israel rest on an “epic myth.” While students should read Khalidi, his work is rarely paired with voices that are sympathetic to Israel and complicate the story he tells. Instead, his writing is commonly assigned alongside authors who reinforce and amplify his criticisms of Israel, including fellow travelers James Gelvin, Illan Pappe, and Charles Smith.

Of course, there is almost certainly wide curricular variation across institutions. But absent any systematic account of which places really expose students to varied perspectives on the most pressing social and political challenges, it’s hard to know how particular colleges and universities stack up.

This is all to say that we need better college rankings, ones that don’t lean so heavily on campus climate surveys. We need rankings that care less about the feelings of individual students and far more about the extent to which classrooms discuss and consider varied scholarly perspectives on contentious issues, like race, gender, social policy, Israel, and inequality. This seems especially true if we care about how colleges—as institutions—are responding to a generation that is plagued by social anxiety and how well they are preparing their students for citizenship in a fractured nation. 

In other words: We should care more about what professors are doing, and less about what students are feeling. So here are some questions FIRE should be asking students: How often do your professors in the social sciences and humanities assign authors who represent a diverse range of perspectives on contentious political topics like race, gender, inequality, and the like? Do your professors include a range of perspectives on their syllabi? How often do your professors play devil’s advocate when their students refuse to do so? Such questions can be assessed, at least indirectly, by asking students to share their classroom experiences rather than their own emotions. 

While the psychological comfort of our students certainly matters, it’s not the most important indicator of a good liberal education—and, indeed, sometimes psychological discomfort, even, at times, to the point of self-censorship, is its price.

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