From Slavery and Its Pedagogy to Protests with Their Pictures, Paradigms, and Shibboleths
Hillary Clinton questions students’ knowledge of history, Bret Stephens offers an angry thank you to pro-Palestine protesters, and The New York Review of Books takes on slavery in higher ed
In this issue
Just when you think that protest fatigue has won the day—how else do you explain Robert Kennedy and the dead worm in his brain, the almost-nudes at the Met Gala (they weren’t hanging on the walls), and the tabloid maestro himself (our 45th president) in a courtroom reunion with alleged paramour Stormy Daniels all capturing huge headlines? How about this: The New York Times came out on Friday, finding places for twelve protest stories; The New York Review of Books is out with a masterful essay (in the guise of a review) about slavery, how colleges used it, and how now we must tell the story to our students; and Education Next is promising that there’s “hope for higher ed.” Let me know what you think of our own new issue. And welcome our multitalented assistant managing editor Jennifer Wall, who wrote our protest stories. –peter meyer
PURPOSE / Curriculum
Slavery in Higher Education and How to Teach It
Neither the headline in the latest New York Review of Books, “How Bondage Built the Church,” nor the title of the book under review, Rachel L. Swarns’s The 272: The Families Who Were Enslaved and Sold to Build the American Catholic Church do this review by Tiya Miles justice. Miles, a Harvard historian, begins her review by talking about Florida’s new middle school curriculum, approved by the State Board of Education last July. “There was an uproar,” says Miles, because those standards “advised teachers to tell their students that enslaved people had acquired skills that ‘could be applied for their personal benefit, suggesting an upside to dehumanization and forced servitude.” And isn’t this the nub of the question? Miles calls it “rhetorical acrobatics.” With perhaps some parallels with the current campus protests over the war between Hamas and Israel, Miles manages to describe the debate over African-American history curricula involving slaveholders and enslaved people as often reflecting something between wishful thinking and reality. And the point of all this ambiguity is to suggest that Miles’s review is a masterpiece of what an old friend of mine, in a book he wrote in 1974, called “intellectual skywriting.” She acknowledges that “many Americans” recognize “the harms of minimizing slavery—both to the memory of those who lived through it and to our ability to improve race relations today—those who attempt to white-wash it face opposition.” Miles covers the 1619 Project, the 2022 Harvard report on American universities and their “widespread ownership and sale overseas of Black and Indigenous bondspeople,” and various other reports, studies, and books showing how schools “where bondspeople were held on campus, where enslaved laborers maintained the grounds, where institutional programs depended on proceeds from slavery, and where the knowledge and technologies produced relied on enslaved people’s presence and contributions.”
The ostensible point of the book and the review is to trace the Catholic Church’s 17th- and 18th-century slave-trade abominations. Swarns’s book, says Miles, is not just “about a mass sale of enslaved people by Jesuit priests to save Georgetown University [but also] reminds us that the legacy of slavery is simultaneously the legacy of resistance.” A bonus here is Eric Foner’s also-masterful 2022 story in the NYRB, “The Complicity of the Textbooks.”
Sources
How Bondage Built the Church (New York Review of Books)
Intellectual Skywriting (New York Review of Books)
The Complicity of the Textbooks (New York Review of Books)
Further Reading
Yale University apologizes for its role in slavery (Washington Post)
Scientists oppose retractions for racism, sexism and fraud (Times Higher Education)
Embrace Pluralism over Racialism (City Journal)
Harvard University to Offer Segregated Graduation Ceremonies Based on Race, Class, Sexuality (National Review)
Name-Calling and Calling the Police: How N.Y.C. Parent Meetings Got Mean (New York Times)
In a post–affirmative action world, Harvard admits its first class—discounting race (GBH News)
How Colleges Are Fighting Racism Head-On (Chronicle of Higher Education)
GOVERNANCE
Campus Chaos Continues
Many 2024 college graduates were deprived of in-person high school graduations because of the pandemic, and this year’s waves of protest, encampments, and, in some cases, “horrific acts of violence” are shutting out this rite of passage for a large part of this cohort again. Columbia University canceled its main commencement ceremony (but is retaining smaller ceremonies in its 19 colleges). One Politico-bound graduating student bemoans her lost “senior spring [that] was supposed to be a time to relax and recharge” and writes about her “nightmare on 116th Street.” USC canceled the valedictorian speech planned for Asna Tabassum, after pro-Israel groups complained about a pro-Palestinian link she had on her social media bio. The ensuing fallout included self-cancellation of many “Very Important Speakers.” As one USC student put it: “To have the finish line disappear in front of your eyes is disappointing.” Read advice on how colleges can re-draw the lines on campus and how 50 campus leaders responded to the challenge.
---Jennifer Wall
Sources
‘Horrific Acts of Violence’: Demonstrators Spar at UCLA Before Police Move In (Chronicle of Higher Education)
After Weeks of Protests, Columbia Cancels Main Commencement Ceremony (New York Times)
Inside the chaos at Columbia (Politico)
U.S.C. Tries to Manage ‘Train Wreck’ of a Graduation (New York Times)
Campus Protests Aren’t Going Away. Colleges Need to Draw Lines (New York Times)
We Looked at 50 Colleges to See How They Handled Student Encampments. Here’s What We Found. (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Further Reading
A Thank-You Note to the Campus Protesters (New York Times)
The Road Back to Normalcy Starts Where the Problem Began: College Campuses (RealClearEducation)
Cornell University’s President Is Resigning, the Third Ivy-League Leader to Depart (Wall Street Journal)
U.S.C. President Censured by Academic Senate After Weeks of Turmoil (New York Times)
After Negotiations Collapse, Police Sweep Through Columbia U. and Arrest Dozens (Chronicle of Higher Education)
‘These Terms Are Just Absurd’: How One University Disciplined Professors Accused of Assisting an Encampment (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Student Protest Is an Essential Part of Education (New York Times)
A Way Back from Campus Chaos (New York Times)
The House Republican Going After Universities on Antisemitism (New York Times)
What the First Amendment Means for Campus Protests (New York Times)
It’s Not Just Gaza: Student Protesters See Links to a Global Struggle (New York Times)
Why Antiwar Protests Haven’t Flared Up at Black Colleges Like Morehouse (New York Times)
A Rising Democrat Leans Into the Campus Fight Over Antisemitism (New York Times)
British universities have adopted a more permissive attitude to pro-Palestinian encampments. Will it pay off? (New York Times)
A Failure of Leadership at American Universities (New York Times)
PUBLIC TRUST
Words and Images: Protest Rhetoric and Pics
In an essay in The New Yorker, Zadie Smith, notes that words are “weapons of mass destruction.” She observes that when someone asks, “Where do you stand on Israel/Palestine?,” words that get bandied about are like “a series of shibboleths...phrases that can’t...or...must be said…(river to the sea...right to defend, one state, two states, Zionist, colonialist, imperialist, terrorist).” Their usage establishes the speaker’s position and determines whether the speaker is ignored. Thomas L. Friedman also picks up on the shibboleth “from the river to the sea” and opines in The New York Times that the speaker is “essentially calling for the erasure of the state of Israel, not a two-state solution,” and thus is “part of the problem.” The “problem” with some of the protest rhetoric, according to some, is that there is an ignorance of the history of these phrases—a knowledge of history that Hillary Clinton called out in a recent interview on MSNBC. She believes that student protesters “don’t know very much at all about the history of the Middle East, or frankly about history, in many areas of the world, including in our own country.” Those lacking this knowledge should perhaps enroll in Steven David’s course at Johns Hopkins University, “Does Israel Have a Future?” If someone does not have an opportunity to study the subject or read up on it, they can certainly look at photos (worth a thousand words). Time magazine has a campus-protest photo essay showcasing “the power of photography to capture moments of truth” in which they describe the subjects as “young Americans who have known Israel only during its occupation of the West Bank” and are not “old enough to remember...fighting, in the shadow of the Holocaust.” They can also view “Scenes From the Student Protests Churning Across the Country,” in The New York Times.
---Jennifer Wall
Sources
Shibboleth (New Yorker)
Three Reasons the Campus Protests Are Part of the Problem (New York Times)
Hillary Clinton Accuses Protesters of Ignorance of Mideast History (New York Times)
Yes, Students Can Have a Reasoned Debate About Israel-Hamas (Chronicle of Higher Education)
What America’s Student Photojournalists Saw at the Campus Protests (Time)
Scenes From the Student Protests Churning Across the Country (New York Times)
Further Reading
What the First Amendment Means for Campus Protests (New York Times)
House Republicans to Examine K-12 Schools in Latest Antisemitism Hearing (New York Times)
UCLA Defends Dismantling Camp (Los Angeles Times)
The Story Behind TIME’s Campus Protests Cover (Time)
This is not a problem that will go away on its own (New York Times)
EXTERNAL ORDERS
Money Talks and Walks and Opportunities Vanish
“Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest” were the words frequently chanted on campuses this spring during pro-Palestinian protests. They did not fall on deaf ears. In an attempt to staunch these protests, a few colleges are reconsidering their investments in companies with Israeli ties. Brown University will vote this fall on whether its $6.6 billion endowment will divest those holdings; they did this in exchange for the dismantling of the pro-Palestinian encampment on the main lawn. Strings were tied to a grant from the Russell Berrie Foundation to Columbia. The widow of the foundation warned that “future giving would partly hinge on ‘evidence that you and leaders across the university are taking appropriate steps to create a tolerant and secure environment for Jewish members of the Columbia community.’” Judges piled on too. A dozen federal bench judges signed a letter stating “we won’t hire law clerks who matriculate at Columbia.”They believe that “the reputational costs from our boycott ought to provoke some soul-searching at the school.”
---Jennifer Wall
Sources