AI, Free Speech and the Saga of a Bridled Professor: Israel Pedagogy
In its latest report, America’s Censored Campuses 2025: Expanding the Web of Control, PEN America describes the current state of higher education in nothing less than apocalyptic terms. To PEN, 2025 was a “year of catastrophe,” marked by a “full-scale campaign” of state and federal censorship that has “cast a web of control over campuses.” Yet, as I argued in 2024, the alarmism surrounding PEN’s rhetoric of educational gag orders often obscures a more fundamental question: Is the crisis truly one of external censorship, or is it a reactive attempt to restore professional boundaries that the academy has allowed to dissolve? PEN’s earlier report acknowledged that the problem of viewpoint diversity was real, but it was buried far away from its claims of educational gag orders.
Echoing PEN’s concern in its current report, the New York Times featured the plight of Professor Ben Robinson among a bevy of incidents that were characterized as undue scrutiny, Professors Are Being Watched: ‘We’ve Never Seen This Much Surveillance’:
In late 2024, a student anonymously complained, saying that Dr. Robinson — who has been vocal about his pro-Palestinian views — had spoken negatively about Israel, mentioned personal experiences like being arrested at a protest at the Israeli consulate in Chicago and “repeatedly spoke against Indiana University” during his classes.
The university found in favor of the student and reprimanded the professor, citing a recent state law meant to improve “intellectual diversity” and prevent students from being subjected to political views unrelated to the course. . . .
Rick Van Kooten, the dean of Indiana’s liberal arts college, wrote in a letter of reprimand to Dr. Robinson that his concern was not so much the speech related to Gaza or that he brought his personal experience into a lecture. Rather, he explained, he did it repeatedly, which risks “shifting the focus away from the academic content and toward personal political narratives.”
The professor received a written warning, which he said put his employment at risk under another provision of the viewpoint diversity law, which weakens tenure and mandates periodic reviews of faculty members by trustees.
Dr. Robinson, who is Jewish, acknowledged that he referred to Israel’s conduct as a genocide in class but he insisted that he never asked students to agree with him. He said he brought up his personal experiences of activism during a discussion of Kant and the philosopher’s distinction between private and public stances.
“If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience,” he said, “if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.”
The issue can be stated as: Are we looking at government overreach or a needed corrective to pedagogical wokeism? Are we talking about education or propaganda? A close look at this issue, especially when it comes to describing Israel as a genocidal state or settler-colonial country, would contribute to disentangling the value of free speech from competing interests to promote ideological speech.
Perhaps there are legitimate lines to be drawn (government legislation) or perhaps faculty are at liberty to say whatever they wish even when they are employed in institutions funded by taxpayers.
Let’s take a closer look.
PEN’s 2026 report leans heavily into the narrative of government overreach, characterizing legislative efforts to promote viewpoint diversity as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.” The report, like the predecessor report, contains a buried, admission. In the second section of the report, the authors concede that the “seeds of these conflicts were sown years ago” by real “obstacles to dialogue” and the “feelings of isolation and silencing shared among conservative professors and students.” This buried admission suggests that the “web of control” PEN fears is not a spontaneous act of political malice, but a consequence of the university’s own failure to uphold the “quest for viewpoint neutrality.”
Admission: My bias leans into this quest for viewpoint neutrality as central to the liberal arts mission.
Here, we encounter the flashpoint issue surrounding the institutional discipline Indiana University Professor Benjamin Robinson and what appears to be his personal activism. As earlier noted, Robinson was reprimanded for characterizing the Gaza conflict as “genocide” within his German Studies classroom. Robinson framed his defense as a struggle for the very soul of pedagogy: If he cannot appeal to his “private feeling of conscience” regarding contemporary politics, he “can’t possibly teach Kant.”
Alternatively, Robinson’s defense can be understood as a sophisticated, but ultimately misleading, application of philosophical necessity to political advocacy. By invoking Immanuel Kant to justify the injection of personal activism into the classroom, Robinson attempts to cloak what I would call pedagogical imperialism living under the mantle of academic freedom. In doing so, he appears to have committed a Kantian inversion.
It is more likely that Kant’s seminal distinction between the public and private uses of reason requires that the professor’s duty within the private sphere of the state-supported institution is one of professional restraint, not─as Robinson contends─personal testimony. By displacing pedagogical discipline with personal conviction, Robinson does not save Kant for his students; rather, he demonstrates exactly why the external oversight PEN America so fears has become a necessary, if blunt, instrument for preserving the conditions of genuine inquiry.
Now, the reader should be asking, how did this Op-ed writer come to his conclusion? That’s something I generally ask when reading opinion pieces. I think it is worth sharing since I will took the novel, but increasingly convenient path of invoking the “thinking” (or statistical pattern matching) of AI. My turning to AI is not one of seeking an authority for what is likely confirmation bias, but of employing this intellectual tool as a collaborator. My time with Kant is in the distant past when I majored in philosophy as an undergraduate. My time as an instructor struggling with similar concerns, however, is central for understanding Robinson’s academic free speech justification. That grounding was central to my earlier essay when these legislative efforts first appeared.
But Kant? Using Kant to justify criticizing Israel as a genocidal state? Being Jewish as a point of privilege for such instruction? These concerns posed issues that I had not (Kant) or not sufficiently (drawing on personal identity) explored in relation to academic free speech. This is where AI (Gemini and Claude) became a useful collaborator as interlocutor as well as framing these entangled arguments. One can easily dismiss this instance of using AI, but given its dramatically expansive use in university education (overt or not), it becomes important to define where naïve reliance on AI and where informed collaboration begins and ends.
Let us consider Robinson’s argument from this collaborative exercise with AI. The AI essay was lightly edited.
The Kantian Classroom: When Personal Conviction Displaces Pedagogical Discipline
In February 2026, Benjamin Robinson, a professor of German Studies at Indiana University, received a formal reprimand for using his classroom to characterize the Gaza conflict as “genocide.” His defense, recounted in The New York Times, rested on a pedagogical claim: “If I can’t appeal to people’s intuitions, what it’s like to publicly use reason versus to have a private feeling of conscience… if I can’t evoke what that feels like, I can’t possibly teach Kant.”
Robinson’s argument deserves serious engagement. The question of how best to teach abstract philosophy ─ whether through purely conceptual analysis or through concrete, experiential examples ─ is a legitimate pedagogical debate. However, a careful examination suggests that Robinson’s specific approach raises troubling questions about the boundaries between teaching and advocacy, the role of professorial identity in validating contested political claims, and the very nature of academic freedom in an age of institutional dysfunction.
The Pedagogical Necessity Claim
Robinson asserts that without evoking his “private feeling of conscience” regarding Gaza, Kant’s philosophy remains inaccessible to students. This claim warrants skepticism. For over two centuries, Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and What is Enlightenment? presumably have been taught effectively through rigorous, non-personal methods ─ through thought experiments, historical examples, and careful textual analysis.
Notably, the strength of Kant’s categorical imperative lies precisely in its universality: the command to act only according to maxims that can be willed as universal law is designed to transcend individual particularity. Of course, experiential pedagogy can illuminate abstract concepts, but the suggestion that this specific political example ─ and this professor’s personal activism ─ constitutes the only effective path to understanding Kant deserves scrutiny.
This is not to argue that philosophy should never engage with contemporary issues. Rather, the question is whether Robinson is primarily teaching Kant or using Kant as a framework to advance a particular political position. The distinction matters because it determines whether students are learning to think critically about moral philosophy or being socialized into a specific ideological stance.
The Problem of Contested Characterizations
The characterization of Israel’s conduct as “genocide” is not a settled matter of fact but a subject of intense legal, historical, and moral debate. Genocide, under international law, requires specific intent to destroy a group as such. As John Spencer, professor of urban warfare at West Point, has noted from his on-the-ground observations in Gaza, the IDF’s operational practices ─ including warnings to civilians, proportional targeting, and humanitarian corridors ─ do not align with genocidal intent, whatever one’s views on the broader conflict.
Historian Niall Ferguson has argued that the application of “genocide” to Israel represents what he calls a “luxury belief” ─ ”divorced from the strategic and historical realities of the conflict. In an August 2025 essay, Ferguson wrote that accusations of Israeli genocide are “elicited in response to misleading photographs on front pages and fake fatality statistics, and utterly divorced from strategic reality.” Ferguson contrasts this with the explicit genocidal charter of Hamas and notes the irony of applying the term to a democratic state defending itself against an organization openly committed to its destruction.
The point is not that criticism of Israeli military conduct is illegitimate ─ reasonable people disagree about proportionality, civilian casualties, and military strategy. The point is that by framing “genocide” as an established fact rather than a contested claim, Robinson forecloses rather than enables critical thinking.
Identity as Epistemic Authority
Robinson’s Jewish identity plays a complex role in his pedagogical approach. By invoking his heritage while characterizing Israeli actions as genocidal, he appears to immunize his position from the charge of bias or historical ignorance. After all, how can a Jewish professor be accused of antisemitism or historical insensitivity?
Yet this rhetorical move is precisely what makes the case pedagogically troubling. In a classroom, identity can serve as a shield against scrutiny rather than an invitation to rigorous debate. Douglas Murray, in interviews and his recent work on Western responses to the Israel-Gaza conflict, has noted how Western students project their own guilt about historical crimes such as ”colonialism, racism” and “white supremacy” onto Israel. As Murray observes, “Young people from Britain to Australia, Canada and America . . . accuse the Israelis of things like colonialism, genocide and white supremacy . . . all of which are offences that these young people in particular have been told that they themselves are guilty of.”
In this classroom context. a professor’s biographical credentials can serve to validate a political position, displacing the emphasis from the aspirational marketplace of ideas. The question may be how to incorporate identity to open doors rather than to shield one from critique.
The Kantian Inversion
Robinson frames his activism as a teaching tool, arguing that he cannot make Kant’s abstract ideas real for students without talking about his own arrest. But this logic flips Kant on his head. In the classroom, a professor isn’t just an individual; they are an employee of the state. Kant calls this the “private” use of reason because you are acting as a piece of a larger machine. Your job is to deliver the curriculum neutrally, representing the institution’s goals rather than your own. By injecting his personal political drama into the lecture, Robinson isn’t just being a vibrant teacher; he’s essentially hijacking his government role to serve his personal views.
The real friction here is that Robinson is using the wrong tool for the job. Kant believed that as a scholar—a person writing to the world—you should have total freedom to say whatever you want. That’s the “public” use of reason. But the classroom is a workplace, not a public square. When Robinson insists that he can’t teach without his personal testimony, he’s collapsing the wall between his job and his persona. The students aren’t getting a deep dive into Enlightenment philosophy; they’re getting a front-row seat to the professor’s political identity. It replaces the hard work of critical thinking with the easy path of emotional storytelling.
This focus on the professor’s conscience also ignores the responsibility he has to his students. Teaching requires a certain level of professional restraint—a duty of care. If the focus is always on the professor’s self-righteousness, the students become an audience for a performance rather than participants in an inquiry. It can be alienating or even harmful for a student who just wants to learn the material without being drafted into their teacher’s moral crusade. If the state’s rules on neutrality really are a bridge too far for Robinson, Kant’s answer is blunt: quit. You can’t take the state’s paycheck while ignoring its rules; you either follow the script or you walk away.
Teaching Kant does not require revealing one’s soul; it requires challenging students’ minds. It requires careful attention to texts, engagement with diverse interpretive traditions, and the disciplined maintenance of a space where students can develop their own philosophical convictions.
This does not mean excluding all contemporary examples or personal experiences from the classroom. It means maintaining appropriate boundaries between pedagogical illustration and political advocacy, between inviting students to grapple with difficult questions and socializing them into predetermined answers.
Conclusion
Robinson’s appeal to pedagogical necessity deserves to be taken seriously as a claim about how philosophy is best taught. But when examined carefully, it reveals itself as something else: a claim that the professor’s political convictions and activist experiences are essential to student understanding of canonical texts.
This represents not authentic pedagogy but what might be called pedagogical imperialism─the colonization of intellectual content by personal politics. Students come to learn Kant; they encounter instead their professor’s position on Gaza, validated by his identity and insulated from rigorous critique by the intimacy of personal testimony.
The public use of reason that Kant championed is indeed fragile. It survives only when those entrusted with institutional roles, including professors, have the humility to distinguish between their scholarly obligations and their personal convictions, between teaching students to think and teaching them what to think.
Robinson’s case illustrates why institutional oversight, whether through academic self-governance or external accountability mechanisms, has become necessary: not to suppress unpopular ideas but to preserve the conditions under which genuine inquiry remains possible.
Postscript: The Coming AI Audit
The debate over Professor Robinson’s classroom tactics usually ends in a “he said, she said” about pedagogical intent. But as AI moves from a simple chatbot to an active AI agent─particularly with the emergence of Clawdbots and OpenClaw, this debate is about to get empirical. We are entering an era where AI doesn’t just answer questions; it audits them. Frontier models will soon achieve greater agency with the ability to proactively browse, script, and audit. They will offer a new form of aligned research that could bypass the rhetorical fog of both the academy and its critics.
Imagine a Syllabus Forensic Audit where an AI agent scans thousands of curricula across the country. It wouldn’t look for wrong opinions, but for statistical outliers. These are the moments where a professor’s personal activism pushes so far outside the norm that it ceases to be a lesson on Kant and becomes a personal platform.
Beyond auditing, these tools can act as a Synthetic Socratic Dialogue. Instead of relying on a professor’s subjective intuition of what Kant felt, we could pit a digital avatar of Kant against modern activist claims. This simulation wouldn’t be used to silence anyone, but to map out exactly where a logical argument breaks down. It offers a baseline of objective inquiry that strips away the rhetorical fog often used to shield advocacy in the classroom. The goal isn’t to create a surveillance state in academia, but to use these agents to help distinguish between a genuine scholar’s public critique and an official’s private duty.
