Faculty on Fifth Avenue

“Who are we?
Faculty!
What do we like?
Complexity!”

This was my suggestion for our chant, as I stood with an assortment of professors from around the country, proudly carrying a banner advertising our organization, Faculty Against Antisemitism Movement, at the annual Israel Day parade in New York City on May 18. All of us are more at home behind a keyboard, or at the front of a seminar class, than we were walking up Fifth Avenue, chanting slogans that were less ironic than the one I proposed.

The groups who formed the parade were carefully vetted and arranged by the city; we were behind the American Jewish Medical Association, and ahead of what appeared to be a Jewish high school. There were children handing out Israeli and American flags. NYPD was everywhere.

We do love complexity. I teach Shakespeare; my friends in the group teach everything from theoretical physics to Sephardic literature. We have dedicated our lives to sharing ideas with students, and coaxing them into creativity and learning. We were the children who were always full of questions, and we never stopped asking them. Complexity is where truth lives.

There is something both offensive and deeply absurd about what many universities have turned into. Some anti-Israel faculty denounce Zionists and shun them from classes, as if the belief in the existence of Israel can be severed from the idea of being Jewish. They block any discussion about the Middle East. They claim their reason for such a blockade is that discussion with a Zionist only normalizes Israel, but the reality is that many of them ban those conversations because they do not know the history of the region, and do not want to promote the kind of details that are necessary to understand the present or the past. At every level of power in the university, words and actions are marshaled into layers of bullying and silencing. A victory is declared when one voice wins, and another is shut down.

We often talk about the stakeholders in a university. We typically mean students, parents, faculty, staff, alumni. But the truth is that all of us are stakeholders in the university. All of us are affected by what happens at Harvard, at Rutgers and at Berkeley.

Universities should stand strongly against antisemitism, but they should also stand strongly for the hard work of civil dialogue. At a time when many people in our society have given up on conversation and resorted to doom-scrolling and screaming, many elite universities have been adding gasoline to the fires of ignorance, and encouraging rage in the place of learning.

We can do better than that. Not just for our Jewish students, but also for the rest of our students, and indeed for the society that surrounds us. My suggestion for a chant was received by my friends with both laughter and recognition. Fifth Avenue is not a good place for subtlety, and the high schoolers blaring Israeli techno music and dancing were entirely correct in their demonstration of pride. They were joyous, as they should be.

But we also need universities to lead us toward tolerance, not away from it. We don’t just love complexity: we need it.