The resolution of the case of Kristofer Petersen-Overton at Brooklyn College has provided an all-too-rare moment of celebration for defenders of academic freedom. While administration officials have been guarded in describing the reasons for Petersen-Overton’s dismissal or his reinstatement, it seems impossible to believe that the former was not linked to state assemblyman Dov Hikind’s letter of complaint to CUNY chancellor Matthew Goldstein, and that the latter was unconnected to the strong support provided to Peterser-Overton by Brooklyn College faculty, the Association of American University Professors, and other academic freedom advocates.
I wonder, as we celebrate this outcome, whether this might not be an opportune moment to open up a particular aspect of the attacks on academic freedom when it comes to teaching issues related to the Middle East, and especially to Israel-Palestine, what we might call the “save the children” line of attack. According to this line of argument, impressionable young students must be protected from “indoctrination” that would be otherwise carried out by faculty with “slanted” views.
Such thinking can be found very explicitly in Assemblyman Hikind’s initial letter to CUNY, in his declaration that: “The responsibility of a true academic is to remain objective in imparting information and to allow students to draw their own conclusions. Instead, Mr. Petersen-Overton’s required and recommended reading selections intentionally stifle the passionate discourse of students who would challenge his political ideologies.” It can be found even more clearly in Hikind’s response to the reinstatement of Petersen-Overton: “Granting Mr. Petersen-Overton access to thousands of impressionable young minds, especially at the taxpayers’ expense, is nothing short of shameful and embarrassing.”
There are a number of ways to dispute such allegations. One is to look at the source of the statements, which, in this case, come from a politician whose own views, including his stated support for the principles of the Jewish Defense League, could be viewed as extreme, to say the least. As in so many cases, Hikind’s attack, which begins in the name of objectivity and rational, balanced discussion, becomes inevitably hyperbolic and unbalanced as it proceeds: he ends his initial letter with the “rational” suggestion that “Mr. Petersen-Overton would be better suited for a teaching position at the Islamic University of Gaza.”
Another approach would be to defend the content of the course being attacked, which would not be difficult to do in this case: Petersen-Overton’s syllabus (posted on his website), meets every standard of academic rigor, and of the two required books for the class, one is largely a collection of primary documents related to the history of the conflict in Israel-Palestine, while the other is a monograph on political Islam that has been praised by Foreign Affairs, hardly a hotbed of radicalism.
But I think the best approach is to question the very premise of the “save the children” attack: that is, the proposition that the “impressionable young minds” of students need to be “protected.” As a teacher, I find such suggestions to be patronizing to the point of insult. In the narrow sense, as Bruce Robbins reminds us (pdf), academic freedom applies only to faculty, and, indeed, “Students seem a bit stunned when informed that they do not actually enjoy academic freedom.” This is a crucial point: academic freedom, which is a recent achievement that has required a constant struggle to defend, is meant to protect specifically the propagation of controversial ideas, not to ensure a “balanced” or “objective” approach. But in the larger sense, in fighting for our academic freedom as teachers and scholars, we are in fact protecting the full intellectual rights of our students from those politicians, administrators, and other public figures who would deny them these rights in the name of protecting their “impressionable young minds.” In my experience — and I am certain I am not alone in this — students have proven to be more prepared to approach, discuss, and dispute controversial issues than many of their “adult” counterparts.
One example from my own teaching may apply here. A few years ago, I taught Mourid Barghouti’s book I Saw Ramallah as the central text of a Freshman English class, alongside a series of shorter essays and Jamaica Kincaid’s book-length essay A Small Place. This was not a history or sociology or political science class, let alone a class in Middle East politics, so we approached Barghouti’s book as what it is: a memoir by a Palestinian poet about his return to his native land after thirty years of enforced exile. Barghouti, who was born in a village near Ramallah, was studying in Cairo in 1967, and after the Six Day War, was not allowed to return; it was only in 1997, after the Oslo Accords, that he finally received permission to enter the West Bank. While I gave students some basic context (like a glossary of unfamiliar names and references from the book), my goal was to let them respond to the book as a personal narrative, rather than as representing a “side” in a conflict.
Students’ responses to the book varied: some responded strongly to Barghouti’s story, many linked it to their own experiences, some simply found it to be boring or not relevant to their lives. But most noteworthy, in the context of academic freedom, were the responses of three students, who each approached individually me before we began reading the book. Each one identified strongly with Israel: they had all spent significant amounts of time there and had family and friends living there. Each of these three students, in his or her own way, expressed a sense of discomfort at having to read Barghouti’s book.
I should take pains to note that this was neither the first nor the last time that students have approached me with such concerns, and they have generally not involved Palestine or Middle East politics. When I taught Sapphire’s book Push and the film Precious that was inspired by it, a student who was a survivor of sexual violence told me that she didn’t feel comfortable reading or writing about the book and film. When I taught Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, a student who was an adherent of Jehova’s Witnesses objected so strongly to the book’s representation of this group that she told me she was unable to finish reading the novel. When I taught Jonathan Kozol’s Shame of the Nation, an African-American student told me that he was deeply wounded by reading about the huge racial inequalities in U.S. public schools, and questioned me closely about why I would want to provoke such feelings in my students.
In each case, my answer was the same: to start with, try reading the book and engaging with it. “Engaging” doesn’t mean agreeing; it might mean precisely the opposite, fighting with the author, crafting a response that would dispute what was being said, or finding a way to use your own experience to create a counter-narrative. If it turned out that reading or writing about the book really meant crossing an ethical line, then I agreed to respect this and come up with some sort of alternative assignment — but, as it happens, this has never turned out to be necessary, as students have managed, often quite resourcefully, to find ways to enter into an agonistic (sometimes antagonistic) relationships with the book in question.
In the case of Barghouti’s book, not surprisingly, the responses of my three students varied. One told me that he was glad to have read the book, but considered it to be ultimately a piece of propaganda; he wrote a very perceptive final paper that took issue with some of Barghouti’s rhetorical strategies. Another told me that she really hadn’t liked the book at all, but had been urged by her mother to finish reading it, since it was important to read accounts from “the other side.” The third student sent me an email after the class had ended, thanking me for introducing her to Kincaid’s and Barghouti’s books; she told me that taken together, they had really changed her outlook about a lot of things (especially when it came to traveling as a tourist), and she planned to read them both again and keep thinking about them.
There’s no sense in my claiming “objectivity” when it comes to these three reactions: it was the third one that made me happiest. But each one was a victory in its own way. In each case, the student had found a way to engage with a book that offered a fundamental challenge to the way s/he saw some aspect of the world, and was able to create a context for understanding and engaging with this new point of view. This is, I think, the very definition of an ethical response, and, false modesty aside, I as a teacher ultimately had relatively little to do with the development of each of these individual ethical responses, aside from providing the opportunity and context.
Unfortunately, Barghouti’s book received a very different response from some of my colleagues when, the following semester, I nominated it as a “common reading” text for my campus. Several colleagues (especially those who had read the book) responded strongly to Barghouti’s narrative. However, at a certain point in the discussion, Barghouti’s membership in the PLO came up. Despite the fact that Barghouti had never played a major political role in the PLO, and certainly had no relationship whatsoever to the military wing of this or any other group — he had served as a cultural attaché for the PLO for several years, and indeed, part of the book is a meditation on why he had not been drawn towards more explicit political actions, as many of his friends and colleagues had — I was informed by several colleagues that the PLO had once engaged in attacks on Israel, and indeed had once called for the destruction of Israel. Therefore, to teach this book was to promote the destruction of Israel. In a truly surreal moment, one colleague held up Barghouti’s book and declared that if we could ask our students to read a book like this, “Why not a book by Osama bin Laden? Why not Mein Kampf?”
Needless to say, I Saw Ramallah was not adopted as our common reading text. But the response of some of my colleagues, which was so different from the response of my students, taught me a great deal. It also returns us to the “save the children” impulse with which I began. The real fear, it seems to me, was having students encounter an unfamiliar viewpoint that might cause them to question certain taken-for-granted aspects of what they have come to understand as the ways things are — in this case, the way things are in that tiny corner of the world called Israel-Palestine.
Again, this attitude can be found quite clearly in Hikind’s attacks upon Petersen-Overton. What seems to most exercise Hikind is Petersen-Overton’s writing on suicide bombings, and specifically, the suggestion that the actions of suicide bombers can be potentially intellectually engaged with and understood: “what he actually said is that he doesn’t condone suicide bombers but he understands them. That’s something I find totally shocking and unacceptable. You can never accept the murder of women and children for any reason.” It is not enough to simply condemn suicide attacks that kill civilians; from Hikind’s position, attempting to understand such actions amounts to “accepting” them, which means supporting them. Such actions, from this point of view, need to be kept outside the realm of discussion, debate, or study.
This is the attitude, I would argue, that such proponents bring to Middle East politics as a whole: the givens of the situation are known, are unquestionable, and are beyond “understanding.” Students — indeed, Americans as a whole — need to have their “impressionable minds” protected from alternate viewpoints. If the events of the past few weeks, which have brought democratic uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, and elsewhere in the region, have taught us anything, it is that the suppose3d givens of the situation, as they have been understood in mainstream U.S. discourse, have been falling away one after the next. If there was ever a time to take off the blinders, when it comes to Middle East politics, it is today. Hopefully, the outcome of Petersen-Overton’s case will the first of many instances to come, in which we stop trying to protect our students — and ourselves — from understanding the world.
Anthony Alessandrini is an assistant professor of English at Kingsborough Community College-City University of New York.
