Context, and the Effort to Pretend It Doesn't Matter

Liz Magill testifying

For better or worse, the testimony of the presidents (well, one of them is now an ex-president) of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania before a congressional committee a little over a week ago remains a subject of considerable commentary, particularly from those who sought to denigrate the alleged evasiveness of the presidents’ responses.

Specifically, the trio wouldn’t answer “yes” or “no” to questions posed by Rep. Elise Stefanik about whether calling for the genocide of Jews violates their universities’ policies on bullying and harassment.  They gave boilerplate responses, suggesting that context would be a determining factor.  Yes, they looked sort of bad, but Curmie struggled to discern how their answers were inappropriate.  Context does matter, always; terms like “pervasive,” “severe,” and “directed” may seem legalistic, but Curmie isn’t sure how one can answer legalistic questions without responding in kind.

Moreover, Curmie can find no one who advocated for the “genocide of Jews” in those terms.  There were, apparently, chants of “intifada,” and of “from the river to the sea.”  The former refers to resistance against oppression; it suggests the possibility of violence, and that’s what Hamas means by it, but the word is apparently used not infrequently by others without that implication. 

Similarly, “from the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” is a rallying cry for Palestinians.  But, as Laurie Kellman points out in an AP article, “what the phrase means depends on who is telling the story — and which audience is hearing it.  Many Palestinian activists say it’s a call for peace and equality after 75 years of Israeli statehood and decades-long, open-ended Israeli military rule over millions of Palestinians. Jews hear a clear demand for Israel’s destruction.”

In other words (wait for it), context matters.  When used to justify Hamas’s slaughter and kidnapping of innocent people whose only offense was to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, or as a means of intimidating specific Jewish people, it means something different than simply an declaration of general solidarity with the Palestinian cause.  Yes, it may be naïve to believe that one is expressing the latter sentiment without recognizing the distinct possibility that others, particularly but not exclusively Jews, will hear something different than what was intended.  But naïveté should not be a punishable offense, or, rather, it carries its own punishment.

Let’s be real for a second.  Congressional committee hearings are seldom intended to illuminate an issue, but rather to provide Congresscritters an opportunity to grandstand for their respective political bases.  Witnesses at such hearings are generally to be treated as piñatas to be pummeled by the smug and censorious pols who are blinded by their moment in the spotlight.  Stefanik did admirably at getting her name in the papers (be honest, Gentle Reader, had you ever heard of her before last week?), largely by asking questions that could not be reasonably answered with the “yes” or “no” responses she so petulantly demanded.  And she got a particularly high score on the smugometer.  The link included above is from her YouTube page.  She’s pretty damned proud of herself.  Curmie doesn’t think she should be.

As expected, and no doubt intended, the press was all over the hearing.  We heard lots about the presidents’ “inability” to give straight answers.  Their performance was derided by pro-Israeli pundits and parodied by Saturday Night Live (to be fair, the show pretty well skewered Stefanik, too).  Omitted from this commentary was a recognition that there’s a difference between speech which is repulsive and that which ought to be suppressed.  Nor was there any indication that the chattering class understands that criticism of the Israeli government is not intrinsically anti-Semitic, any more that criticizing the Obama administration was intrinsically racist.  Sometimes, yes.  Always?  No.

These reports also gloat about Ross Stevens, the UPenn alum who withdrew a $100 million donation because he decided the university was doing too little to suppress what he regarded as hate speech.  This, probably more than the reaction to now ex-president Liz Magill’s testimony at the committee hearing, is likely to have been the deciding factor in her no doubt forced decision to resign.  Curmie, who would prefer educational policy to be determined by other than plutocrats, is less enthusiastic about this maneuver. 

No one, certainly not Curmie, is countenancing the actual intimidation and harassment of Jewish students, which has in fact been occurring on college campuses across the country.  How widespread it is may be difficult to determine—Curmie has seen none of it first-hand—but it unquestionably exists, and needs to be aggressively addressed.  The cries from Muslim advocates that this situation is no different than what their predecessors endured post-9/11 are probably accurate but ultimately irrelevant.  Two wrongs…

But revenons à nos moutons; back to that testimony.  As you can no doubt discern from the commentary above, Gentle Reader, Curmie was not and is not particularly appalled by those university presidents’ answers.  Guarantees of free speech mean nothing if they apply only to non-objectionable speech.  Whereas it is true that as private universities the three schools in question are not bound by the 1^st Amendment, as elite secular institutions of higher learning they have a responsibility to be at least as open to speech, even that which they may find abhorrent, as do their public counterparts.  Plus, of course, their respective mission statements promise that level of protected speech.

But the apparent unanimity of response, even from trusted sources, gave Curmie pause.  It’s clear that the line between protected speech and harassment, intimidation, or incitement is very thin and virtually indiscernible.  Might Curmie have found himself on the wrong side of that line?  Was his contempt for Rep. Stefanik’s self-righteous (and, indeed, harassing) posturing affecting his judgment on the larger issue?

Then, yesterday morning, he read an editorial in the Los Angeles Times penned by Eugene Volokh and Will Creeley.  The former is one of the most-respected constitutional scholars in the country; the latter is legal director at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).  When it comes to defining what is and what is not protected speech, we could do a lot worse than listening to what either of these gentlemen have to say. 

Curmie encourages you, Gentle Reader, to read the article in its entirety, but here’s their most important paragraph: “Antisemitism on campus is a real problem, and in this fraught moment, many Jewish students are understandably scared. But if freedom of expression is to survive on American campuses — and for our nation’s vitality, it must — Magill’s original answer was right. Context does matter.”

They subsequently argue that calls for intifada are protected or not according to context.  And whereas the segment quoted above is the best encapsulation of their total argument, the part that most caught Curmie’s attention comes later, in a consideration of the ethics and morality of killing civilians in order to advance a politico-military agenda or, especially, to deter other killing.  They note that the same argument could be made by both Hamas in their self-image as freedom-fighters and by the Israeli government in terms of their willingness to allow predictable and significant collateral damage in the form of civilian casualties in their attacks on Hamas.

Significantly, write Volokh and Creeley, “a broad rule against ‘calling for mass killing’ would render this discussion subject to punishment. Indeed, it would mean students could be punished for using the same argument to defend the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” 

Curmie notes an even more significant example: the British decision to allow Coventry to be bombed in order that the Nazis not know that the Enigma Code had been cracked.  That decision—sacrificing not merely civilians, but one’s own civilians—was a key to the Allied victory.  It literally could have changed not merely the longevity of the World War II, but its very outcome.  It had to have been a horrible decision to have to make, but it isn’t difficult to understand the reasoning.  The idea that a discussion of the propriety of that strategy would somehow be off limits undercuts the entire rationale for the existence of universities.

Here is where Curmie goes all Confucian (again) and insists upon looking at these incidents on a case by case basis.  Some of the words and actions clearly ought to be forbidden; others, however upsetting they may be, ought just as clearly be allowed.  And then there are the ones in the middle, where honorable, objective, and well-intentioned people can disagree.  It would be nice to have an actual Confucius around to make those close calls, but (alas!) he’s unlikely to appear on the scene. 

The goal is, and must be, to protect one group of students and faculty from actual harassment and true threats while protecting the freedom of expression of a different group of students and faculty.  Curmie, who lived his entire professional life subject to the often stupid decisions of university administrators, is less than entirely sanguine about turning such cases over to them, but there is no better alternative.  Distinguishing between that which is threatening and that which is merely offensive isn’t easy, but the job must be done, and done well, or we all lose.

"Good" vs. "Great" Teaching

Thirty-something years ago, Curmie read an article—perhaps it was in an academic journal, but he can’t remember for certain—that sought to distinguish between “good” teachers and “great” teachers.  Interestingly (to Curmie, at least), the author expressed his preference for the former: the in-the-trenches professional who successfully imparts and explains the prescribed course material while maintaining decorum and respect for authority.  This teacher is not boring, but the class is unquestionably about the material, not the teacher.

The latter, exemplified by the Robin Williams character in “Dead Poets Society,” is a showman, someone whose passion and energy are inspirational.  The author felt that such a teaching style was narcissistic or something.  Curmie remembers not being quite able to wrap his head around the idea that “good” was somehow better than “great,” wondering if the author might be a little jealous that his colleagues were more popular than he.

Anyway, something a few days ago made me reminisce a little about the great—in both the generally accepted definition of that term and the one adopted by that author—teachers I experienced in my many years as a student.  Like everyone else, Curmie had more than a few teachers who were neither good nor great.  His high school Analytic Geometry teacher was expert at the pedagogical equivalent of burying the lede, that Economics 1 prof in college could put coffee to sleep, and so on.  But Curmie was lucky—there were few of that description and a lot of the other kind.

Curmie read a few months ago that the woman who taught his 3^rd and 5^th grade classes had passed away at the age of 93.  It was only on reading her obituary that he learned that she had become principal of the school sometime after he’d moved away from the town.  His first thought was that whereas he was glad she got that promotion if that’s what she wanted, he was sad for those who came after him that they wouldn’t experience her in the classroom.  She wasn’t “great” according to the definitions of that author, but she was great in the mind of at least this former student. 

There were others who were certainly very good but, at least in my pre-college days, one stands out.  He was a young man, probably in his mid-20s, who taught 7th grade Social Studies.  I don’t know how it was that this Floridian came to teach in my school an hour and a half or two hours north of New York City.  But I do know that few if any people outside my immediate family have had as much influence in determining the person I ultimately became.

Imagine this, if you will, Gentle Reader: a bunch of tweens in the mid- to late-‘60s talking about the world around them.  This was the era of civil rights demonstrations, the women’s movement (then called Women’s Liberation), and the Vietnam War.  Importantly, we weren’t allowed to simply spout opinions; we had to have done research… so we learned how to do that.  I remember spending a lot of time in both the school and public libraries.   

In class we were introduced to anthropology and through it to cultures unlike our own, to the rationale both for the status quo and for dissent, to the essence of the Bill of Rights.  We debated ideas and perspectives in a way I’d never seen or heard.  We wrote research papers—mine was on environmental policy, especially as it pertained to air pollution (pretty heady stuff for a 12-year-old!).  And we were expected to cite sources appropriately (in a way few of my 21st-century university students could manage). 

His class opened my mind to the idea that education wasn’t just about memorizing facts, but about considering how facts fit together.  He taught us to walk that thin line, simultaneously respecting authority and being willing to challenge it, and I don’t think I ever as much as suspected what his politics were.  He was tough because he cared.  He was, in short, one of the best teachers I ever had.

Ah, but there was a problem, as you’ve probably already ascertained, Gentle Reader.  You see, what he was supposed to be teaching us was New York State history.  He wasn’t from New York and he believed, correctly I think, that such a course was essentially useless.  Even then, the population was increasingly mobile, and many if not most of us would end up living elsewhere.  I doubt that my own history of spending less than 10% of my adult life in New York (and that small fraction only because of grad school at Cornell) is an outlier.  Moreover, the really important stuff about New York history would appear in American History courses, and it’s unlikely that anyone, even those who never left the state, would ever care about the rest.

He did try to be “good” for a few weeks, but he sort of ran out of gas in our chronological progression shortly after John Peter Zenger.  Perhaps I’ve forgotten our section on the American Revolution, but I honestly don’t think we got that far.  There was a fair amount of history we didn’t cover, in other words!  Anyway, we learned about the Seneca Falls Convention because it marked a seminal moment in the women’s movement, not because it happened in New York State. 

For all I know, the teacher went to the administration and got permission to teach something other than New York State history.  I kind of doubt it, but I suppose it’s possible.  What I know with ever fiber of my being is that I’m extremely glad I got the course I did.  But he probably was, as Dickens might have said, “the best of teachers, the worst of teachers.”

Let’s grant that permission to scrap the prescribed curriculum was probably not forthcoming, and that cashing a paycheck for doing X and not actually doing X is unethical: more so, in fact, than Robin Williams-like flamboyance.  That I, and I strongly suspect a majority of my classmates, got far more out of this man’s course than we would have by learning the details of building the Erie Canal is, of course, consequentialism.  

But what if those consequences are eminently predictable?  I was, and am, fascinated by history, but I can’t imagine a year-long course in New York State history that would interest tweens in the slightest: not then, not now.  The course was, no doubt, the brainstorm of some idiot state legislator (the usual apologies for redundancy).  From my perspective, that puts us into “any change is an improvement” territory.  And the course he did teach was wonderful. 

He was, in other words, not a “good” teacher.  He was, however, great.  He didn’t mock authority, but he certainly circumvented it.  His course was not traditional by any stretch of the imagination, but in the words of the great 20th century philosopher Frank Zappa, “without deviation from the norm, progress is impossible.”  There was nothing particularly exciting about his teaching style—he didn’t jump onto desks or start chants, and the fires he lit were purely metaphorical.  But those were substantial conflagrations, even if only in our minds.

He lasted only the one year at my school.  Chances are, he was fired, but it could be that he just didn’t like the winter cold (he mentioned that more than once after trudging through the snow) and made the voluntary choice to head south again.  Either way, I hope he had a good life, and that subsequent generations of students had the opportunity to learn from him.

There were times in my teaching career when I sought to be “great”; other times I settled for trying to be “good.”  I never sought to teach something other than what the course description demanded (well, I did do things like extend Theatre History II past the 1940’s, but that was because the course description hadn’t been updated in decades, and I had the full approval of the department chair).  There were plenty of moments when I was a performer as much as a pedagogue, though, and some of my courses were idiosyncratically mine.

Did I succeed at being either “great” or “good”?  That’s not for me to say.  But, as I look back at that classroom from over a half century ago, I know that I have never been so grateful that someone else, someone I knew, broke the rules.  No, he wasn’t a John Hancock or a Rosa Parks, but his influence was direct and life-changing in an unquestionably positive way.  If I ever had a similar effect on even a handful of students, I’ll consider it a win.