Further Musings on "Context"

Claudine Gay at the Congressional hearing

The recent resignations of Liz Magill and Claudine Gay as presidents at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University are, of course, of interest to Curmie, both as a career academic and as an observer of American society.  They tell us more about the business of higher education than, perhaps, we would like to know.

It is widely believed that their testimony before a Congressional committee last month was evasive, even mendacious and/or anti-Semitic.  Curmie, you may recall, disagreed with those conclusions, and noted that both Eugene Volokh and FIRE’s legal director, Will Creeley, agree with his assessment.  Context does matter. 

The specific circumstances surrounding a demonstration by supporters of the Palestinian cause chanting “from the river to the sea” are central to determining the appropriate response.  That phrase has been interpreted by some to mean the extermination of Israel, or even of Jews in general.  Others claim the slogan suggests merely an aspiration to be liberated from what Palestinians perceive, not altogether inaccurately, as Israeli oppression, with no inherent suggestion of violence.  

Analogously: a swastika—the word is derived from the Sanskrit for “may all be well with you”—is a positive emblem in several Eastern religions (especially, but not exclusively, Hindu), but that’s not the first association 21^st-century Americans, especially Jews, will make.  Should Hindus be prevented from using a time-honored symbol of their faith because the Nazis appropriated the image?  No, but circumspection would certainly be in order.  Context!

Back in the Dark Ages of the late 20^th century, Curmie taught courses in public speaking and persuasion.  Those courses required examining the relationship between the sender and the receiver of a message.  More specifically, communication theory suggests that there are innumerable ways in which the process can go wrong.  All of us have experienced more than one episode in which what one person intended to say was not what the other person heard.  These situations, though clearly unintentional, often lead to tension… or worse.

Volokh, Creeley, and Curmie agree that context matters, that whether or not demonstrators were engaging in protected (even if objectionable) speech is a matter of context.  If the chants constitute an actual threat against specific individuals or group, if there is an incitement to criminality, then First Amendment protections (and their equivalents at private universities purporting to uphold free speech values) do not apply.  Barring that threat, however, even offensive speech must be permitted, provided it does not directly violate the rights (as opposed to the sensibilities) of others.

Curmie has long believed in the “reasonable person” approach.  That is, in this particular matter, the question is not whether Jewish students at those universities felt personally threatened, but whether a reasonable person would have interpreted the actions of the protestors in that way.  And now we’re back at context.  Curmie wasn’t there.  Neither, probably, were you, Gentle Reader.  Ultimately, we’re going to have to trust the people on the ground to make the call.  That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily right, only that we have no other reasonable alternative.

The concept of context takes on another meaning, too, of course.  Here, the issue is not free speech, but consistency.  And here is where those critical of the responses by various university administrations across the country have their most persuasive point: what if it were a different group of students who were offended or felt threatened by the actions of others?

Curmie has been dismissive here and elsewhere of, for example, the black student at the University of Michigan who felt “unsafe” when a professor showed the Laurence Olivier film version of Othello in class, or the Muslim student at Hamline University who purported to feel “unwanted” and “disrespected” when she passed up clearly stated opportunities to avoid seeing an image of the prophet Muhammad in a global art history class and would have us believe she was scarred for life.

Curmie mentions these incidents not because they’re silly, although they are, but because university administrations sided with the students and their fragile sensibilities: in the former case, a Distinguished University Professor (note the capital letters: this is an official title) was humiliated and removed from teaching his course; in the latter case, an adjunct professor (with a PhD) was de facto fired.  

It is not too big a stretch to suggest that had some group other than Jewish students considered themselves threatened on the Penn or Harvard campuses, the administrations’ actions might almost certainly would have been different.  In other words, whereas allowing the pro-Palestinian protests was arguably the correct call when considered in isolation, in context (there’s that word again!) it could reasonably be considered a hypocritical violation of the university’s precedents in order to favor one side of a contentious issue.  Are these examples of anti-Semitism?  Curmie isn’t saying “yes,” but he isn’t saying “no,” either.

This critique is especially true at Harvard, where Claudine Gray’s resignation letter includes this tidbit: “it has been distressing to have doubt cast on my commitments to confronting hate and to upholding scholarly rigor – two bedrock values that are fundamental to who I am – and frightening to be subjected to personal attacks and threats fueled by racial animus.”

Yeah, right.  Curmie may agree that responses to campus demonstrations should be based on context, but she failed to make that case in her appearance before that committee, when either she knew what questions were coming or was remarkably unprepared.  If that performance was “confronting hate,” Curmie is Miss America.  Still, Curmie is reasonably convinced that Gay would have survived the brouhaha arising from the congressional testimony had she not been outed as a plagiarist. 

As for “scholarly rigor,” well, even her supporters at the Harvard Crimson admit that “Gay’s behavior constitutes plagiarism” and that “sloppiness of this kind is unbefitting of a Harvard president.”  Yes, it is true that plagiarism cases are on a continuum, and some examples are worse than others.  But whereas the lack of intention to deceive is at least a partial excuse for an undergraduate (Curmie has seen scores of such cases), such a lack of… wait for it… rigor is unacceptable in a graduate student, let alone the president of Harvard. 

If, as many folks who know the specifics of Harvard’s honor code better than I have asserted, Gay’s plagiarism was quantitatively and qualitatively significant enough that a Harvard undergrad would have been suspended for similar offenses, Gay should be fired, not simply from the presidency but also as a faculty member.  Nor should anyone else hire her.

Predictably, Gay accepts literally no responsibility for her actions, resorting instead to claims of racial victimhood.  They are bullshit.  It may not be true that Gay got the job to begin with not because she was the best available candidate, but because she was considered the best available black female candidate (Curmie doubts that even that description is likely to be true), but it’s difficult to believe otherwise.  And her self-righteous bluster about “racial animus” only weakens what little case she had.

Dr. Gay, you were de facto removed from the presidency of the nation’s oldest and most famous university because you were proven to be a fraud, even to the satisfaction of many of your supporters.  You get to remain in a cushy faculty position, and according to one report will still bring in a salary about a dozen times as high as Curmie’s was when he retired as a full professor.  You caught a break, and it’s far more likely that your demographic profile lightened your punishment than that it precipitated it.  The wise thing to do would be to STFU.  But, of course, if you were actually wise, you wouldn’t be in this position to begin with.