The Hard Work of Universities Is Hard to See

The fallout over three university presidents’ congressional testimony on antisemitism continues. On Thursday and Friday, a plane flew over Harvard with a banner claiming that “Harvard hates Jews.” On Saturday, the president of the University of Pennsylvania — where I’m a professor — announced that she was stepping down after a bipartisan chorus condemned her testimony, with many demanding her resignation.

In some critics’ eyes, today’s universities have lost their moral compass. What could be easier than denouncing genocide?

But while I’ve been afraid to say what I am going to say here, I am more afraid not to. As a Jewish American and Harvard alumnus, I worry that many off-campus have exaggerated images of universities’ vices — and too often ignored their virtues. If we’re not careful, the upshot of this episode may be to hobble the very institutions that can help us advance our common values through these divisive times.

To say that Harvard downplays the horrors of genocide flies in the face of my own experience. As a Harvard undergraduate in the late 1990s, one of my academic advisers was Daniel J. Goldhagen ’81, author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust.” I had the opportunity to delve deeply into the sources of the Nazi rise to power in Germany in a one-on-one independent study with Judy E. Vichniac, an expert on West European politics. It was also at Harvard that I took two classes with international relations scholar Stanley H. Hoffmann, where I heard firsthand how Nazi tanks rolled into France when Hoffmann was an 11-year-old hospitalized with appendicitis.

These academic moments built on the history that I had learned in Hebrew school, convincing me of the grave dangers that hate, political extremism, autocracy, and state failure can pose for Jews and other minorities. But the dangers came not only from Hitler’s overthrow of Weimar democracy — they came, too, from France’s bitter polarization and its inability to defend its citizens.

More recently, when I returned to Harvard to pursue a Ph.D., my focus turned to domestic politics and the stubborn persistence of intergroup tensions. During that time, one clear lesson emerged from my studies: The people who would devalue or dehumanize one group frequently do the same for other groups. Antisemitism and other forms of hatred aren’t mutually exclusive — they are symptoms of the same disease. I learned that fighting antisemitism also includes guarding against those who would weaponize it in service of other forms of bigotry, as evident in Europe today.

Late in my Ph.D. studies, I approached a newly arrived Harvard faculty member with a research paper about racial and ethnic diversity that I had worked hard on. She read the paper closely and pointed out significant limitations, telling me that I could do better. Immediately, she made me realize that nurturing students and asking more of them aren’t trade-offs; they are two sides of the same coin.

That professor was Claudine Gay, and she taught me a critical lesson. Now a professor myself, I work hard to pass forward the same lesson to my students. If all you know of now-University President Gay is her widely denounced set of remarks before Congress, for which she has apologized, you may not know her well. Her October speech at Harvard Hillel provides context behind her character and leadership against antisemitism that a 30-second sound bite cannot.

These are undeniably trying times on campus and off, with clear and vile incidents of antisemitism. Just last Sunday night, a large crowd calling for a ceasefire chanted outside of Goldie, a prominent Israeli-owned restaurant in downtown Philadelphia, charging its owners with “genocide.”

And the problem has effects beyond just isolated instances. Research by political scientist Eitan Hersh shows that more than half of Jewish students feel they pay a social cost when supporting the existence of Israel as a Jewish state.

But every day, outside the glare of social media, I see new reasons to have faith in our campus communities — at Penn, Harvard, and beyond. I urge my friends and fellow citizens not to judge universities merely by the most outrageous things you see on social media. What you can’t see quote-tweeted is our core work: the daily process of students and faculty encountering new ideas and challenging each other. Academic exchange is hard to capture in a sound bite, but it is this exchange, not hate, that drives our communities.

Concerns about the values of major universities certainly didn’t begin on Oct. 7, and we shouldn’t dismiss them lightly. Our universities are bedrock American institutions; Congress and the public are right to ask that those of us fortunate enough to work in America’s universities affirm crucial values including religious tolerance.

But the answer isn’t to erect more barriers to speech. It’s to push in the opposite direction — to construct spaces where people from different backgrounds can learn from each other without the fear of retribution. It’s to better understand when hate thrives and how to uproot it. It’s to study yesterday’s threats to democracy so that we can enrich that most valuable American inheritance today. That’s what we are trying to do, however imperfectly, in our classrooms at Penn — and it’s in part because of what I learned from Claudine Gay.

Daniel J. Hopkins ’00 is a graduate of the Harvard Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and a professor of political science at the University of Pennsylvania.