The author is Andrew Gelman, whose posts are popular on HN. He agrees with Steven Pinker, whose posts are also popular on HN, that universities do NOT have a mandate to tell society what emotions to feel in response to events, nor what the correct moral position should be in response to them.
In the OP, Gelman announces he has changed his mind and now agrees with Pinker that university administrators should "shut up and do their job" (Pinker's words), providing the most impartial forum possible for professors and students to argue these issues, i.e., adopt the "Kalven Principles" (https://president.uchicago.edu/from-the-president/announceme...).
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EDIT: Added quotes around "shut up and do their job" to make it clear that those are Pinker's words, not mine.
> Gelman announces he has changed his mind and now agrees with Pinker that university administrators should shut up and do their job
No, that's not what he said. This is what he said:
"The problem is not with academic leaders “having a foreign policy” in the sense of expressing opinions and seeking to achieve political change; it’s with expectations or demands such as Emanuel’s that academic leaders should have a foreign policy, that it’s part of the job, that it’s a matter of leadership."
In other words, condemning atrocities is fine, but it's optional, not a required part of the job.
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EDIT: The title of the article is clearly tongue-in-cheek. If you don't realize that, and you take the title 100% literally, you've missed something crucial. It should be clear when the author begins by talking about "wearing earth tones, driving Priuses", which he still thinks is an absurd stereotype by Pinker.
Also: "So here’s where I agree with Pinker. Or, to be more precise [emphasis mine], where I agree with his implicit point [emphasis mine]."
Further quotes to show what the author is really talking about, which is the demand that university leaders make statements:
"The trouble is, there are so many issues out there? How much “leading” does he demand that university leaders do?"
"But then there’s the question of where to stop, which atrocities to condemn. You wouldn’t want a university president to become the equivalent of an outrage-of-the-week blogger."
"Again, my problem is not with university leaders, or business leaders, or church leaders, etc., expressing views, but rather with the idea that this is what they are supposed [emphasis mine] to do."
The coup de grâce: the author says in the P.P.S. that he was still right on this one, this one being a link to an article titled, "Steven Pinker is a psychologist who writes on politics."
After reading the entire essay (including the external links with which Gelman says he now agrees), I understood the point to be that it's OK for administrators to express opinions in a personal capacity, but it's not and should not be part of their job.
See Steven Pinker's twitter post (linked to by Gelman) and Michael Baily's essay (linked to by Pinker):
"The problem is ... with expectations that it’s part of the job ... that academic leaders should have a 'foreign policy'"
> administrators should shut up and do their job
I read that with an implied "while performing duties of said job", not "at all times no matter what". In other words "Do not implement or promote said foreign policy on the job" as that (in their opinion) is not part of their job, but a personal matter to be tended to on personal time.
Stripped of context I can see why someone would take issue with that quote as the implication is dependent on that context, but in context he's clearly talking about performing their duties on the job. Afterall, the implication you're operating off of is that this person is expected to be on the job 24/7 and/or as such should never ever do anything ever that's not relevant to the job or in line with company policies, which is frankly absurd. It's why context is important and while a single line/quote can anchor an entire discussion or position, it rarely can fully embody or express it.
The problem with some of these abstract arguments is that people forget to carve out exceptions for circumstances, and shifting norms.
Nobody likes busybodies who calls the cops for the most mundane of neighbourhood infractions. But what happens when a bunch of people with different values move in? Will the people who just mind their business say anything? Do anything?
Agree with both Gelman and Pinker here, around expectations of people having “an opinion”. But what’s missing from Gelman’s critique of the other fellow, is that you do also need leaders to enforce some norms. There should be some values. And if you can’t agree to what those values are, there definitely is a problem.
Times have changed, there’s too much lazy tolerance now, and people do need to organize around some common values that isn’t just what is the progressive de jour.
> And if you can’t agree to what those values are, there definitely is a problem
I don't see how that's the case. The only way we could agree entirely on those common values is to be entirely homogenous as a group, and that is not the case and in my view, deeply undesirable. (I suppose another way we could agree entirely is to be entirely conformist, but that doesn't seem very attractive either).
> Times have changed, there’s too much lazy tolerance now, and people do need to organize around some common values that isn’t just what is the progressive de jour.
Well that comes across as "I want more of my values in society, not yours because they are wrong". If you gave some reasons for why yours are correct and mine aren't, I'd be interested.
>>> Should a university have a foreign policy? Was it given a mandate to tell a grateful nation what emotions to feel in response to a national event, or what the correct moral position is? At Harvard, many colleagues & I will urge the university administration to shut up and do their job of providing an impartial forum for profs & students to argue these issues
Harvard is not "a university."
Harvard profits from the disproportionate amount of attention that it receives, and the power that it confers to its graduates. Sure, it should be responsible for its foreign policy.
How about the public university down the street from my house? Should it have a foreign policy? Yet our university will suffer from the political backlash against Harvard's shenanigans.
I would love to be able to read more about the personal journey people have taken to arrive at their opinions.
Like how does one person end up on one side of the debate, and then someone else on the polar opposite. They are both human. How did the process differ between the two.
There was a time when they had no opinion, and then there is a time when they are waving flags in the street and thinking about it all the time.
What are the critical moments? What are their contact points with news and propaganda?
Why don't journalists ask about this? Instead we hear each side explain their understanding of the situation in a subset of points that ChatGPT could basically have written.
What is more interesting is to ask people why they think other people have a different opinion.
That American universities have "foreign policies" is pretty damn obvious given how different the treatment of Russia's war and occupation of parts of Ukraine is from the treatment of Israel's war and occupation of Palestine.
The whole situation in Palestine is a mess. It’s way too simplistic to claim that the Palestinians have an ancestral claim on the land and the Jewish people are invaders. Jewish people have also lived in that area for thousands of years. What’s changed is the state of Israel has kicked out a lot of Palestinians who also lived in that area for thousands of years. And the Palestinians have (unsurprisingly) become radicalised and deeply antisemitic. They elected Hamas and Hamas redirected aid for their own people into making weapons of war.
The conflicts are not alike. In Gaza, there is no “good guys”. Everyone has civilian blood on their hands. Everyone is angry. And there are no easy answers that have any hope of achieving peace. Of course the foreign policy positions of our governments are different in each case.
Well, since no two situations are identical you can always make up a contrived argument as to why "X warrants Y" in situation A but not in situation B. "We should divest any occupier state" applies to both Israel and Russia so you tweak your argument to "We should divest from any state that occupies the territory of another state" and, voila, Israel is excluded! If Palestine ever becomes a UN member, just tweak the argument further "... of another state recognized by the United States". Eventually the mental gymnastics reduces to "Divest from states whose names begin with R, but not from states whose names begin with I." You then claim consistency but everyone else can see what you are doing.
> “Divest from states whose names begin with R, but not from states whose names begin with I”
I’m not sure why you expect your comment to be convincing. The facts on the ground are obviously different. I sincerely believe those differences matter. Reducing my argument to a straw man only leaves me suspecting you don’t understand my point.
In any case, if you take this as axiomatic:
> We should divest any occupier state
Do you also believe that non-indigenous people are “occupying” the USA, Canada, Australia, India, South Africa and so on? Should we all somehow return “home”? If you see Russia and Israel as the same situation, is it not also the same situation in many other countries? Where do you suggest we draw the line?
And where, exactly, do you propose the Israelis should go this time?
Sure, the "facts on the ground" are different. The average temperature in Israel is significantly higher than the average temperature in Russia. Hence, it totally makes sense to subject Russia, but not Israel to economic sanctions. I'm not reducing your argument to straw men - I'm claiming that it requires mental gymnastics that would make an Olympian gymnast impressed to explain why Russia should be treated as a pariah state but not Israel.
Let's see. One is a brutal, colonial invasion with the intent of totally replacing the local population. And the other is Israel responding to the rape and murder of hundreds of their civilians.
By killing 23,700 Gazans so far, mostly women and children? And possibly this came about because the Israeli government allowed money to Hamas to split the Palestinian governance? And possibly the Palestinians don't like being treated in the same way that blacks were treated in South Africa (i.e., second-class citizens)? And wasn't there something about government supported attacks happening in West Bank?
Israel does have a right to defend itself. It also has an obligation to be humane, and if it wants to continue existing without internal conflict with its neighbours, perhaps this is not quite the best way to do it.
"“Colleagues who have managed to make it to the north in recent days describe scenes of utter horror: Corpses left lying in the road. People with evident signs of starvation stopping trucks in search of anything they can get to survive,” Martin Griffiths, UN Under-Secretary-General for Humanitarian Affairs and Emergency Relief Coordinator, told members of the UN Security Council on Friday. " - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/01/12/middleeast/gaza-corpses-o...
Does any of that matter to you?
Edit: @josephg
"The Health Ministry in Hamas-run Gaza said Saturday that 135 Palestinians were killed in the last 24 hours, bringing the overall toll of the war to 23,843. The count does not differentiate between combatants and civilians, but the ministry has said about two-thirds of the dead are women and children." - https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/ct-aud-nw-israel...
"For years, the Qatari government had been sending millions of dollars a month into the Gaza Strip — money that helped prop up the Hamas government there. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel not only tolerated those payments, he had encouraged them... Allowing the payments — billions of dollars over roughly a decade — was a gamble by Mr. Netanyahu that a steady flow of money would maintain peace in Gaza, the eventual launching point of the Oct. 7 attacks, and keep Hamas focused on governing, not fighting." - https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/10/world/middleeast/israel-q...
This is a weird claim. How are the bombs selectively targeting women? Are the bombs sexist?
> And possibly this came about because the Israeli government allowed money to Hamas to split the Palestinian governance?
“Allowed money”? Gaza has been self governing for years. Do you want Israel to intervene in politics in Palestine or not? You can’t have it both ways - either they pull out and let Gaza self govern, or they meddle in political affairs and make sure money is spent in a way they like. What would you have them do?
I agree with your main points - the loss of civilian life seems like an avoidable tragedy. (As were the Israeli civilian deaths a few months ago). But the strange points you make at the start of your comment weaken the overall message.
Both Russia and Israel are widely agreed to be on the wrong side of international law - Israel is of course continuing its illegal occupation, illegal settlements, illegal blockade, etc. Why are the circumstances so different?
Hamas is also on the wrong side of international law. Bombing, kidnapping, raping and murdering civilians is not ok no matter how angry you are. And they aren’t just a rogue terrorist cell. They’re the elected government of Palestine.
Russia can just pull out of Ukraine and everyone will chill out. But Israel can’t ignore Hamas after the terrorist act in October. And if they pull out of their illegal settlements in response to a terrorist act, it will embolden the next strike against their civilians.
As far as I can tell, it’s an impossible situation for everyone. If you truly think there are simple answers in Gaza, how would you de-escalate the conflict at this point?
>Hamas is also on the wrong side of international law. Bombing, kidnapping, raping and murdering civilians is not ok no matter how angry you are. And they aren’t just a rogue terrorist cell. They’re the elected government of Palestine.
Much to my point about the Israel and Russia attacks being very comparable, Russia can of course point to such terrorist groups in Ukraine, even ones like Azov being given official status in the armed forces.
>But Israel can’t ignore Hamas after the terrorist act in October.
Speculation on both our parts, but I think a real Palestinian state in the pre-67 borders and right of return for refugees would effectively end large-scale terrorist attacks, much the same as Russia would be safe if they withdrew from Ukraine.
> I think a real Palestinian state in the pre-67 borders and right of return for refugees would effectively end large-scale terrorist attacks
Unfortunately it would also tell Palestine that terrorism works. And next time they want Israel to take their needs seriously, murdering, kidnapping and raping some Israeli civilians is the right way to go about it.
From a long term strategic point of view, Israel can’t give ground as a result of the terrorist attacks or they encourage more such attacks to happen in the future.
So an end to the illegal occupation, settlement, blockade would be a lesson to Palestinians that terrorism works? Is the end of terrorist attacks against Israel a lesson that blockades, settlements, and occupations work?
Ah, if you consider the situations comparable, then maybe you'd like to point out which Ukrainian group has been plotting and committing acts of terror against Russia for decades to the point that Russia needs an Iron Dome missile interceptor system to keep its cities safe?
The thousands of civilians murdered in Gaza, the people getting killed in the West Bank haven't "plotted" anything. Starving people is a war crime, not war. Nobody, literally nobody ever at any point in this debtate, is talking about how Israel is treating Hamas. You have as much as an argument as Putin saying he just wanted to denazify the Ukraine.
As far as I know, the University of California never issued an official statement on the war in Ukraine. On our campus, the campus leadership issued their own condemnation about a week after the invasion started. I remember thinking that there must be something going on behind the scenes, as the university usually reacts faster.
On the other hand, the university officially condemned the Hamas terrorist attack on October 9, which was the first business day after the attack.
In the Salaita affair donors made it clear that donations would stop if they hired him. And the university complied. It would have been a nothingburger if his tweets were about Russia. Similarly, many US universities have divested from Russia, but all have consistently refused calls to divest from Israel.
A clever title to serve as a starting point for an insightful post, but he's not actually disagreeing with what Pinker wrote, and he did not actually change his opinion that much recently. The conclusion is as I understand it is that he feels academics should be free to have political opinions and it's good to be involved in trying to affect change, but they should not be expected to have public opinions on every hot topic and especially align them with those of the government, mass media or various think tanks.
In today's environment, moralists would argue "it's immoral to not have an opinion, i.e. if you are in a position of power and are not actively using your voice to reach out to your audience in order in favour of populist opinions, you are in the wrong."
I don't know what to make of it. I think it's great that people fight for what they believe in but at the same time, "inaction" is becoming more and more difficult.
Silence and/or neutrality support the powerful. If the powerful are acting morally and well, then all is good. If not, silence and/or neutrality are harmful.
Every time one of these an article comes up that says that what Israel is doing (and has been doing for decades) against Palestine is *WRONG* , people come out of the woodwork to call it "antisemitism". (look in "showdead")
Yes, the WW2 Holocaust happened. That doesn't entitle the current Jews living in Israel to "1 free holocaust" coupon.
I took "Never Again" to actually be just that. But in reality it's "Never again to us, and anybody who denounces us is antisemitic!"
If you read the history of the conflict, Palestine only exists today because Israel gave them land that they (Israel) won from wars that neighboring countries started.
Additionally, Israel called dibs first, that is Palestinian/Arabs could have declared themselves a country as soon as the British mandate ended but chose not to. Instead Israel did first and was attacked by neighboring countries which caused the majority of the Palestinian diaspora.
>Palestine only exists today because Israel gave them land that they (Israel) won from wars that neighboring countries started.
The internationally accepted borders of Israel are based on the 1949 armistice. Israel did not "give" Gaza or the West Bank to Palestine, those are simply the borders. Israel started the 6-day war in 1967 that led to the present occupation.
The Western media is so focused on it—over other conflicts—because we (in the West) are witnessing an ethnic cleansing committed by a country whose population has strong familial and cultural ties with the West. (Obligatory notadefenseofhamas)
Well that's one hell of a whatboutism. Just for your info, Israel killed more civilians since October than Russia did in Ukraine since 2014. That's why we focus on them. If anything, the complete lack of western official condemnation regarding that is a perfect example of just how much slack is given to israel.
Also, Israel is extremely open about its plans which also makes it easy to be really quite alarmed. What more is needed?
>On October 10th an Israeli official told a television station: “Gaza will eventually turn into a city of tents. There will be no buildings.” Daniel Hagari, an idf spokesperson, boasted that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had been dropped on Gaza. Then, he added: “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
> Just for your info, Israel killed more civilians since October than Russia did in Ukraine since 2014
Just for your info, that's complete BS. The people making this claim are comparing the deaths in Ukraine which the UN has independently confirmed (and discriminated from military casualties) against claims which have not been independently confirmed nor discriminated from military casualties.
Russia does not allow investigators behind their lines, so the official figures are a significant undercount - a fact which the UN themselves have specifically called out themselves as being the case. It is entirely possible and even likely that more Ukrainian civilians died in Mariupol alone than in all of Gaza.
At a minimum, as of more than a year ago, there were 10,300 new graves dug around Mariupol, as seen from satellite pictures. Pictures of those graves suggest that many of them contain more than one body, which was also the case in Lyman when the mass graves there were excavated. But none of the new graves in Mariupol are in the UN statistics because they cannot be considered "verified" without access.
And the stories of what has been going on in Mariupol from the handful of people that managed to escape and get back to Ukraine are every bit as bad as Gaza if not worse. And that's one city.
To be clear I'm not trying to minimize Ukrainian deaths. My point was more so that it was at least comparable, and in the same order of magnitude. Yet the international reaction to one is completely different to the other ( I mean, in terms of concrete action against Israel and Russia). That's the double standard and the unlimited "slack" given to Israel that I was talking about. The IDF can come up with any excuse for bombing any number of civilians, with absolutely 0 proof given and again, they are just automatically believed. I mean, they are cautious about civilian deaths... they told us so!
Yeah, I want to edit my original comment and correct the false stats I gave but I don't want to remove the context for the comments correcting me. In any case, I was wrong about that part!
This is disingenuous. The issue isn’t, in a vacuum, whether college leadership needs to weigh in on the Hamas massacre. The broader context is that university leaders jump in with both feet regarding literally everything else. The question isn’t whether universities should be opining on every issue - it’s that they do, and have for years, and the explicit omission here was itself a signal that Jewish life means less than others.
In the OP, Gelman announces he has changed his mind and now agrees with Pinker that university administrators should "shut up and do their job" (Pinker's words), providing the most impartial forum possible for professors and students to argue these issues, i.e., adopt the "Kalven Principles" (https://president.uchicago.edu/from-the-president/announceme...).
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EDIT: Added quotes around "shut up and do their job" to make it clear that those are Pinker's words, not mine.