A number of people writing in Joe Katzman's SFSU Blog Burst have addressed the role of the SFSU administration in allowing anti-Semitic behavior to poison the campus atmosphere. They have noted how equivocal the administration is, how eager it is to define the problem away, how it has invoked the language of tolerance to paper over the rank intolerance exhibited by pro-Palestinian students in recent months, how it has ignored its own policies on hate speech in order to avoid dealing with the fact that the campus was fast becoming an ethnic war zone. I blogged about this aspect of the problem myself on May 17. In this blog I want to focus on a different, more elemental aspect of the problem: the role of fashion in helping to create and sustain campus support for the Palestinian cause.

I will open with this caveat: a great deal of the tolerance that has recently grown up around the Palestinian cause on campuses has less to do with informed political decisionmaking than it does with the desire to be a part of a hip new political trend. That's right: on many campuses, supporting the Palestinian cause is not just the "right thing to do"--it's also the cool thing to do.

This is to me one of the saddest things about the current wave of anti-Semitism. It is not just that Palestinian supporters are continually crossing the line of free expression and entering the realm of threat, hate, and even violence--though that appalls me. It is not even just that so many academics seem to want to use the conflict as an occasion to destroy Israel via divestment--though that appalls me, too. It is the fact that it has become fashionable to support the pro-Palestinian cause. And when a belief or position becomes fashionable on campus, when something becomes, in other words, politically correct, all hell breaks loose. The double standards kick in--the people on the right side can say and do whatever they want; the people on the wrong side risk their careers, and even their physical safety, if they protest; the administrations start busily looking the other way; and the faculty--oh, the faculty!--they prey on the eagerness of young people to be part of a cause, to be political, to take part in a radical fight for justice that confirms their readiness to join the adult world.

The faculty should not be lumped in with administrators as we view events at SFSU, or at any other campus. Faculty have academic freedom to say what they believe; administrators have to toe the official university line. Faculty also have a professional--and moral--obligation to educate their students in a non-partisan, respectful way that honors students' ability to distinguish among viewpoints and challenges students to decide what they believe about how the world works and how it got to be that way. I know from personal experience that many faculty, and many graduate student instructors, do not make good on that obligation. I know from personal experience that many college teachers regard that obligation as spurious in and of itself. That they regard those who advocate non-partisan pedagogy as reactionary idiots who lack awareness of both postmodern theory and the true history of oppression. That they mock and dismiss those who believe there is more to history than the story of how white western men have subjugated everybody else.

If you doubt me, hop online and read syllabi for courses in English, women's studies, sociology, African American studies, and so on. Familiarize yourself with the scholarship that is coming out of these departments by looking up faculty members' books on amazon.com. Familiarize yourself with books on radical pedagogy such as bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress. And then you won't doubt me.

Instead of teaching students to think, a great number of leftist faculty teach students how to see the world through a leftist lens. Many do so without even knowing they are doing it, such is the singlemindedness of graduate training in the humanities and social sciences. You won't find conservatives teaching in these areas, and you won't make it through grad school, most likely, let alone find an academic job, unless you are a political clone of your professors. And so there is a situation where there is a powerful ideological norm dominating a large number of fields of academic study.

What is the net result? Sheeplike political behavior that is less about carefully considering issues and coming to independent decisions than it is about conforming to the positions adopted by the leaders in the fields. In the case of the present Middle East crisis, the leaders are the Noam Chomskys and Edward Saids and Cornel Wests of the academy, the pro-Palestinian socialists who despise Israel, who see a chance to mobilize the public--and their students--against Israel, who love revolution and revolt--any revolution, any revolt--and who don't mind if a little anti-Semitism comes with the territory. These leaders use transparently manipulative and inaccurate language about victimhood and martyrdom and oppression to recruit support for the Palestinian cause. Students follow because they respect their professors and look to them for political leadership. Students follow because they are primed by the rhetoric of multiculturalism to believe there is always a victim and a victimizer, to believe there is always an oppressor and an oppressed, to believe that subaltern violence cannot, by definition, be morally reprehensible because it simply expresses the depths of the Other's disempowerment. It goes without saying that this rhetoric acts as a substitute for actual teaching; it goes without saying that it accomplishes indoctrination in the name of education; it goes without saying that this is a terrible abuse of the teacher's authority; it goes without saying that such behavior is too, too common on campuses today. The silence that comes from dissenting faculty in moments such as this--the deafening refusal of all but a very few Laurie Zoloths to speak up for what seems such a simple, basic, unexceptionable thing--is devastating.

Some campus activists are supporting the Palestinian cause for personal, familial, and religious reasons; some for consciously political reasons. But too many students and faculty are supporting it because it is the thing to do. It's what hip intellectuals are doing. It's what hip students are doing. And so they figure it must be a good thing. And so they follow. They consent, freely, without a second thought, to the moral fascism that governs campus life, and they look the other way when things get out of hand--when Jews get beaten, or when swastikas get painted on buildings, or when blood libel becomes the stuff of campus flyers. They do it happily, believing they are doing what's right. And so, having checked their morals and their reason at the door, they can't discriminate between a victim and a terrorist, between statehood and repression, between political resistance and genocidal mission. Thus do they demean themselves, their education, their citizenship, and their country. But what the hell. It's the cool thing to do.

For more on the SFSU incident and the alarming trends it represents, see the SFSU Blog Burst Index at Winds of Change.