Just months before the Oct. 7 attack on Israel, Muslim and Jewish students at Middlebury College in Vermont set up a dialogue. They agreed to exchange any and all views on Israeli-Palestinian issues. After the attack, their bonds were already so tight that they raised money to feed the people of Gaza by selling bread.
“The students were the model for us,” Laurie Patton, president of Middlebury, said at a recent panel organized by Interfaith America. “Are there still tensions? Absolutely. But that kind of work was possible because they had a relationship. And they had been brave together.”
True to the spirit of academic freedom, the Middlebury students engaged in civil discourse and open inquiry between equals, based on a respect for each other’s inherent dignity. Providing such tools to students, said Dr. Patton, “is our moral obligation as educators.”
Journalists covering the campus protests over Israel’s actions in Gaza are beginning to notice that many schools have long taken a different tack on the difficult, complex issues in the Middle East. Instead of a climate of confrontation, students and teachers seek to stretch their thinking on such issues without fear of reprisal. As The Guardian newspaper discovered, the protests have led to “an undercurrent of more nuanced, private conversation, as students from different backgrounds try to navigate their own identities and have an impact on a devastating war happening a world away.”
The newspaper found a few Jewish and Palestinian American students at the University of California, San Diego have forged a friendship by subjecting their views to criticism in order to find common ground. At Yale University, graduating senior Ian Berlin wrote for CNN that he found “a community of activists and organizers that is eager to listen, ready to learn and committed to including Jewish voices and perspectives.”
At Johns Hopkins University, Professor Steven David has taught a course on Israel’s future since 2016. It pushes students of all backgrounds to listen to competing and perhaps repugnant arguments while also accepting the consequences of their own views. His tactics help students be “less polemical and in some ways less intense, recognizing that there are many sides to these problems,” he told The Chronicle of Higher Education.
Such intellectual humility in the pursuit of truth is the essence of higher education. And perhaps needed more than ever.
A recent study by three university scholars looked at 40 institutions, organizations, and groups of professionals, from Facebook to scientists, and found that such groups were less trusted by the public when they were perceived as ideologically biased. That was true even “among participants who perceived the institutions as aligned with their own ideology.”
In recent weeks, as the protests have escalated, a number of universities have affirmed the need to offer a neutral forum for students to explore ideas and learn the skill of navigating differences. Not all ideas are equal and some may need tough scrutiny, especially those based on antisemitism. But equality within a community of thinkers defines a university. It might even compel some of them to turn their shared discoveries into baking bread for others.
Mark Sappenfield