They were passionate. They seized their right to free speech. They risked arrest and expulsion. And they learned how to pitch a tent. Yes, the pro-Palestinian protesters on U.S. campuses had their moment. Their spring of discontent is finally over. (University administrators have probably downed more than a few cocktails to celebrate that fact.) But to many on the outside, there was something deeply flawed about it.

The students’ sympathy with the “Palestinian cause” blended too easily with support for Hamas, a terrorist group. Protesters who decried Israel’s crimes without uttering a single negative word about Hamas, its genocidal charter, and what its members did on Oct. 7 to spark the current hostilities – competing with the Nazis for who could perpetrate the worst atrocities against Jews – struck sensible folks as morally bankrupt.

The students are an easy piñata to smack. Many of the performative TikTokers chanted “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” without being able to name what river and sea all the fuss was about. Much worse than their geography skills, they didn’t know or care that the phrase is a Hamas battle cry to eradicate the Jewish state and all the Jews in it.

Except for the violent ones, we should give the other participants an eye roll and move on. Maybe, deep down, they wanted to anchor themselves in history and be part of something bigger than their “selfie” microcosms. Many of them understandably reacted with compassion to the ugly realities of war fed to them daily on their screens. And maybe down the road they’ll come to question their simplistic one-sidedness in this long-running and complicated affair.

But we’re still left with the faculty. Not all of them, to be sure, but those who joined the protests or supported the students should be scrutinized.

Some instructors have cheaply claimed that they stood by students’ right to protest, not their cause. Hmm … so students get extra credit for merely joining a protest? Who cares about its overall message?

This begs the bigger question: What’s going on in classrooms?

Activist faculty pushing “woke” agendas and courses/programs funded by foreign money, especially from the Middle East, are some of the problems university administrations will have to tackle if they want to right the wayward ship of academia. Some critics say that the ship already hit the iceberg and is sinking fast.

A telling anecdote from several months ago sheds light on a subtler but vitally important classroom issue. In November, Dr. Michael V. Drake, president of the University of California system, came under fire from faculty for an initiative to teach ”viewpoint-neutral” Middle East history.

Drake saw a need for an educational program “focused on better understanding antisemitism and Islamophobia” as well as on “how to recognize and combat extremism” in the wake of Hamas’ October attack.

But before he could fully explain what he meant by “viewpoint-neutral,” the faculty pounced. A group of 150 UC professors signed a public letter calling on him to rescind the term and denouncing the move as “external interference.” They claimed “viewpoint neutrality” is wrong because they “present conflicting viewpoints as a normal part of our curriculum.”

Drake didn’t push back. The debate, if there was one, fizzled. Maybe the UC president – trained as a medical doctor – didn’t want to pick a fight with the humanities and social science people on their own turf. (They were the ones who signed the letter.)

Too bad, because he was onto something.

Of course instructors should use conflicting viewpoints in their teaching. You would be hard pressed to find completely unbiased sources. Drake wasn’t highlighting the role of classroom materials or the students, both of which contain conflicting views. By “viewpoint-neutral,” he was likely highlighting the role of the teacher.

Back when dead white men exercised their bloody tyranny over university curriculums, many institutions and instructors lived by the Socratic method of teaching. It was immensely fruitful and we would be wise to resuscitate it in general, but especially for teaching contentious subjects like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In Plato’s Dialogues, Socrates hides behind a metaphorical mask. He doesn’t spout off theories. Instead, he pretends to be ignorant and prefers to ask pointed questions that lead his interlocutors down the path of self-discovery. Alcibiades, an Athenian statesman who appears frequently in the Dialogues, said of Socrates: “He spends his whole life playing the part of a simpleton and a child.”

Like Socrates, instructors should seek to mask their own biases, while allowing the students to unveil their own. At the end of the day, students shouldn’t know a teacher's personal positions – this forces them to better understand, clarify and question their own.

A Socratic approach to the conflict entails an openness and curiosity about both sides, as well as sympathy for the suffering of both peoples thrown into this bloody historical quandary.

Many protesters assume Israel is an illegitimate state without understanding why it was created in the first place. They don’t know the complex history of Zionism and the plight of the Jews throughout history, especially in the aftermath of World War II. It’s juvenile to ignore the history of one side.

Universities should look for and reward educators who have demonstrated a commitment to a Socratic approach. They seem to be few and far between. The reason faculty lashed out at Drake’s proposal, I suspect, is because it was a tacit recognition from higher ups that current teaching methods are failing. And the protests made clear to many observers that they indeed are.

The stakes are high. Properly educating Americans and others around the world on this conflict could bring us much closer to peace. Israeli historian Noah Yuval Harari sees a vital role for “outsiders.”

“During times of conflict and suffering, we can only hope that outsiders who are not immediately affected will nurture seeds of peace,” he writes.

“The job of intellectuals, artists and scholars is to try and go deeper. To try and see the complexity of reality, especially in today's climate of post-truth. It feels intellectually and emotionally lazy to just pick a side.”

_____

Terrance J. Mintner is a news editor and writer living in the Midwest. He writes a newsletter on Substack called Feral Brain (https://feralbrain.substack.com/ ).

_____

©2024 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.