THE DARTMOUTH PROTESTS AND THE HUMANITIES: A MESSAGE TO MY FACULTY COLLEAGUES
OPED PUBLISHED BY THE LEBANON, NEW HAMPSHIRE VALLEY NEWS MAY 10, 202
Posted here on same date.
James Heffernan
The dust is already settling.
Including the Hanover Police Department and President Beilock, virtually everyone now agrees that all of the people who demonstrated on the Dartmouth College Green on the night of Wednesday. May 1 were peaceful and that riot police should never have been ordered or empowered to treat them as if they were just raging trespassers trampling on college property.
What they are now doing is a perfect solution: fully complying with College rules, they are demonstrating in a permitted area from 9:00 M to 9:00 PM each day--with no tents, which the rules now forbid. Furthermore, President Beilock has apologized--as indeed she should have--for inadvertently initiating this fiasco, and I trust her to make sure, as she says, that "anyone who was swept up in the chaos on the green but not in violation of any Dartmouth policy suffers no consequence."
But I must also say that President Beilock's banning of tents on the College Green is a brilliant move. It is the very best possible say to forestall the kind of confrontations that have roiled and disrupted colleges and universities across the country, and even now, the University of Chicago--which has long prided itswlf on its commitment to free speech--has finally decided to ban tents on its own grounds.
But President Beilock needed and now needs to do more. Before making the protesters disperse, she could and should have asked them to choose a small delegation (4-6 people) who would be free to make their case in her own office within a week. Thus assured that their demands would be promptly heard by the president herself, the protesters would have had no reason to go on breaking any rules. What would Dartmouth lose by such a concession? Nothing. But it would take a giant step forward in the direction of civil discourse--precisely what colleges and universities dedicated to humanistic values are meant to provide.
Parenthetically, Brown University has already met its protesters halfway, for in October, its Board of Trustees will actually vote on divestment. In consequence, a billionaire donor to Brown is "pausing" his donations--merely because Brown's trustees are considering divestment! So I ask you, my dear colleages, should Dartmouth be thus cowed by anyone who thinks the college should not even consider changing its policies? Or should it not prove to everyone here that it is always ready and willing to listen to its critics?
Besides being willing to take even that modest step, it is high time that Dartmouth and other institutions of higher learning in this country spoke out loudly and clearly for humanistic values. In a nation now polarized and virulently tribalized as never before, we have signally failed to furnish the sort of guidance that our country desperately needs.
Last fall, when President Claudine Gay of Harvard was asked by a Congressional committee why Harvard was tolerating "calls for genocide," Gay simply failed to explain that calls for "intifada"--which Harvard does tolerate--were not calls for genocide, any more than the American Revolution called for the genocide of the British people. "Intifada" means simply "uprising against occupation," which in turn means simply calling for an independent state of Palestine.
So it pains me to find Lewis Gilbert, Professor of Hebrew Studies at Dartmouth, equating the protesters with the Ku Klux Klan. In today's New York Times (May 8), Thomas Friedman writes that he is "deeply uncomfortable as a Jew" to see the protesters charged with antisemitism--let alone the Klan version. For after thirty years of experience in the Middle East, Friedman firmly believes that the independence of Palestine--the two state solution--is the only way to peace there. If you truly believe there is any other way, Professor Gilbert, I would welcome your solution.
Unfortunately, the two-state solution is precisely what Israel'a Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has always opposed, and why he denounces all pro-Palestinian protests as the work of "antisemitic mobs." No, no, Mr. Prime Minister, it is emphatically NOT antisemitic to deplore the recklessness and ruthlessness of your policies.
In quest of the impossible goal of eradicating Hamas from Gaza, you defiantly insist on the right to kill limitless numbers of Palestinian citizens as well as to obliterate every last square inch of Gaza itself, and you are even now planning to attack Rafah, where over a million Palestinian civilians are helplessly trapped. That is why your policies are bitterly opposed not just by hundreds if not thousands of American Jews but also by a majority of your own people, who massively demonstrated against you before October 7 and who--as you well know--would vote you out of office in a heartbeat if you called an election right now.
Which brings me to the heartbreaking case of Annelise Orleck, the 65-year-old Professor of History and former Professor of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth who was thrown to the ground by riot police as they arrested her and who was at first banned from the campus for six months but has now--I am told--been re-instated. In any case, what
happened to Professor Orleck is absolutely inexcusable and should never be allowed to happen again to any peaceful protester here at Dartmouth or on any other college campus.
Professor Orleck is actually a model of what humanistic learning can do. As a Jewish woman who stood up on behalf of Palestinian rights, she heroically embodies what we have almost entirely lost in this polarized world: the capacity to imagine the suffering of the other.
Why is this so important?
Just see what happens when we try to solve our present problem by means of quantification alone--when we play the numbers game.
According to Wikipedia, Hamas killed 1339 Isrealis--mostly civilians-- on October 7.
In return, Israelis have now killed over 34,000 Palestinians in Gaza. Since an estimated 70% of the Palestinians killed have been civilians, Israelis have taken more than TEN Palestinian lives for every ONE Israeli killed, and since Netanyahu has vowed to go on attacking Gaza until he has eradicated Hamas (an impossible goal), the ratio wll keep on rising. And according to Bibi, it's all the fault of Hamas.
But if you find this ratio appalling, Bibi will insist that Israel has the right to defend itself, above all the right to take limitless revenge for the murder of six million Jews, which President Biden has just solemnly commemorated yesterday, Holocaust Day.
You can thus see how impossible it is to settle this matter by means of quantification and numbers alone. Each side believes that its suffering trumps the other's; each side demonizes the other; each side blames the other. There is no common ground of humanity on which we can share our feelings or find a way to break this deadly cycle of provocation, revcnge, and retaliation.
On my personal website, therefore, I have posted a truly radical proposal: require all first-year students at Dartmouth to take one full year--three terms--of a humanities course stretching from ancient to contemporary authors (jamesheff.com/articles/humanities.html)
Radical and even irrelevant (to the protests) as this proposal may sound, I believe that what happened here on the night of May first has made it still more urgently needed. Quite simply, we have never before so much needed what the unifying, imaginative, soul-building power of the humanities can give to our students.
Consider the timeless wisdom of ancient texts such as Homer's Iliad, the first great epic of war, the first great story of the killing we have relentlessly inflicted on each other for more than three thousand years. To be initiated into a mature humanity, students need to ponder and discuss among themselves such things as the great scene at the end of the Iliad, when King Priam of Troy goes to the tent of the Greek warrior Achilles, his mortal enemy, and on his knees begs him for the body of his son Hector, whom Achilles has killed in retaliation for Hector's killing of Achilles' beloved friend Patroclus. Thus caught up in the deadly cycle of provocation and revenge, both men shudder and weep together, and both men--I believe--can be heard weeping also for us.
Believe it or not, Annelise Orleck is not the only Jewish person who can imagine the suffering of Palestinians, and I'm sure there are Palestinians capable of imagining the suffering of Jews. But the only way we can build this capacity in the hearts and minds and souls of our students is to revive what was once offered to all first year students at Dartmouth: one full year of humanities courses--a common core of texts whose wisdom has resoundingly stood the test of time.
Right now there is not a single text--not ONE--that all Dartmouth students read. Under such conditions, how they can possibly experience the intellectually unifying power of humanistic education? How can they possibly discover for themselves what it means to be a truly educated human being above all other vocations?
But if you have any doubts about the market value of the humanities in the face of post-graduate debt, consider what GENERATIVE AI may do to entry level jobs in the financial industry. Only last month, an article in the NEW YORK TIMES painted a grim picture of what lies ahead. It turns out that jobs which now take new analysts several days to do can be done by Generative AI in seconds. And where then do our newly minted specialists in computer science go?
Should we not offer such students a much better alternative? For a start, consider why business needs the humanities just as much as the humanities need business and the funds it provides.
A recent essay on the topic in the Canadian Globe and Mail comes not from any management consultant or tech wizard but from Ira Wells, Professor of Literature at Victoria College, University of Toronto, but he repeatedly quotes from business leaders who argue with overwhelming evidence that the best preparation for success in business is a solid education in the liberal arts and above all in the humanities.
Wells concludes as follows:
"The humanities provide students with space to contemplate their own ends, their life's purpose, which is not to be undervalued in the midst of a mental-health crisis, and is not reducible to educational or career outcomes. A human being is not to be 'usurped by his profession,' wrote John Henry Newman in his book, The Idea of the University -- advice we are still learning to heed. We can recommit to the reciprocal relationship between the two -- or embrace the economic and spiritual immiseration that is our only alternative.
So, dear colleagues, I ask you to read my case for reviving the study of humanities at Dartmouth. If I were 30 years younger, I would gladly spearhead this effort myself. But since my age (85) and failing health make that impossible, I can only hope there lives among you just one person with the drive, dedication, and daring to make it possible. At the very least, will you pass a motion to launch a committee charged with exploring this proposal? I urgently hope so.
James A. W. Heffernan
Professor of English Emeritus