In a combination of two rather lengthy posts, Eugene Volokh provides the background and some discussion of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government professor Marshall Ganz rejecting a project for his class, “Organizing: People, Power, Change.” Three Israeli students proposed their project including a description of Israel as a “jewish Democracy.” Ganz said no.
- When the Parties met on February 27, 2023, Professor Ganz told the Students they could not describe Israel as a “liberal-Jewish democracy” because Israel is not democratic.
- In a March 2, 2023 email, Professor Ganz wrote that the Students’ statement of purpose was “not acceptable going forward,” and he instructed them to revise it. In a later email that night, Professor Ganz wrote, “I cannot permit [a debate of the question of ‘Jewish democracy’] to claim the very limited time and space in a class in which 116 students are enrolled to learn to practice organizing. Please find a way to describe your organizing project in terms that are respectful of others in the class.” {There is no evidence that the Students intended to debate whether Israel is a democracy in the Jewish homeland. According to Professor Ganz, certain teaching fellows sought to debate this issue, which Professor Ganz rightfully stopped.}
- When the Students told Professor Ganz that they would not change their purpose, he told them they would be responsible for the “consequences” of their decision, and later clarified that by consequences, he meant “fulfillment of course requirements.”
This resulted in an investigation, which produced a report from an outside law firm concluding that Prof. Ganz violated the students’ free speech and engaged in “discrimination and harassment” based on national origin, ethnicity, and ancestry, which the report treated as embodying federal rules developed under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by rejecting the class project and threatening consequences if the students didn’t comply with his demand for change.
The report concluded that Ganz’s actions “treated the Students differently on the basis of their Israeli national origin and Jewish ethnicity and ancestry,” by “instruct[ing] the Students not to use as a purpose anything that describes Israel as a ‘Jewish democracy,’ which he did only after complaints by Muslim and Arab students.” Ganz had replied that he was focused solely on the topic, regardless of the ethnicity of the students, and would have likewise rejected a proposal from non-Jews who wanted to describe Israel as a “Jewish democracy.”
Eugene contends that characterizing Ganz’s actions as a Title VI violation goes too far.
The report never found that Ganz targeted the students because they were Jewish or Israeli, and indeed it seems unlikely to me. Ganz’s statement that
he was focused solely on the topic, regardless of the ethnicity of the students, and would have likewise rejected a proposal from non-Jews who wanted to describe Israel as a “Jewish democracy”
strikes me as quite credible: It appears that he, and the Muslim or Middle Eastern students whom he was trying to placate, were indeed concerned about the pro-Israel message rather than the identities of the messengers.
Eugene uses an analogy of an employer refusing to allow employees to wear pro-Hamas messages, regardless of their race or ethnicity.
There’s no reason to think the employer cares about the identity of the speaker (absent some specific evidence that the opposition to the message or the concern about disruption is a pretext for going after Muslims or Palestinians); he just doesn’t want what he sees as an evil or incendiary message.
Does the analogy hold in an educational setting (forget that it’s Harvard, and consider whether it would apply in a good school), where academic freedom and free inquiry are supposed to prevail? But then, the finding of discrimination was per Title VI, not First Amendment or academic freedom, and so analogizing it to Title VII employment discrimination makes more sense.
Clearly, Ganz sided against Israel and the position these three students sought to pursue. Good thing, as academics keep insisting, that they aren’t indoctrinating students, but I digress. Is this discrimination on the basis of race or ethnicity, or is it just a prof controlling his classroom topic in accordance with his academic freedom to reject characterizations like Israel being a Jewish democracy with which he disagrees? Is this discrimination on the basis of being Jewish or Israeli, or is it viewpoint discrimination which falls outside Title VI?
*Tuesday Talk rules apply, within reason.
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This is a tough one. It’s not that Volokh is wrong that viewpoint is different from religion or ethnicity, but viewpoint can be a proxy for religion or ethnicity, particularly when the prof is well aware that the students are Israeli and their “adversaries” are Arab.
Would the prof have been similarly dismissive had a Muslim characterized Israel as a Jewish Democracy? Perhaps, although the prof might not have been inclined to contradict a Muslim in that circumstance. But the fact remains that a Muslim didn’t raise the point, but three Israeli students did.
Yes, Ganz clearly chose sides. If the report is at all accurate, he supposedly did so to keep the peace in the middle east quad. Assuming the report’s factual summary is accurate, Ganz clearly handled this whole thing poorly.
In terms of whether this is discrimination based on a protected class vs. rejecting viewpoints vs. classroom control, I have more questions than answers: Why do Harvard grad profs feel the need to use role playing exercises to teach grad students how to “create an ask” to encourage others to attend an event that the other people are already interested in attending (even if they don’t necessarily “care about a cause in the first place”)? Was Ganz acting from a Harvard mandate to create “safe spaces” for the feelings (which is distinct from maintaining a space for civil debate) of people who intend on becoming future world leaders? Are Marshall Ganz and David Crosby twins? Does the fact that Ganz is also Jewish factor into any Title IX analysis?
That is nothing short of sublime.
Fun fact:
Jerry Garcia made a deal that he would play pedal steel for this song, and in return CSNY would teach the Dead how to better sing harmonies. The results can be heard on the albums Workingman’s Dead and American Beauty.
Thank you for this factoid. The transition of the Dead to the harmonies in Workingman’s Dead never made sense to me. It’s nice to have a 50-year mystery resolved.
I had a high school teacher who even for a teacher was left wing and particularly despised Nixon, even moreso (it came up because teaching US history). But, in part because I was a teenager, I chose for the topic of my term paper great things Nixon had done (focusing as I recall on SALT, affirmative action [good thing in sense of anti-racism for purposes of my paper] and opening up relations with China [again, seemed like a good thing in context and at time].
My teacher approved my topic, and I ultimately got a very good mark on the paper, and IIRC some comments like I had made some good points, because my public school teacher was an excellent teacher, and was clearly much fairer and open-minded than a Harvard prof.
I don’t see why the Federal government is invovled in this at all. This should be a state government issue. This country has left the rails.
Where I grew up, ‘smart and modern’ people use to laugh at the Birchers for saying, “Federal Money means Federal Control.”
The Birchers were 100% right.
If a University education is to have any value at all, it is going to come from the free-spirited debates that result when many different viewpoints are presented and allowed to compete on a level playing field. Some fields are more conducive to this than others; those who argue that 2+2=5 are going to win few debates, but political questions are in many cases matters of opinion, and excluding a particular opinion from the discussion because someone disagrees with it eliminates the only redeeming value of the university experience.
This case is a perfect example of the reason why our “education” system is dying. It no longer even pretends to be anything but an indoctrination system designed to turn out useful idiots.
A pro-Hamas message is an odd analogy to use as comparison to someone making a claim that Israel is a democracy. “Don’t take my disapproval personally. I would object to Hitler too.”
So is it because the prof doesn’t agree with the claim, and he only allows students to make claims that he himself agrees with? Or might he tell another student, “ok, I’m skeptical of your claim but make your best case for it,” whereas in this case he thinks it’s not just incorrect but it’s noxious because it’s Israel? I’m guessing students these days come up with some pretty crazy and inflammatory (not to mention discriminatory) claims, and that they get warm approval for them. One can imagine the counterpoint projects that the loudest students would propose to this one.
If it’s strictly the message the prof is responding to, not the student identities, the message is still rooted in that identity. Darth Cheeto complaining about a “shithole country” would cause even more outrage if he said it to one of its citizens. And this goes beyond that to telling the citizen they aren’t permitted to say it isn’t. The pro-Hamas campus faction probably gets more support.
Maybe it is a simple matter of him sincerely believing the project’s claim lacked rigor, and he applies that standard across the board. But really, does it seem at all likely that a professor who similarly rejected a project proposed by 3 Black students lauding Black Lives Matter, because he believed the movement was dishonest and corrupt, would not very loudly condemned as perpetuating racism specifically against those students? It seems unlikely the prof could even show up on campus afterward without it becoming an Evergreen State mob scenario.
Perhaps analogizing to Muslims / Jews / Israel is not the right way to go.
What about a student claiming America is a democracy? Would this also be verboten?
If so, I’m inclined to let it slide. If not, the fact that only one side tends to claim Israel is a democracy in these kinds of situations makes the situation smell.
Not sure it’s odious enough to be actionable under Title VI… but it stinks.