Duke University welcomes to its campus a non-academic conference sponsored and attended by supporters of Palestinian terrorism, offering to foot the bills for security. Questionable judgment, but I’d have to know more about Duke’s policies on such conferences to reach a conclusion. If Duke would be similarly hospitable to a conference of fundamentalist Christians and Jews who wish to expel all Palestinians from the “Land of Israel” in preparation for the coming/return of the Messiah, then I will grant that this is solely an issue of freedom of speech. Can’t believe that the fundamentalist conference would be welcomed at Duke? Neither can I.
Regardless, Jewish community activists warned that the venomous views of the conference organizers would inevitably cause a deterioration in the comfort-level and status of the Jewish community at Duke. Lo and behold, as soon as the conference ended, one of Duke’s star students, a recipient of a full tuition merit scholarship and a journalism award, penned a blatantly anti-Semitic article for the school newspaper. (I explain the broader political significance of this article at the end of this post.)
Duke President Richard H. Brodhead, somehow unable to demonstrate the famed sensitivity of university administrators to anything that smacks of “racism,” knows who the biggest victim of this fiasco is: himself. He writes:
In the weeks before the conference, I received many reasoned expressions of concern, but also some attacks on Duke’s decision that were astonishing in their virulence. Poor baby.
Brodhead adds:
Among the things I found troubling in these messages was the tendency to think of the conference’s supporters in this way: You, Duke student, can be thought of as belonging to a group that contains terrorists and terrorist supporters. Therefore, you are indistinguishable from terrorists and deserve as little opportunity to exercise your rights as they do.
One can understand the passion that underlies such a thought, but that does not prevent it from being highly dangerous. This is the disindividuating, dehumanizing logic of prejudice. It says, I already know you because I know your type—more truthfully, your stereotype.
Brodhead then goes on to analogize the anti-Semitic rantings of the Duke student to the slightly (but only slightly) overdrawn conclusion that individuals who belong to a group that they know “contains terrorists and terrorist supporters,” and give support to that group, are morally culpable for terrorism. Because you see, anti-Semitic stereotypes regarding Jews, and “stereotyping” those who belong to pro-terrorist organizations as being, well, pro-terrorist, are exactly the same thing, because they are both based on “the dehumanizing logic of prejudice.” The sorry state of intellectual discourse at Duke obviously starts at the top.
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