The Volokh Conspiracy

Claiming that the student had the right to wear the costume is, I believe, a dodge and a moral cave-in to the very forces that made possible his entrance into the party and her subsequent acceptance (at least initially) of his costume. This is not a question of rights, after all, as Penn is a private university and can regulate what its students wear. No one is allowed to attend class or stroll across campus in the nude because such actions would be universally seen as morally unacceptable (or, at the least, socially disruptive). It would violate agreed-upon norms of public behavior. I also doubt students would be welcomed if they wore transparent clothing or pants with the crotch cut out.

What's missing from President Gutmann's statement, and from the larger academic community of which she is a part, are moral parameters within which every member of the community must act, short of the prohibition of criminal acts, which this of course is not. This applies particularly to statements or actions concerning terrorism, the war on Islamism, and the representations of those actions.

Had Mr. Saadi, or anyone else, shown up dressed in as Hitler, Pol Pot, David Duke wearing his Klan garb, Bull Conner, Sirhan Sirhan, John Wilkes Booth, a slave trader with a whip, a rapist, or any such person, he would have been identified immediately as representing someone, and perhaps some force, that is evil. Neither Ms. Gutmann nor anyone else would have objected to having him barred from her home and party; indeed, to have failed to act in such a way would have invited opprobrium.

But in the modern university, especially in anything relating to Middle East studies, the guardrails are down. After years of scholarship that consistently fails to investigate thoroughly, much less condemn, terrorism or jihadism, or which misrepresents both these historical actors and the consequences of their actions, can we be surprised at President Gutmann's lack of shock? With moral equivalency between bombers and the bombed, especially regarding suicide bombers, a mainstay of modern scholarship and pedagogy in Middle East studies, why wouldn't a young man presenting himself as a killer of innocents be laughed at rather than set straight by his intellectual and moral superiors--i.e., women like Amy Gutmann?

Apologias for terrorism and extremist politics breeds an atmosphere in which the intolerable becomes the everyday. I shudder to think where this will take us.