This past April, a Minnesota-based website named Racket published an op-ed arguing that The University of Minnesota is silencing faculty who support Gaza and its people. On the face of it, the article appears to be nothing more than internal academic politics that would be of little interest to the general public. In reality, though, the diatribe highlights some of the most important debates about universities and their staff: What are universities for? Are professors indoctrinating their students? How much influence should faculty have over university policy? What moral responsibilities do institutions have to acknowledge purported injustice? How wide-ranging should we assume faculty knowledge to be and do professors deserve to be role models simply by virtue of our titles? The op-ed is a variation of The Dunning-Kruger Effect, the phenomenon of specialists mistakenly believing that their expertise in one subject gives them advanced knowledge about other non-related subjects. What then does this do to the op-ed’s credibility? To the credibility of the University of Minnesota? These philosophical questions and more are touched upon in my response, so I thought it would be of interest to PQED readers.

It is worth reporting that I first submitted this response for publication to Racket itself, but its editors refused to even acknowledge my submission or follow-up email. They seem to lack enough courage or integrity to openly reject disagreement. Also, this post is different from the original submission, containing stylistic and substantive changes made possible by no longer having a word limit.

In his recent opinion piece on Racket, “University of Minnesota to Faculty: Shut Up About Palestine, Please. Also Anything Else,” English professor Nathaniel Mills decries censorship at the University of Minnesota. He claims that his administration is trying to make sure that the “massacre of Palestinians in Gaza since 2023…is invisible at the U.”

I am not a faculty member at the University of Minnesota; I am at a nearby institution. Yet, what happens there is particularly interesting to me. I recently had to help my daughter decide where to go to college and she was accepted to the U of M (she declined). I regularly advise my pre-law students where to apply for law school and many consider Minnesota (more end up at Mitchell Hamline, instead). And, as someone who works in the shadow of that more prestigious school, I like to keep my eye on what my colleagues there are doing as a metric for comparison.

Mostly, though, I couldn’t get the opinion piece out of my head because it is an archetypical example of what I describe in my new book Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground. Most arguments about Israel and Palestine are not arguments at all but are virtue-signaling jockeying of performative moral superiority. This is what Mills is doing and it’s unconscionable.

In the article, Professor Mills tells us several things:

First, he is “currently preparing to teach the work of Black radical poet June Jordan, an unapologetic and principled advocate of Palestinian liberation.”

Second, the University of Minnesota’s administration is trying to silence Palestinian advocacy despite an open letter signed by hundreds of U of M community members.   

Third, statements articulating this advocacy were deleted from department websites, which led the U of M Board of Regents to forbid “academics of University of Minnesota units (departments, research centers, etc.) from issuing collectively authored statements on any matters of public concern through university channels.” Hundreds of faculty and staff denounced the new policy.

Professor Mills elaborated on all of this in great detail, mixing emotion-laden judgmental language with eyerolling dismissals of concerns about antisemitism. He then backhandedly concludes by implying that the university president doesn’t care about any victims of oppression other than Jews

So, what’s really going on here?

I think it’s important to recognize that the wide outcry over these policies Professor Mills cites is a chimera. Hundreds of community members signed the first statement, and hundreds of faculty and staff protested the resulting decision, but there are roughly 55,000 students at the University and 25,000 employees at the Twin Cities campus. Hundreds is hardly an outcry. Now, this doesn’t make the signatories wrong. We should not equate being in a miniscule minority with ignorance or misguidedness, but these numbers hardly point to crisis or outrage.

Mills is right that there are issues of truth and justice here. Philosophers will sometimes refer to “standpoint epistemology.” Summarized, this is the position that oppressed people have unique access to certain truths, and that the search for justice demands we pay special attention to them. I personally find this school of thought persuasive, but it doesn’t add support to Mills’s complaints, and it certainly doesn’t put Gaza in an absolutely privileged position when it comes to injustice. Both Israel and Palestine are homes for the oppressed, so both of their perspectives must be attended to.

Furthermore, standpoint epistemology doesn’t confer priority on the authors of of the open-letters. Faculty at the University of Minnesota are not themselves victims of marginalization, so there is no need to center their complaints. Sure, every person has a story and there are Israelis and Palestinians with great privilege, just as some University of Minnesota employees have led traumatic lives. But these rebuttals and their insistence that morality demands faculty be heard are no objection to the university’s claim that academics’ political statements have no place on their website.

Which brings us to Mills’s main claim, that the university has no justification to delete and forbid open letters penned by the faculty. As Mills himself recognizes, the university is not forbidding anyone from teaching, publishing, or advocating any point of view. Instead, it simply insists that the university website only house official university positions, whether on administrative or departmental pages. I don’t see the problem here.

Again, there is a philosophical question at the heart of this debate: what purpose does a university website serve? For Mills, it is to disseminate employees’ political grievances. For administrators, it is branding and recruitment. For outsiders like me, it provides a sense of what my daughter, my students, or I might experience, were we to connect with the University of Minnesota community. If the website were what Mills hopes it will become, a medium for faculty’s personal political priorities, what the university would actually be advertising is hostility, chaos, and expected obedience to left-wing catechism. It would be revealing to its readers that new members of the university should expect a culture of unease and continuous demands for allegiance. This, by the way, would be equally true if the website posted public statements in support of Israel, or of MAGA, or of the NRA. This isn’t about silencing Palestinian advocacy.

Mills might object that there is a fundamental question of justice here, that the university has the moral obligation to speak truth to power, to give voice to the silenced, and to center victims and their plights. In fact, universities have no such obligation. Individual faculty might have it, although I’m not so sure whether this is the case for Accounting or Metallurgy professors whose subjects are technical and narrowly defined. In contrast, universities are complex institutions. They are not moral agents in the same way people are and if they do have responsibilities to counter injustice these obligations aren’t met by posting innocuous and overly simplistic assertions of political allegiance that require no follow-up. It is precisely this difference between individual and collective moral accountability that necessitates attention to the legal adjudication of whether corporations are people, but that is another issue altogether. Justice is hard.

A university’s job is to create and disseminate knowledge. Its secondary purposes are to educate citizens, train future employees, and promote economic development. To do all of these things, it needs to cultivate a safe and stable environment within which research and debate flourish, cross-disciplinary communication is promoted, and community members can explore and experiment with the unknown. Understanding the plight of Palestinians is most certainly one tiny component of this but so is recognizing the reality of living in Israel, as is searching for the cure for cancer, training engineers, and teaching people how to convert Microsoft Word documents to PDFs. The university website is not a repository for political conflict in each and every field.

But isn’t victimization of Palestine special? Must we not bend the website policies in just this instance so we can shout about Palestinian victimization from the hilltop, even if we do it for no one else? Isn’t what happens to the people in Gaza more important than, say, the displacement in Congo, or the war in Syria, or the Trump administration’s denial of FEMA funds to the tornado victims of Kansas, or the city of Minneapolis gentrifying neighborhoods as they expand public-transportation infrastructure? ? Many people would have us think so, but this is a matter of contentious opinion and herein lies the root of Mills’s testimony. He wants attention. He wants everyone to know that he and a small group of faculty believe in Palestine above and beyond everything and anyone else, and he want us to celebrate them for it.

Mills begins the article by telling us that he will be teaching a “Black radical” pro-Palestinian poet (his term, not mine). Why does he include this? It has no bearing on the argument. No one is stopping him from doing it. There are no syllabi police at the University of Minnesota. Nevertheless, he needs us to know what he is teaching so much, that he places that information front and center, even before he reports on the suffering of those he purports to speak for.

He longs so much for our knowledge of his personal teaching choices that he eradicates Israeli suffering to highlight it. Consider his second paragraph, the one immediately following his announcement of poet choice. It begins “This semester, the U of M administration has taken steps to ensure that the massacre of Palestinians in Gaza since 2023—which anyone paying attention to Palestine could see was coming on October 7, 2023—is invisible at the U.”

Don’t forget that October 7^th was the day that Hamas, the Palestinian government, invaded the Israeli countryside, killed 1,139 people including young children and babies, took 250 hostages, and raped and pillaged their way through homes and a music festival. For Mills, this is just a date on which Israel strategized to massacre people.

Isn’t the inherent injustice of Israel’s response evident in its undeniable predictability? To answer this, let’s analogize Mills’s sentence structure to see what he is actually reporting: the home invaders were shot, which anyone paying attention could see was coming the day they broke into the house. The rapist was tried for his crimes, which anyone could see coming the day he chose to rape his victim. The allies invaded France, which anyone could see coming the day the Germans marched in and took over Paris. Predictability has no necessary moral consequent.

Mills might challenge the aptness of the analogies here, but this would be a separate discussion. I’m happy to have it elsewhere. What is more important is our desperate need to have a real and nuanced conversation about innocent civilians being victimized. I myself discuss it in my book and on my radio shows here, here, here, and here.

Was this dismissal of Israeli victims just poor phrasing on his part? This is unlikely; poetry professors know the power of words. In fact, a few paragraphs later he makes it much worse by referring to “those October 7 Hamas attacks against Israel.” The operative word here is “against,” which reverses the causality from one of aggressor to one of victim. If Hamas had simply attacked Israel, it would be the responsible party. Instead, Mills reports that Hamas attacks against Israel, making the perpetrators the reluctant defenders.

Tellingly, this is the only time Mills uses the word “attacks” in the entire essay, choosing “massacre” to refer to Israel’s actions instead, not once, but twice. First, he considers every action since October 7th a massacre and second, he uses the term massacre to refer to Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon. What he doesn’t bother to tell his readers is that the 1982 Lebanon War was a response to the terroristic Palestinian Liberation Organization repeatedly attacking Israel from within Lebanese borders, and that it was undertaken in cooperation with two different Lebanese Christian military organizations. Israel’s withdrawal later was also a crucial element in Iran’s reliance on this same area of Lebanon as its base of operation for Hezbollah’s attacks on Israel.

I do not mean to argue that Israel is without guilt. They did horrible things during the Lebanon War just as they are causing inconceivable suffering in Gaza right now (again, see my book). But international conflict is incredibly complicated and every political authority in this particular iteration is acting at their worst, not just Israel. Context is always relevant but Mills doesn’t want his readers to have any. This is as true for his essay as it is for the open-letters he defends. Faculty-written proclamations posted on department websites are not nuanced documents.

So, who was Hamas attacking against on October 7th? Mills wants his readers to think that it was Israel, the nation, instead of acknowledging the humanity of the unarmed non-combatants who were actually slaughtered. Remember, Hamas murdered real people who were neither policy makers nor members of the government. They were not “collateral damage” from an attack on a nation’s capital or a military base. They were not bureaucrats working in government buildings under fire. They were innocent individuals who weren’t doing anything immanently dangerous other than maybe taking ecstasy and having unsafe sex at a rave.

There is a lot to process here, so take a moment to ask yourself whether Al Qaeda was attacking the Twin Towers or attacking against America on September 11th, 2001. Ask also whether the bankers, lawyers, tourists, commuters, and others who died in those attacks were legitimate targets because they worked in New York City. Finally, ask whether the janitor who was mopping the World Trade Center floor that morning deserved to die because while they might look like they were simply cleaning up a spilled soda can, what they were really doing was “mopping America.”

I wrote above that we need to have a conversation abut killing innocents in war. This need is not new. Yet, as his writing shows, if Mills also thinks we should concern ourselves with innocent lives, he doesn’t seem to want to include Israelis in that discussion. Apparently, only Palestinians need be eulogized. Who is making whom invisible?

Let me add, by the way, that Mills is no expert on the conflict. His specialization according to his department website is “20th-century US and African American Literature; Literature and Culture of the Great Depression; The Literary Left and Communism in the US; Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright.” His C.V. (academic resume) confirms that his scholarly focus is on America, not the Middle East. What Nathaniel Mills appears to be instead is someone who needs street-cred, someone for whom announcing his allegiance to Palestine is essential to advertising himself as a leftist and a radical. He has situated himself in just the right way to counter perceptions of bourgeois privilege that come with his cushy tenured position in a doctoral-granting English department in the Upper Midwest.

I’m not an expert on Israel-Palestine relations either, by the way, and my job is probably equally cushy. Also like Mills, I have been very vocal about my opinions, so I don’t take issue with his outspokenness. But I do not demand that my personal allegiances be announced on my university website or through a university-distributed open letter endorsed by my department. Every position I take is in my own name.

I am not suggesting here that Professor Mills doesn’t actually care about Palestinians. Neither am I arguing that he is wrong to do so. Advocacy is often a moral imperative. In fact, my book explicitly argues that neither Israel nor Palestine has the moral high ground, that they are both trapped in immorality, and that advocates especially need to confront head-on the real nature of the trap Israel and Palestine have jointly made for themselves.

My point is that Mills’s basic assumptions about the one-sidedness of the conflict are actually hotly contested issues and essential topics for academic political debate. As such, they should not be reduced to public pronouncements that allow faculty members to play as if they are on the frontline of social-justice activism. Open letters on department websites do nothing. They do not make Palestinian lives better, they make no new audiences aware of the problem, and they have no meaningful effect other than advancing signatories’ reputations amongst themselves. They are a form of self-gratification.

Furthermore, it is not at all clear that the accusations of antisemitism he dismisses early in the article without evidence aren’t at play here; this is up for debate, too. So is the accuracy of describing Israel’s actions as genocide. I discuss this term and its oft-cited partner “colonialism” in my book, concluding that using them is, in fact, antisemitic. I build these claims on a nuanced argument that takes time, patience, and generosity, founded on significant historical evidence. In contrast, Mills wants the university to accept all of his moral conclusions as resolved and he wants its website to disseminate his cadre’s certainty as if it were fact, when its not. Posting such letters is a narcissistic pronouncement of infallibility, to say nothing of the dangerous disregard political posturing holds for dissenting department members or the untenured who feel pressured to sign-on because they are in unsecured positions.

Professor Mills and his colleagues are not being silenced by their employer. They just aren’t getting free publicity to bolster their personal brand. The University of Minnesota Board of Regents was right to deny Mills and his cohort access to their marketing platform and I think better of them for doing it so decisively.

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Israel, Palestine, and the Trolley Problem: On the Futility of the Search for the Moral High Ground is open source and may be downloaded and shared for free. A paperback copy is available on Amazon.com for $7. More information can be found here or at the publisher’s website: The Digital Press of the University of North Dakota.

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Dr. Jack Russell Weinstein is Chester Fritz Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Institute for Philosophy at Public Life at the University of North Dakota. He is the author of four books and the host of two public radio shows, Why? Philosophical Discussions of Everyday Life and Philosophical Currents.

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