Institutional Neutrality in a Time of Genocide

Christopher Iacovetti

I want to begin these reflections with an episode I experienced as part of the UChicago United for Palestine (UCUP) negotiating team. Sitting across the table from President Paul Alivisatos, our team was asked what the university administration could do to build trust with student protestors and move toward a negotiated ending of the quad encampment. As a step in this direction, we proposed that Alivisatos issue a university statement opposing Israel’s campaign of scholasticide in Gaza – that is, its systematic destruction of Gazan universities and targeted assassination of Gazan academics. Given the university’s professed commitment to defending free expression “throughout the world” and to “supporting the global academic community in times of great need,” we thought this a fairly uncontroversial proposal. There could scarcely be a greater threat to free expression and academic freedom, after all, than the wholesale destruction of a people’s higher education system.

Alivisatos disagreed. Not only, in fact, did he dismiss the idea of making a public statement about Israel’s scholasticide; he refused to concede as a factual matter that Gazan universities had been bombed at all. The problem was not that Alivisatos disbelieved or did not know that such bombings had occurred. (When offered videographic proof, he dismissed it as irrelevant.) Rather, the problem was Alivisatos’s insistence that for him to acknowledge the mere existence of these bombings – even privately, even with evidence, even off the record – would be to take a “political position” and thereby compromise the university’s policy of “institutional neutrality.” After all, Alivisatos explained, there are “people who would disagree” with the facts in question.

At one level, Alivisatos’s position is self-evidently absurd. While the University’s Kalven Report does urge administrators to refrain from “expressing opinions on the political and social issues of the day,” it nowhere prevents them from acknowledging basic factsabout the world. (There are “people who would disagree” with the reality of anthropogenic climate change, for example, but that does not prevent the university from recognizing it.) In certain “extraordinary instances,” moreover, the Kalven Report not only permits but explicitly urges the university to oppose sociopolitical measures that threaten its “values of free inquiry.” This has been the operative logic behind statements the university has readily issued about the invasion of Ukraine, affirmative action, Trump’s immigration policies, and a range of other politically charged issues. Consistency would demand that the same logic be applied to Israel’s scholasticide in Gaza.

Compelling as it may be to highlight the university’s double standards, however, there is something potentially short-sighted about this approach. For while it is true in the abstract thatfacts about Palestine are no more “political” than, say, facts about Ukraine, it is crucial to stress that the University does not exist in the abstract. The “supposedly hermetic world of higher education,” as Steven Salaita reminds us, is “in fact symbiotic with the real world.” Situated among existing concentrations of corporate and political power and predominantly governed by ruling-class trustees, corporate universities process and reproduce the same “prejudices,” “market conditions,” and “geopolitical common sense” at play in other US industries. This context is crucial for understanding what forms of speech these universities do and do not treat as political. For the University of Chicago, as for those in power generally, speech is most political when it threatens to disrupt existing power structures and ideological truisms, least political when it reinforces them. Expressions of sympathy for Ukrainians suffering a “devastating humanitarian crisis” as a result of Russia’s “ongoing invasion,” for example, threaten neither the material interests nor the geopolitical ambitions of the US ruling class. The university therefore classifies such statements not as political speech but as displays of student care and basic human decency. Nor does the university consider hosting the Obama Presidential Center to be a political act – a position that many Libyans, Yemenis, and others would no doubt find bizarre and infuriating. Glorifying the Obama presidency is, at this point in time, a politically safe act, one wholly unthreatening to the status quo. It is therefore – from the university’s perspective – not a political act at all. 

Speech about Palestine, however, is a different story. If there is one thing Palestine is not, it is “politically safe.” Indeed, merely mentioning Palestine by name is enough to ruffle certain ruling class feathers – which is presumably why Alivisatos has refused to do so publicly. This situation has little to do with the Palestinians themselves and everything to do with the central place Israel occupies in the ecosystem of US power. There is nothing mysterious or particularly surprising about the fact that it occupies this position. Since the 1970s, Israel has functioned as a strategic outpost for both domestic and imperial US interests, ranging from weapons manufacturing to energy production to the maintenance of regional US hegemony. This being the case, Israel’s centrality to US interests owes neither to lobbyists nor primarily to a deep ideological commitment to Zionism on the part of US elites but to the fact that Israel has been effectively annexed into the corporate and political power structure upon which the ruling class (and the university) depends. To voice support for Palestinian liberation – or even to acknowledge basic facts about Palestinians’ oppression at Israel’s hands – is therefore to threaten not only Israeli colonialism but also the US status quo in which both Israel and the University participate.

It is against this backdrop, I would like to suggest, that we can best understand the hostility with which the University of Chicago and other US universities have responded to the ongoing student intifada in support of Gaza. The fundamental problem is not that these universities operate with double standards, refusing to support Palestinians while being happy to support Ukrainians. More fundamentally, the problem is that US universities operate all too consistently by a single standard: fidelity to the status quo dictated by US power, no matter what form it takes. 

For the past 230 days, this status quo has taken the form of genocide in Gaza.[1] Contrary to public perceptions, the US has not merely been complicit in this genocide but has actively presided over it. Since the start of Israel’s onslaught, the US government has sent it more than a hundred distinct arms shipments, gifted it more than eighteen billion dollars in unconditional military aid, bombed multiple countries in its support, slashed funding for UNRWA, and vetoed no less than four UN Security Council resolutions demanding humanitarian pauses and ceasefires. Israeli officials, for their part, have candidly admitted that their Gaza onslaught could not continue without US support. What we are witnessing, then, is not simply an Israeli genocide, but a US-Israeli genocide. Whether most of us realize it or not, the blood of Gaza’s children is on the hands of US citizens and institutions no less than it is on the hands of Israeli society.

In such a situation – what Hannah Arendt called the “intrusion of criminality into the public realm” – there can be no neutral option: “whoever participates in public life at all, regardless of party membership or membership in the elite formations of the regime, is implicated in one way or another in the deeds of the regime as a whole.” It is this basic truth that student protestors have been insisting upon for months, despite their administrators’ cynical attempts to evade it. In calling for divestment from Israel’s genocide, they have in effect been calling on their administrators to cease operating as cogs in the machinery of US power and instead to act, finally and for once, as moral and institutional stops to it. Hiding behind the rhetoric of “institutional neutrality” will not deliver administrators from the burden of this decision. On the contrary, as Jasbir Puar points out, it will only deepen their culpability: “It is precisely by denying culpability or assuming that one is not implicated in violent relations toward others, that one is outside them, that violence can be perpetuated.”[2]

Even now, 230 days into this genocide, a clear call is emanating from the Gaza ghetto: never again. There can be no neutral option in the face of this call – least of all on the part of academic institutions already invested in Israel’s arms suppliers and implicated in Gaza’s suffering. For administrators like Alivisatos to justify their ongoing silence and inaction in the name of “institutional neutrality” is merely to confess their abiding allegiance to the status quo, that is, to US-Israeli genocide. This in itself is a political decision, albeit an ugly and cowardly one. Ultimately, the question facing Alivisatos and administrators around the country is not whether they will act politically in response to Gaza’s call, but how they will do so: as functionaries of ruling-class power or as principled human beings. Granted, the latter choice may involve a degree of personal sacrifice and career risk – but has that stopped students from making it?

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[1] Within this timeframe, Israel has killed or wounded more than 116,300 Palestinians, destroyed over 70 percent of Gaza’s homes, targeted hundreds of humanitarian sites and aid convoys, displaced more than 85 percent of Gaza’s population, and driven 1.1 million civilians to the brink of famine.

[2] I first encountered the quotations by Puar and Arendt in Michael Rothberg, The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (Stanford, Calif., 2019).

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Christopher Iacovetti is a PhD student in religion and literature at the University of Chicago, where he organizes with Students for Justice in Palestine. The views expressed here are his own.