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| A University Occupation in The Netherlands - via de Volkskrant |
Here is my best effort to reconstruct the reasoning behind these occupations.
Premise 1. The Israeli government is doing terrible things in Gaza and should stop
P2. If there is something I can do to make a terrible thing stop then I ought morally to do it
P3. This university in my city has a student exchange programme with some universities in Israel
P4. If I disrupt the operations of this university sufficiently, they may agree to end the exchange programme in exchange for ending the disruption [Intermediate goal]
P5. Ending the exchange programme would [by some mysterious means] make the Israeli government stop doing terrible things [Final goal]
Conclusion. Therefore, I ought to disrupt the university
I think there are three major ethical failures in this argument.
- Odious ends-means reasoning (P4)
- Lack of legitimacy (P2)
- Narcissistic causal reasoning (P5)
1. Hurting Innocents to Achieve A Noble Goal
The goal is to get Netanyahu's government to radically change its behaviour towards those living in the territories it illegally occupies, which amount to massive crimes against humanity and the laws of war. There's nothing wrong with that goal - I endorse it too. (In the sense that I would prefer that world to this world, other things being equal. Not in the sense that I should try to bring it about.)
However, the means by which this goal is intended to be accomplished does not involve those responsible for continuing to commit those evil actions. Instead the target is the ordinary members of the local university - students and teachers - who have nothing at all to do with those crimes. The plan to achieve the goal requires deliberately doing things which are known to be bad to these innocent people: disrupting their lives, studies and jobs, as well as creating financial costs (repairing vandalism, hiring more security, etc) for the university as an institution.
Moreover, the badness of the actions is not incidental but essential to the occupiers' plan to achieve their intermediate goal. By doing these bad things the occupiers place pressure on the management of the university to solve the problem their actions have created. Management must choose between acceding to the occupiers' demands, or else escalating by sending in the police to remove them and having the resulting violence as an enduring stain on their conscience and the reputation of the university.
2. A Feeling of Moral Righteousness Does Not Give a Right to Rule
The first moral problem with occupations is that they deliberately target innocents as a means to their noble end.
The second moral problem is more subtle and not necessarily shared by all occupiers - only the ones who are actually students/employees of the university in question and claim on the basis of their membership status a special right to determine how the university operates. The problem here is that these occupiers constitute a tiny minority of all the tens of thousands of members and stakeholders of the typical university. What gives this particular group the right to appoint themselves the rulers of the university?
Actually this is a general problem with coercive protests in a democracy - the kind that go beyond peaceful demands for attention to attempting to imposing economic costs and disruption on society until the government gives in to their demands. In the case of a democracy the illegitimacy of coercive protestors is clear: having manifestly failed to persuade enough people to their view they are attempting to bypass democracy and impose their views anyway.
In the case of universities the illegitimacy of coercive protests is less clear. Universities are not democratic communities, but hierarchical and bureaucratic organisations. So the fact that the occupiers have failed to persuade a majority of its employees and customers to their view is not decisive. Instead we should focus on a thinner (Kantian) test of moral legitimacy: can the occupiers justify their actions by reference to a moral principle that they consistently follow?
Another way of putting this is to ask whether these particular anti-Israeli government occupiers believe that the method they have adopted is the right way for governance decisions by universities to get made. This can be cashed out by asking if they would think it was acceptable for small groups of people passionately committed to goals they disagree with (such as supporters of the Israeli government, or some populist right wing cause like anti-migration) to adopt the same coercive method to impose their will on the university.
If they would not see such behaviour as acceptable when done by other people for other goals, then they should admit that they do not actually believe this is a legitimate method for any members of a university to use to get their way.
3. University Occupations Will Not Achieve the Noble Goal
As it happens, the extortion technique of occupations is quite effective in getting university management to do what you want, so long as they can safeguard the core concern of the university: perpetuating and reproducing itself as an institution over time. In this project university directors have greatly benefited from the general goodwill that universities enjoy by default as non-profit seekers after knowledge which nearly everyone in the elite that manages society has pleasant memories of being a young person at. This has allowed the university industrial complex to syphon off a significant percentage of the economic production of modern societies; comparable to the military budget in many countries (e.g. the Netherlands: 1% vs 1.1%), at least before Putin made military spending great again. But this privileged social status is also a vulnerability that university directors are very keen to protect, even at the expense of other considerations such as 'academic freedom' that they claim to believe in. Hence the spinelessness of these apparently huge and powerful organisations when confronted with even minor challenges to their legitimacy (especially in comparison with ordinary profit-seeking companies, which don't expect everyone to like them).
So occupations have a good chance of succeeding at their intermediate goal: coercing universities into publicly severing relationships such as research collaborations and student exchanges with Israeli universities in order to protect themselves and their students and employees. The question remains, how does this intermediate goal contribute to achieving the final goal of stopping the terrible crimes that Netanyahu's government is ordering the Israeli military to commit?
How indeed? The links between universities are generally rather trivial affairs - teams working on different components of large research projects; conference invitations; students planning to spend a semester abroad. Ending these would inconvenience some people, especially if done abruptly, but it is otherwise entirely symbolic. This would not disrupt Israeli military command structures or logistics. Of course if every rich world university could be coerced into cutting off such relationships, this would have a significant effect on Israel's universities. Their researchers and students would be isolated from the outside world, which would be rather unpleasant for them, and even a career threat for the researchers.
Effectively this would be a collective punishment: people being punished for their membership of a group (residents of Israel) perceived as complicit in wrongdoing, based on the arbitrary criteria of being vulnerable to the moral indignation of some university students in rich countries. If this were the final goal of the university occupiers - and for some it does seem so - then it is simply odious. (Compare: punishing the whole population of Gaza for the actions of Hamas.)
However, at least some university occupiers are motivated by the belief that they are contributing to forcing a change in the Israeli government's brutal and criminal behaviour. It is unclear to me how this is supposed to work.
Israel has already received a great many signals of international disapproval, from UN resolutions to the ICJ case to managing to make even the German government a critic. The message is clear, but Netanyahu is choosing to ignore it. He appears willing to burn through all of Israel's geopolitical goodwill to maintain his assaults on Gaza and elsewhere. It seems unlikely that this would be the message that finally persuades him of the error of his ways.
Nor does it seem likely that socially isolating Israel's universities, employees, and customers would meaningfully change the domestic political calculations of Netanyahu, his allies, or his opponents.
Opinion polls suggest Netanyahu is widely blamed for the October 7 disaster and unlikely to win an election if it were held now. It is also generally understood that he is particularly keen to retain power in order to postpone or escape his various criminal trials that are currently on hold. To do that he needs to keep his current far-right coalition content while he plays for time and rolls the dice with other people's lives (classic 'gambling for resurrection'). He caught a break with his quick decisive war on Hezbollah, and another break when Syria fell to rebels and knocked out Iran's other ally on Israel's border. He seems to think that his luck may continue and he may still end up looking like a hero of Israel instead of its greatest threat. And, after all, if his gamble doesn't work out then he won't be any worse off. It is only other people's lives that are at stake, together with Israel's international standing, economy, security, rule of law, and commitment to liberal democracy.
Netanyahu's allies also face losing power and so are keen to advance as much of their Jewish supremacy agenda as possible while they can - by creating 'facts on the ground'; strategic decisions that would be hard to undo; and loathing from Palestinians that would make future peace deals almost impossible.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu's opponents are already as motivated as they can be - knowing that the very idea of Israel is at stake.
Is it an ethical problem to attempt to achieve a goal by means that are very unlikely to succeed? I think it can be understood in that way, as a morally blameworthy failing of character rather than as mere (excusable) stupidity. For what seems to be going on here is that the protestors have grossly exaggerated their centrality to the working of the world. It is as if they are the heroes in a story book world in which everything turns on them. Prime ministers and presidents are just waiting to hear and obey their strongly expressed opinions; guns will fall silent when they find a way to embarrass or blockade one key exporter; and so on. The reality is that terrible things are going on all the time in this world and are difficult for even those with real power and influence to do anything about. Most of the time we ordinary individuals can't actually help, and the feeling that we can is a narcissistic delusion that would make the world slightly worse if acted on.
Conclusion: Stop Occupying the Universities!
One of the embarrassing things about modern academia is its encouragement of simplistic and unrealistic understandings of the world, especially in the humanities and allied social sciences. Calling something capitalism or colonialism or racism or whatever makes a certain kind of person feel that they have achieved a sophisticated and deep understanding of an issue, when actually the opposite is true.
To be clear - the problem is not in making simplifications. All knowledge is simplification, the transformation of the manifold flux of experience into something we can grasp, share, and perform operations on. It cannot be otherwise. The problem lies in making bad simplifications, generally because one is not taking seriously that one is making simplifications in the first place (under the complicated looking jargon), and so has a responsibility to select the right ones and not to allow one's mind to be captured by those one chooses.
Failure to understand what they are actually doing leads to the epistemic arrogance and detachment from reality long associated with the 'ivory tower' of the academy, and when these pathologies are combined with excitable (especially young) people and situations one tends to see just this kind of ridiculous and also toxic political intervention. These people have learned from their university education that understanding the world is actually easy, a matter of mastering the right -isms. So they assume that making the world better should also be easy - 'we' just have to refuse to go along with wrongful things and give 'our' support to whichever side is most oppressed. The only real problem in the world is that the people in power refuse to do the obviously right things. So the student must become the Teacher (a particularly disagreeable kind of superhero), who tells the rest of us what to do, and then tries to make us do it even if we disagree.
Although I tried my best to reconstruct the reasoning for university occupiers in the most charitable way, a more accurate reconstruction is probably this:
P1. This is terrible!
P2. Something should be done!
P3. This is something I can do
Conclusion: This should be done
