Chancellor Martin’s obscurantist and condescending op-ed piece (“Gaza war protests: This semester on campus must be different”), published in The Hill on Sept. 4, warrants response.

I deeply value the intellectual community I have found at WashU, and am regularly struck with admiration for the students, faculty, and staff who constitute it. That is why it pains me to see our community represented in a national news outlet by such a morally unserious statement. WashU deserves better.

The piece positions Martin as the adult in the room, balancing free expression with community members’ sense of safety, and the right to protest with the enforcement of time, place, and manner restrictions. Martin begins and ends with calls for active listening. Who could possibly object? 

I see many problems with the piece, but space allows for discussion of three. 

First, it offers yet more evasion on the ethics of WashU’s ties to Boeing. Martin, who is a political scientist, writes: “As a university chancellor, I can’t affect the course of the war in Gaza or redress its tragic impacts.” In the year since the horrific civilian deaths of Oct. 7, our campus has hosted protests explicitly dedicated to arguing that Chancellor Martin can feasibly affect the course of the war in Gaza, in a modest but meaningful way. He could do so by cutting the University’s extensive ties with Boeing, which builds many of the bombs used in Israeli war crimes in Gaza. 

The goal behind cutting ties with companies like Boeing has never been to do serious financial damage to them, or stop the flow of bombs directly. Any conceivable financial loss to Boeing through the actions of WashU, whatever the endowment’s investment status, would be a drop in Boeing’s budgetary bucket. Instead, the strategy is to use people-power and the authority of civic institutions to signal civil society’s widespread disapproval of Israeli human-rights abuses abetted with American funding. If done in concert with similar institutions, this would put pressure on the Biden-Harris administration to curtail civilian death in Gaza. The pressure would be exacerbated by the fact that it is an election year.

This goal is urgent because of the scale of civilian death in Gaza. Conservatively speaking, approximately 1 in 50 Gazans have been killed in the past year. I sincerely hope that I never become desensitized to that number. As the Israeli news outlet Haaretz details, the percentage is comparable to the Syrian civil war, but in that case the deaths accumulated over 13 years, not 10 months. 

Perhaps public consciousness and activism will be catalyzed again. I hope they will. But as of now, April and May were the window in which a national wave of divestments and severances could have occurred. To put it gently, Chancellor Martin chose not to facilitate that. His plea of helplessness is disingenuous. 

Second, by emphasizing that universities have a legal right to enforce their time, place, and manner restrictions and disruptions policies — a fact I’ve never heard disputed — Martin evades the question of when their enforcement is excessive. This is relevant to our campus in light of the April 27 protest. 

This article is not the place for a full recounting of the police response to that peaceful demonstration. The example of Steve Tamari will have to suffice. Professor Tamari teaches at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Tamari attended the protest, and while he stood by recording the arrests of other demonstrators, the police broke nine of his ribs and one of his hands. The Middle East Studies Association wrote an open letter to WashU condemning Tamari’s “inexcusable … brutalization.” 

Does Chancellor Martin feel the slightest unease about this? Martin writes with attempted eloquence that “[t]he lessons of last school year were forged in a crucible of duress.” As Orwell and others have long observed, gaseous formulations like this are designed to conceal more than to express. When Professor Tamari felt his ribs snap, was he aware that the cause was not the swarm of police on top of him (summoned by University leadership), but was instead a “crucible of duress”? Or did he have to wait for Martin to theorize this for him? We have much to learn from political science. 

And what were the “lessons … forged” on April 27? That it is wrong to put graying professors in the hospital for attending a peaceful protest — even if it is a legally admissible outcome? Or is it that WashU (“Proudly in St. Louis”) is private property, so he had it coming? 

Third: While I have no desire to tone-police or take artificial offense, the cruel irony of one remark by Martin cannot go unnoted. 

Martin pronounces that “a university campus is no place for a tent city.” Every single university in Gaza, attended and taught at by our (and the Chancellor’s) academic colleagues, has been destroyed or critically damaged by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF). 

UN experts put it bluntly: “The persistent, callous attacks on educational infrastructure in Gaza have a devastating long-term impact on the fundamental rights of people to learn and freely express themselves, depriving yet another generation of Palestinians of their future.” The relevant term is “scholasticide,” defined in the UN’s statement as “the systemic obliteration of education through the arrest, detention or killing of teachers, students and staff, and the destruction of educational infrastructure.”

One of the destroyed universities is the Islamic University of Gaza. You can find videos online of the IDF blowing it up. Professor Kamalain Shaath, the former president of the university, said in February: “We have the will and faith in our ability to resume the educational process immediately after the war ends, and we have done so before. … I was at the Islamic University (at its founding in 1978), and we started there from tents, and we can return from tents again.” 

Indeed, as of February, a small amount of university coursework was being conducted from the “tent city” where the Islamic University of Gaza once stood. This resilience, a testament to the human spirit, reflects the Palestinian people’s oft-observed high literacy rates and pride in education. 

One wonders what Chancellor Martin would make of this mixing of tents and schooling. On the one hand, it would be good of the Chancellor to inform Gaza’s educators of their “error” in blending the two. But this is unlikely to happen: As he has already explained, Chancellor Martin is unable to affect what happens in Gaza. 

WashU deserves a leader who is not so cynical — cynical, that is, about the capacity of collective action to effect change, and about the WashU community’s ability to recognize euphemism and self-exculpation.