In the second half of their conversation, Archon Fung and Khalil Gibran Muhammad continue a discussion of campus protests, civil disobedience, and the role speech and democracy as universities across the country grapple with how to respond to this latest wave of protest activity.
Archon Fung:
I want to make a small point, and then go to a bigger one in response. And you probably will say I'm naive. And you'll be quite right about that. So, one of the things I've been thinking about-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
I really admire self-referential, I have to tell you. It's very endearing, Archon.
Archon Fung:
... oh, I've been thinking about the willingness of, and if you look at these survey responses, both people on the left and people on the right to their tolerance for political violence to achieve their ends. And I see that as part of the polarization of society, but what I didn't anticipate in this round is the tolerance of many, many people for the really tough policing on campuses.
And I see that as almost of a piece as society is getting more coarse. And whatever your point of view, you're more willing to endorse or support coercion in order to accomplish those ends. And Khalil, at the Ash Center, we have a number of faculty.
And a couple of weeks ago, we did an active threat training. We installed panic buttons for some faculty who have received direct threats. And I've been working in a university 20 years. And I never thought we'd... Nothing like that ever occurred to me, but yet, here we are. And now, I wanted to return to the... There's...
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Can you hold that train of thought?
Archon Fung:
Oh, yeah.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Because I do want to respond to this.
Archon Fung:
Please.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
I won't call it naivete, but I will say that, as someone who has not only my ancestry ties me back to people whose very existence in this country was framed as property and dehumanization. And no one listening to this conversation needs to be walked through the history of 400 years.
But I just want to own that it's not just my own scholarly perspective here, but my own lived and personal experience that, in this country, a majority of Americans have consistently made peace with the weaponization of the law to subvert my humanity or my rights or my ability to speak freely when others had those rights.
And again, I think it's just important to remind people that the Republican presidential nominee has promised to pardon all of the insurrectionists who participated on January 6th, that the Republican Party that, at this point, effectively controls the Supreme Court.
And I know that's controversial, as a matter of fact, but based on Supreme Court appointments under Trump, as well as the lower house or lower Congress, has itself essentially said that this didn't happen in the way that some of those same Republican members said it happened on January 7th.
Archon Fung:
This is a version of the two facticities problem.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yeah, but I personally reject two realities and two facticities. I will accept different perspectives, but on certain facts, what happened on January 6th was an absolute violation of the law, a violation of norms, and amounted to an insurrection based on President Trump's own rhetoric and calls for people to stop Mike Pence from certifying the election.
And so, there is no moral authority coming from that community when it comes to policing student protesters and upholding some notion of democratic values. It just simply doesn't hold water. And I just want to add to this mix before we move on from Columbia's NYPD response to the UCLA police response and to what some people may have seen over the weekend at the University of Mississippi-
Archon Fung:
I did see that.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... which brings us full circle to my history, to my people, who are from Mississippi. And here is a university...
Archon Fung:
It was pretty hard to watch that video.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Oh, my gosh. It's unbelievable, but what is not unbelievable... It is unbelievable. Let me own that. It is unbelievable to watch the faces of a huge number of counterdemonstrators, overwhelmingly White men, White young men in particular, who were heckling a single Black woman, who had, it seemed from the angle of the footage, crossed a barrier where she was supposed to be on one side-
Archon Fung:
Oh, I didn't notice that.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... the other demonstrator. It's not clear from the video coverage, but one assumes that she wasn't out there completely by herself, but that she had stepped forward from behind a barrier. And you have a marshal, a White man who likely works for the university, who is trying to keep her from moving any further.
And what I saw, Archon, what I saw in the faces of those young men, was the generational transfer of the same commitment to owning this country and all the ways in which White men have historically owned it, whose roots, their own roots, just like I own mine, are deeply steeped in White supremacist ideas in this country, in a state that I believe still contains the Confederate flag in its state emblem.
And if I got that wrong, sorry, folks, I got one thing wrong, but if they got rid of it, it was only a couple of years ago, in a state where the Emmett Till Monument is regularly shot with bullet holes and is bullet written. And I could go on with the state of Mississippi, but here is the news story from this weekend.
When that Black woman positioned herself closer to this, I call, mob of counter-demonstrators yelling White supremacist things and mocking her as a monkey, which was verified by numerous news reports, and saying other things that weren't a fit to be reported in the news, the governor of Mississippi, Tate Reeves, tweeted back a video where he showed highlights of it, of the counter-demonstrators, with The Star-Spangled Banner played on top of it, along with a Mississippi congressperson, whose name forgotten, basically saying, "This is the appropriate response to these people. This is America standing up."
So, when we talk about competing realities, we talk about the fair and balance of different viewpoints. It is not a fair fight. And what I mean by that is the weight of the state from Congress to governors to New York City's finest and its officials, we are still seeing the historical weight of oppression in the United States against people who had to fight for their very existence, let alone the fight for literacy and the fight for representation in this country.
And to come back full circle to a point you made, the surprise of this moment is not this overreaction. The surprise of this moment is that the backlash against Black Lives Matter movement that was embodied in Trumpism has metastasized out of Trumpism into much of America. We often criticized, I should speak for people with bi-political sympathies, all lives matter. I still see such signs in places. They're not as frequent as they once were.
No one ever called for a definition in Congress for all lives matter as a form of racism, anti-Black racism, as is now the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act is calling for. We can talk about that, too. But my point being that our surprise maybe is that in the wake of George Floyd, there's not just been retrenchment, but there's been an embrace and even wider embrace of a law and order ethos.
Now, you mentioned this partisan polling or polling showing that more people would be willing to see the use of violence in support of their views. And that, I'm not questioning what people said to a poll, but in fact, and in reality, what we see consistently is that people who are either moderate and in the center or to the right are completely okay with and indeed are calling for increasing uses of law and order in this moment of political partisanship.
Archon Fung:
So, that's super interesting. And I certainly agree with the asymmetry of who's actually committing violence from civil society sources or whatever. But one thing that's a little surprising is that it's not the right that's deploying state force in the campus protests. It is probably left of center administrations. And even it seems like the Democratic-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
That was the point I was making.
Archon Fung:
... delegation of Congress.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
When I say metastasized-
Archon Fung:
Oh, to beyond.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... right-
Archon Fung:
I see.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... I was saying-
Archon Fung:
Yes.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... it has spread outward.
Archon Fung:
Yes. Well, then I completely agree. I wanted to bring the Mississippi case, not to talk about that, but to expand the problem of outside actors. So, if the universities were islands with nobody outside of them, and all we were talking about was whether it's Israel's right to self-defense or 30,000 people getting killed in Gaza that is on the side of justice, that itself would be an incredibly difficult conversation-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yes.
Archon Fung:
... just among us, students, faculties, et cetera, very, very difficult. What makes it nearly an impossible conversation to have on campus is that there are many outside actors who have an interest in making it a more difficult conversation, and some of whom have an interest in the conversation failing altogether.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Right.
Archon Fung:
And so, these are, I think, a number of politicians on the Republican side, but maybe also on the Democratic side. I haven't really figured out the politics there yet. It's advocates on different sides. And then interestingly, to me, it's also I put a little bit of the blame on national journalists, who have... I think, in my view, many of these stories are getting it wrong because of journalistic practices. A couple of them.
One is the sourcing practices. You interview Mayor Adams and President Shafik first, not the student in the Coleman tent. And so, you get different sides of the story there. And then the other is just in order to construct a compelling story for national audiences, it has to be a story of conflict.
It has to be free speech versus anti-Semitism or free speech versus disorder, even if that's not actually what's happening. And so, part of what I think one of the real problems for us on campuses is that it's nearly intractable, even if there was nobody outside, but there's a lot of people outside who are making it a whole hell of a lot harder.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
One of the most memorable moments on the point of a lot of people outside making it a whole hell of a lot harder was watching Benjamin Netanyahu on Meet the Press. I don't have the date at the ready, but it was likely before the December 5th hearing.
And I remember it because in hindsight, it just feels so much more meaningful, but he basically said that one of the biggest problems we, as a country, face on Israel is what is happening on university campuses today.
I know there are a lot of people who identify as Jews, some of whom also are completely supportive of Israel's ongoing military response to the October 7th attacks, and then there are those on the other side, but in both cases, a lot of criticisms of Benjamin Netanyahu and the Likud party, and what people will call his right-wing authoritarian tendencies.
That being said, I think, again, what has been most remarkable is the degree to which the politics, domestically, which were long attacking social justice as an anti-American project in education more generally, starting in K-12, starting with anti-CRT bans leading to an anti-DEA war that started in Florida and Texas before. We had the congressional hearing that essentially said DEI was a direct contributor to anti-Semitism. And I mentioned this, Archon, because I want to put those two things together.
Archon Fung:
Yes.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
There was already a war on education, a war on true, what I would call, the growing threat of fascism and a threat to democracy more general, where simple facts are discarded for propaganda for the purposes of power and accumulation of that power, of which Netanyahu interestingly represents that in another context.
And then adding to the October 7th attacks, what we've seen is a full-blown weaponization of anti-Semitism, which is now circled back, it is boomeranged time and time again, to essentially attack anyone who is committed to a more redistributive fair, more egalitarian United States of America. Period.
Archon Fung:
So...
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
In which case, this explains what you were just talking about-
Archon Fung:
Yes.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... how campuses could then become the center of an international and domestic crisis.
Archon Fung:
Absolutely. I know you have very good reasons not to share such sympathies, but I want to share some sympathies with the Virginia Foxx position, which is part of this is of our own doing as self-selecting faculties and student bodies, especially selective colleges and universities, have become less politically representative, less of a draw geographically and ideologically of the country as a whole. We also occupy part of the partisan space in the United States.
And so, you can see this in opinion polls. If you look at Democrats, two-thirds of them think colleges and universities are a good thing for the country's future. If you look at Republicans, it's flipped. Two-thirds think colleges and universities are not a good thing for the country.
And so, I think this is a deep structural problem. And I do absolutely think it's a problem. I don't want to work in a university that is 40% of America or half of America. I feel like it needs to be much more inclusive.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
We definitely part ways on that or not.
Archon Fung:
And that's good.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And partly because, I use this example a lot, but I think we have to come to terms with it. I haven't looked at the data you're describing, but I guess if I have this wrong, or at least the speculation is way off, then correct me, but I'm sure there is a partisan disparity between people on this campus who believe in man-made climate change versus general polling data of people who identify as Republican Party members.
And I would not want to try to solve for more inclusiveness simply because somehow, we have to pretend like climate change isn't an existential threat to the future of the world because some people are in belief systems or are in political echo chambers, and that inclusiveness means somehow accommodating views that are just flat-out wrong.
Archon Fung:
I don't favor sacrificing on truth. I would like to find-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
But I think that's-
Archon Fung:
... some way to be more inclusive.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... what this has-
Archon Fung:
In the short term-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... come down to.
Archon Fung:
... it may well.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And to just offer a slightly more substantial rebuttal. It is a fact that part of the culture wars that people often refer to when we talk about how people feel on various campuses, which has been subject mostly to how Black and Brown students have been feeling and their discomfort with certain controversial speakers on campus leading to cancel culture, which now, of course, has been turned on its head because much of the infrastructure of the backlash to universities is about putting in place greater forms of censorship, bottom line, to be able to cancel faculty who don't toe the line on Israel, you name it.
Archon Fung:
How do these conflicts on campuses work themselves out? And one pathway forward is the Columbia pathway. We see that somewhat on USC and UCLA and Emory University and University of Virginia, where it is a police-heavy solution. That's how the tents go away. And then we don't know what the other shoe is or if there will be one, but that's one pathway forward.
The other and other, there may be three and four, but and other pathway forward that just appeared in the last couple of weeks is what Northwestern University and Rutgers and Brown University, and, I believe, UC Irvine or Riverside, I'm sorry, I forget the fourth one, but those administrations have managed to negotiate agreements with students who want different things.
I think most of those agreements involve some transparency of university investments. And then most of them involve some opportunity for the students to present their case to some decision maker, an investment committee and advisory board, in some cases, high university leaders. What do you think about those two pathways forward? Which one's more likely? Do you accept any of the objections to the negotiated pathways?
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
No. I guess there's no shortage of surprise in this moment, but the Northwestern case, I'll speak to in particular, because my daughter was part of a steering committee that helped to advance the students' demands with the university. And having spoken to her directly about what that process was like, she emphasized two, I think, important models. One, an administration that was willing to take seriously students' concerns to treat them.
Archon Fung:
So, she felt that the university side was acting in good faith more or less.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Absolutely. And two, a sophisticated appreciation from her perspective and other students that you don't get everything you want in these negotiations.
Archon Fung:
Many questions.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And so, the need for being prepared to settle on, say, transparency versus outright divestment would be one good example. And I think I can't speak for the particular personalities of who were at the negotiating table, but here, at the Kennedy School, we know full well that personalities matter, right?
Archon Fung:
Yes.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
We're constantly teaching our students-
Archon Fung:
And-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... to solve personalities.
Archon Fung:
... in a negotiation, you never get the whole pie.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
You never get the whole pie.
Archon Fung:
I think we know that.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Right. So, I would say that that is the appropriate response. It validates a fundamental principle at work here. People are dying in the world who had nothing to do with what happened on October 7th.
And while there are people in Israel who feel differently, you cannot tell me, you cannot tell my daughter, and you certainly can't tell many of the students, who have spoken publicly in the news to describe their points of view, that infant children in the NICU, who will no longer get the care they need because a hospital was destroyed under the allegation and/or fact that Hamas were using the hospital for tunnels, or that any number of five-year-olds or ten-year-olds to fifteen-year-olds have become amputees or who have died premature deaths because of this war, either because of bomb or because of famine, that any of that is okay in the name of justifying the response to Hamas's attack.
So, if that is the fundamental premise for what led students to build encampments and to take to other forms of protest on these campuses, then I certainly know that I would want to have a conversation with those students to think about what role do we really have in this moment as an institution. And certainly, we know that our market participation, sometimes very minuscule and symbolic, is one way in which we are all connected.
Archon Fung:
Yeah, absolutely. I think one thing that's been lost a little bit in the conversation, not our conversation, but in the bigger conversation, is that a lot of the frame is about free speech and maybe the right to peaceful protest, which is centered on me respecting your right to say things, which you certainly have. That's one of the great things about America is we have that.
But I think what it falls short on is the idea that maybe we can learn things from each other if we listen hard. And to me, that's why I think a much more accurate and appropriate frame is civil disobedience, which hasn't been talked about as much as protest and free speech, but, of course, what we're seeing, they're pitching a tent where the rules say, "Don't pitch a tent."
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Right.
Archon Fung:
That's civil disobedience.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
That's right.
Archon Fung:
And from Dr. King, to Jack Rawls, to Ronald Dworkin, the logic of civil disobedience is that you, or I, or your daughter, or these students in Harvard Yard feel like there's a great injustice going on. As you say, it's these innocents getting killed in Gaza for a war that they didn't start in very large numbers. And so, that's number one. They feel like there's a great injustice going on.
And number two, they feel like the normal channels, the normal democratic channels, of voice to articulate that injustice are blocked up. And that's why they have to break the rules, but at least in Dr. King's logic and these other thinkers, the point is to extend the democratic conversation through channels that are illegal. And my view is when people cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
The Selma March, yes-
Archon Fung:
... the Selma March-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... in 1965.
Archon Fung:
... the target wasn't primarily... they didn't think they were going to change the minds of too many White segregationists, but maybe some minds of White liberals in the North who, up to that point, had been pretty okay with segregation in the South, maybe they would see what's going on and change their mind. So, it's a way to extend the conversation, but that requires that all of us listen pretty hard to what these students are saying.
And the thing about civil disobedience is, if you look at a bunch of the cases, it turns out, I think, in the light of history, they had it more right than wrong in many of these cases, but in the moment, you don't really know who's right, or at least I don't. I exercise a great deal of humility. It might be the democratic system that's decided that we're going this way that's right, or it might be the protesters that are right. You can't tell in the moment.
But the only way to figure it out, I feel, is to not just allow speech and protest, but to really try to listen hard to what the protesters are saying so that you can try to come to a better answer, which, to come full circle, that's why I am, right now, in favor of the more negotiated path out because at least it extends the conversation and allows everybody to listen a little bit harder.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
So, listen, I think to close the massive act of civil disobedience on January 6th has led to a partisan divide as to whether or not it was legitimate or not. The-
Archon Fung:
That's a good point.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... blood of liberty needs to be shed every now and then is a paraphrase, one of the rallying cries for that call. And we have a man who led that insurrection, who may win the presidency again-
Archon Fung:
Yes.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... even if he's in a jail cell. So, we have to keep in mind that civil disobedience, in the moment, even if I take, at face value, that we can't always know where history is going to judge.
Archon Fung:
Where history will... how they'll judge us.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Although in a lot of cases that we are concerned about in terms of the expansion of democracy, generally, people who have fought for that and engaged in forms of civil disobedience have been on the right side of the issue. But even if we take that issue at face value, what we are seeing is an abuse of the discretion to acknowledge the traditions of civil disobedience in one instance versus in another.
And while the Republican Party clearly is essentially equating today's form of campus civil disobedience as akin to a kind of domestic terrorism and calls for a greater national security in response to it, of which Eric Adams is now in league with that as a matter of a local response to a national, so-called, problem, the reverse is simply not true, meaning that we don't have a Democratic Party that is trying to hold on to the tradition of civil disobedience.
And the reason why I think this is an important point to finish on here is because we really are not seeing a counterbalancing of the very argument that you just made rooted in our own histories from Vietnam to the Civil Rights Movement to the apartheid movement. We are seeing it among talking heads or hearing it among talking heads like ourselves. But there is not a Democratic Party establishment leader. And Biden just gave a very robust-
Archon Fung:
Argument against it.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... argument against it in his defense of the right for Jews to feel safe here and in Israel. And so, again, I come back to the imbalance of power around this issue. There is something specific about Israel in our political landscape that has made this largely a bipartisan issue of which students are in the crosshairs of two parties competing for the 2024 race. And we have heard from the Republican Party very clearly what their agenda is.
The Democratic Party has either been silent, except for maybe Bernie Sanders to some degree, and a small number of senators, but the House overwhelmingly passed this Anti-Semitic Awareness Act, which enshrines definitions of antisemitism, which, in capture, critiques of Israel, that will essentially create a legal basis for claims of discrimination in higher education that will destroy, to some, degree viewpoint diversity and-
Archon Fung:
On that issue-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
... [inaudible 01:12:50] on that issue alone.
Archon Fung:
... I know a lot of colleagues who are quite worried about that.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And so, I think we are facing a significant challenge that is catalyzed by our presidential race, which makes it less and less likely that we will see the negotiated settlement option be the favorite choice of a lot of administrators who will continue to feel political pressure if you're in a public university from red state legislators, and if you're in a private university from high-net-worth individuals who are alumni and who are donors.
Archon Fung:
And so, that's the outside actors making the success of the very difficult conversation much more difficult here. But I want to end on the point you began. We are in these universities. So, if the politics make it impossible to square these various circles, then you should act to defend the university's values.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
That's right.
Archon Fung:
And that's, I think, where both of us are. So-
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yes.
Archon Fung:
... as always, it's just amazing to be able to talk to you. I always learn an enormous amount. I'm always surprised. So, thank you very much, Khalil.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
And if Congress calls for us to be fired, then we can start our own university somewhere else.
Archon Fung:
At least we'll be able to say we stood on university values.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
That's right. All right, Archon. This was a good conversation. Thanks.
Archon Fung:
Okay. Thank you very much.
Khalil Gibran Muhammad:
Yep.