Speaking out against injustice is too much for academic leaders?

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As the death toll in Gaza approached 30,000 last month, Macalester College President Suzanne Rivera found time amid the weighty obligations of a college president to argue that issuing statements on calamities, such as the genocide in Palestine, places an undue burden on the leaders of academic institutions. As a Macalester alum, I was disappointed.

In an opinion piece for Inside Higher Education, Rivera argues that the COVID-19 pandemic and local upheavals of the Black Lives Matter movement, George Floyd’s killing in particular, coalesced to produce new expectations for presidential pronouncements. Colleges’ move online normalized regular electronic communications, while Floyd’s death demanded presidential response (it also led, in Rivera’s words, to a less “pastoral” relationship between administrators and their students — lending new meaning to the college’s possible adoption of the Highland cow as mascot). Rivera’s thesis? College presidents don’t have room on their plates for certain disasters.

What Rivera fails to illustrate are the criteria for a response-worthy crisis. While rightly emphasizing that Floyd’s murder required recognition, Rivera makes clear that other events, ill-defined but certainly including Palestinian genocide, do not. How, you ask, is Floyd’s death — and the endemic police killings of Black men it represents — more worthy of words than 30,000 Palestinians’? Aren’t the movements for Black lives and Palestinian liberation intertwined? How many faraway deaths equal one in our backyard? Rivera doesn’t clarify, leading one to believe this is yet another abdication of responsibility long characteristic of U.S. responses to the third rail “problem” of “Israel-Palestine.” What Rivera is really worried about, I’d venture, is facing the fate of peer presidents like Harvard’s Claudine Gay and Penn’s Liz Magill, both of whom lately fell victim to the American mob mentality that conflates antisemitism with objections to the Israeli state. In the face of anti-intellectual opposition, at least these leaders of thinking institutions went down swinging.

Such obfuscating from someone whose bio states she is “an advocate for social justice and brings a strong commitment to inclusion and equity to her role as president” is disappointing, but what troubles me most is that Rivera rebuffs Macalester’s ethos as I thought I knew it. Prior to graduating in 2017, Macalester introduced me to the connection between academics and advocacy. Unlike at the college I’d transferred from, disciplines ceased to seem abstract or irrelevant precisely because professors emphasized their relationship to human experience and ongoing injustice. Study informed individual and collective responsibility. At “Mac,” students laid on the lawn and used the frameworks they encountered in class to imagine a better world. When Jamar Clark and Philando Castile were shot dead by police in 2015 and 2016, Mac students marched in the streets to build one.

Furthermore, the idea that college presidents, of all people, should avoid dicey politics for self-preservation borders on laughable. The terrain between employment and activism has always been rocky, all the more for those making far less than Rivera’s estimated half-a-million dollars per year. Teachers, bricklayers, grocers, meatcutters, bankers and custodians speak up, show up to vote and protest human rights violations not because their schedules or supervisors support them in doing so, but despite the fact that they don’t — indeed, often precisely because they don’t. Put differently, advocates have always been those who take up torches because they feel they have to, not because they want to, because it’s easy or because their jobs depend on it. I learned that at Mac.

Sam Downs is a writer, editor and college English instructor living in Great Falls, Mont. He grew up in Winona, Minn., and graduated from Macalester College in 2017.