My students aren’t debating ‘genocide,’ they’re looking for the freedom to learn

I wish more of the people who are so obsessed with campus speech could actually focus on the kind of speech that really matters for college students and those of us tasked with educating them.

In a world driven by sound bites, social media, secret recordings of professors and students and even elected officials demanding yes/no answers, suspicion and division are building, rendering it seemingly impossible to have the difficult conversations in the classroom that always, in my experience, lie at the core of any great education.

This isn’t a new problem. During the war in Gaza, it’s gotten harder than ever.

Earlier this week, the House Committee on Education and the Workforce called in the presidents of Harvard, MIT and Penn to grill them about campus antisemitism. The Republicans on the committee, led by Elise Stefanik (Republican, New York), insisted on simplistic responses and instead received nuance and caution, though all three presidents made it clear that there were lines that can’t be crossed without consequences. The hearing has fed a public outcry, doing exactly the thing that I feared – making it harder to meet the moment through, among other things, education.