Public opinion has poured in over the last week as the devastating conflict between Israel and Hamas continues to escalate. Here in the United States, the First Amendment guarantees Americans the right to free speech.
Another constitutional guarantee is the right to privacy. So what happens when an unpopular, widely criticized opinion gets widespread attention and leads to a public shaming campaign? One prominent example presented itself this week at Harvard, after a group of student-led organizations issued a statement blaming this week's violence squarely on the Israeli government.
To say the backlash was fierce is an understatement. Critics blasted the students for what they deemed an insensitive take, but it went ever further. On Wednesday, a truck funded by a conservative activist group drove around Harvard Square with the names and pictures of students who signed the letter, calling them “Harvard’s Leading Antisemites.”
Some employers have also blacklisted students from any future employment at their companies, or—as was the case at Columbia Law School—job offers have been rescinded.
Paul Niwa, professor of journalism at Emerson College, joined GBH’s All Things Considered host Arun Rath to discuss this response from the community and what it means for free expression. What follows is a lightly edited transcript.
Arun Rath: First, could we get your reaction to the events as they’ve unfolded over the past few days, as I laid out?
Paul Niwa: It’s so disheartening to see our students—any student from any campus—take their passion and move it to a place where they are threatening others, where they are antagonizing each other.
In this very raw, very emotional, very difficult moment where you are asked to articulate your opinion as a professor, I want my students to be conversing, talking, meeting and discussing in a civil manner and to try to understand each other and each other’s points of view, to try out different positions and arguments in a forum. It’s awful to see students try to intimidate each other, and in that way, I’m very disheartened by what has happened.
Rath: I think we could all agree that doxxing is bad, in terms of what happened to these students. The broader part of it, though, where employers are taking preemptive action, and students are being gone after in that way, is that something that goes with the territory if you’re going to have unpopular opinions in the public space now?
Niwa: We have to understand that many of our students are on college campuses, trying to figure out their way in the world and how to present themselves. Certainly, when I was 22 years old, I didn’t have a clue who I was necessarily and how to explain who I was and what my positions were.
What college education does, in its best form, is to give students space to help them figure out how to explain themselves, how to try on different hats, different positions, be a little more radical, try to be somebody else, maybe stretch themselves to find their limits.
For their employers to penalize someone so young is truly unfair. If they look at themselves and who they were when they were in their early 20s, I think they should have a more forgiving attitude towards college students, what they do and how they act.
Rath: Well, as you describe it, that was definitely the case many years ago when I was in college. It was a place where you tried on different ideas—some of them radical and some of them offensive. I mean, this is on the left, right and all around. But we are in this age now where everybody has such traceable and permanent digital footprints, so is there realistically a safe space for those campuses or anywhere else anymore?
Niwa: You know, I think there will be. Maybe not right now, but social media is still relatively new. It’s been around for about ten years, and we’re still trying to figure this out. When we look at other mediums over history, we see that there’s a lot of experimentation that happens. People try different things to figure out what this new medium is about, and it finds a new equilibrium.
When we look at, say, photography and the history of it and when it emerges, photographers see this as a scientific tool. They look at it, they’re trying to see if it has artistic qualities to it. They’re drawing on the photographs. They’re cutting things out. They’re trying to blur their images to try to mimic paintings. They’re doing all kinds of new things with this medium until we move into the 1910s and 20s, and figure out what are the advantages and disadvantages, and how we counteract the disadvantages of this new medium.
Social media hasn’t had that 50 years to figure out its new boundaries and what it’s great for and what it’s not so good for. During this experimental phase, we have to be more forgiving of ourselves and more forgiving of each other and what we post.
Yes, it’s raw. Yes, it’s offensive. Yes, it’s experimental as well. We’re learning from this, and we need to keep hitting these boundaries and try new things until we figure out this equilibrium. Until that, things are going to be pretty raw.
Rath: You actively teach young people who are wrestling with this right now during this messy phase of this new medium. What advice do you give them as they enter these choppy waters?
Niwa: The more experimentation we do, the more experience we have, the better the decisions we’re going to make because I truly believe that all of us learn from our experiences and the mistakes we make. If you don’t try, you’re never going to learn, you’re never going to make those mistakes. We hope that if we do create and engage and be part of new mediums as they emerge, that the good, more refined work we create is going to overshadow all of those other mistakes and lessons learned.
I had this great experience when I was very young to go to the Metropolitan [Museum of Art] for Pablo Picasso’s retrospective. Looking back, this was a vast body of work, but not all of the work was memorable. Not all of the work was a masterpiece. There were many other pieces by Pablo Picasso, this great artist, that were just kind of marginal, really forgettable kind of work.
We have to think of each of the people that we know as not necessarily this one post that they put out, one photo that they put on Instagram, but the entire body of work and who they are and to decide whether we want to be friends with that individual or not based on the broad body of what they produce.
