Wendy Pearlman, a professor of political science and Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, told the standing-room-only crowd at the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground that the role of any university after October 7 is “exactly what it was before.”

Higher Education

What Is the Role of Universities after October 7?

“Exactly what it was before October 7,” scholar Wendy Pearlman said Tuesday at an event hosted by BU faculty

In the year after the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel by Hamas, college campuses have roiled with protests and encampments about the initial attack and about the ongoing, expanding war in the region. 

But university-as-testing-ground-for-debate is nothing new, Wendy Pearlman, a professor of political science at Northwestern University, said Tuesday at “The University after October 7,” organized by Boston University’s Institute on Culture, Religion & World Affairs (CURA) and the Center on Forced Displacement. 

The event’s keynote speaker, Pearlman, Northwestern’s Jane Long Professor of Arts and Sciences, answered the central question of the forum head-on: what is the role of the university—any university—after October 7? 

“Exactly what it was before October 7,” she told a standing-room-only audience at the Howard Thurman Center for Common Ground first-floor event space: “To teach and learn; to listen and discuss; to create opportunities to grow by exposing people to new information, ideas, and perspectives, including those with which they disagree; to challenge each other to articulate reasons for our ideas and support them with sound evidence and argumentation; to empower people with the intellectual tools to evaluate claims; to appreciate nuance, context, and multidimensionality; and to act on their consciences as they engage in the world in informed and thoughtful ways.” 

The event featured Pearlman, as well as a panel of Boston University faculty from a wide range of disciplines, in discussion about the specific role that universities play as places where people with opposing viewpoints necessarily coexist—and how these unique settings can foster healthy conversations and scholarship about even the most fraught topics. 

“Universities have the capacity to be intelligent, capable communities that can handle discussion, disagreements, and even dissent about Israel and Palestine,” Pearlman said.

An opportunity for education and insight

Tuesday’s event was originally scheduled for Monday, October 7—the first anniversary of the Hamas attack on Israel. It was pushed back one day after an intense and sustained email campaign driven largely by groups with no affiliation to BU, a fact that many of the speakers addressed directly.

“This event was originally scheduled for yesterday, but we received concerns about the content of the panel and the date,” said Scott Taylor, dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies and a professor of international relations. “I want to acknowledge the pain and grief felt by so many members of our community as we marked the somber October 7 anniversary. Out of respect for the sensitivities of the date and the pain associated with it, we decided to shift this event to today. 

“Importantly, today’s discussion was always organized as a nonpartisan event, open to the entire community, that examined the University after October 7, with particular attention to the role of teaching, learning, and research,” Taylor said. “This event was never about taking sides, nor was it seen as an occasion for mourning, or for that matter, for protest. We invited experts from many different fields and perspectives to consider how they think about their work after a year of horrific violence.” 

As scholars of global studies, he said, “we can turn this bitter anniversary into an opportunity for education and insight.”

Pearlman, who has been studying and writing about the struggle for Palestine and Israel for the better part of 25 years, did offer some advice for students, faculty, staff, and administrators on college campuses across the United States. 

To students—or anyone, for that matter—who already have strong opinions about the ongoing conflict, Pearlman advised humility about what they do and do not know. 

“No one already knows everything they can and should,” she said. “I certainly don’t. None of us professors do. No one has all the information that they can possibly acquire; no one has the answer to every question. You can always learn more.”

She also suggested students use the same rigorous analytical techniques that undergird their academic classes when they’re presented with arguments that reinforce or contradict their own stances. “Approach differences of opinion not with the aim to score a point,” she said, “but to subject your ideas to scrutiny and evidence, and discover if they pass that test.” 

Pearlman advised that students (or anyone) should resist making assumptions about others’ motivations or beliefs and counseled that “being pushed outside your comfort zone means you’re learning.” 

And to students who don’t have strong opinions or who feel intimidated about even wading into such a thorny conflict, she offered encouragement: “The struggle for Israel and Palestine is not too complicated for you to learn,” she said. “This is a topic that is knowable. And your university should give you the tools you need to know.”

To the faculty charged with educating those students, Pearlman had some different advice. She encouraged professors to tackle these issues with their students, guiding them through difficult conversations and buffeting those discussions with the context of history and facts. 

And she commiserated with the higher education administrators navigating a challenging environment, on their campuses and around the world. “I don’t envy you,” she said. But she encouraged them “not to hide from the most important problems of our times, but to bring the powers of our hearts and minds to the task of addressing them.”

Finally, to everyone feeling helpless or overwhelmed at the sheer scale of violence in the Middle East, Pearlman said it’s important that they recognize they are not alone. “I’m right there with you. I don’t have good answers. I can just tell you about my experience as someone who spent half my life studying violence and injustice in the Middle East: when I haven’t known what else to do, I’ve listened.

“I’ve tried to bear witness to those who have most directly suffered these horrors, to document their experiences and perspectives, to understand, to care, to encourage others to care, and to let caring about these real people inform what I say, what I write, what I do.”

“No one has a monopoly on pain”

After Pearlman’s keynote address, Taylor led a discussion with her and BU faculty members, including Noora Lori, a Pardee associate professor of international relations; James McCarty, a School of Theology clinical assistant professor of religion and conflict transformation and director of the Tom Porter Religion and Conflict Transformation Program; and Jonathan Feingold, a School of Law associate professor, whose scholarship explores the relationship between race, law, and the mind sciences.

Lori, a social scientist whose scholarship includes the politics of the Middle East, opened the discussion by asking members of the audience to raise their hand if they’d cried at all in the last year about any aspect of the events on October 7 and those that have followed. The room filled with raised hands—almost everyone put a hand up. 

“No one has a monopoly on pain because no one escapes from death,” Lori said. She encouraged those in the room, and the BU community more broadly, to approach these difficult conversations with practices informed by the social sciences: refrain from the temptation to categorize people as good or evil and consider a response to grief and pain that is not rage or war. 

“I’m not asking you not to be angry; I’m asking you to be strategic with your anger,” she said.

Feingold, through his lens as a law professor, connected the organized movements to suppress teaching about race in schools to the kinds of sustained attacks on universities and the faculty who research and teach at them. 

“At our best, universities are incredible things—they’re these spaces where we invest in pursuing knowledge and growth for the common good, to create a better society,” he said. This makes them threatening to authoritarians and other “political projects that are hostile to truth.” 

McCarty encouraged people to tune into the profound, embodied effects of trauma—and how that trauma affects the way we show up to difficult conversations. 

“There is no teaching in unprecedented times that doesn’t take seriously the historical traumas we bring with us into the rooms and the traumas we live through as a result of these unprecedented times,” McCarty said. This was an essential part of the semester-long directed study he led with students seeking to understand the current conflict in the Middle East and its long tail, he said. 

“​​The way trauma works is that it’s the automatic threat response. You can only weigh information when you’re not in threat response; when you have some felt level of safety and trust in the space.”