How could the presidents of three major American universities respond as they did to the question of whether a call for the genocide of the Jews was necessarily condemnable? Their now famous “it all depends on the context” – which led to the resignation, Tuesday January 2, of Harvard President Claudine Gay – deserves the pillory, but it also calls for reflection. These women are a priori intelligent, sophisticated; one of them claims to be Jewish. Many things are curious about it, but let us focus on the ease, the fluidity and the harmony with which they wallowed in this way.
It was revealed that serious coaching had preceded their hearing, but it magnified the problem more than it solved it. If experts – lawyers or communicators – advised them to utter this kind of nonsense with such success, it is because they thought it was good to do so and they did not see fit to put up any resistance. . Back to square one.
Do not wrinkle under any circumstances
Let us argue that their primary concern will probably have been not to upset their clientele, that is to say mainly students. Here we touch on one of the tragedies of higher education, in the United States as in France: everything is done, with rare exceptions, to give in to their demands, calm their ardor and not offend them under any pretext. Dinosaurs like me continue to think it’s madness, because our job as teachers should first consist of destroying their intellectual comfort, putting them in a position to rise above their beliefs and their automatisms. mentally, but we don’t have much grass left to graze, and we will soon disappear. As for doubting that there is any scientific virtue in the enormous power that these same students have been granted in the management of universities, it is a waste of time. No one wants to grab that catenary.
It is therefore likely that our three presidents sought above all to meet the expectations of their respective establishments, where we are, broadly speaking: 1) convinced that nothing matters more than the respect due to the individual sensitivities of students; 2) willing to think that moral judgment on what they say (or do) should not be exercised in ignorance of relations of domination; 3) “aware” of the fact that this domination is based above all on skin color, perceived gender, sexual preferences, but also, from now on, belonging to the “global South”; 4) convinced that everything, in fact, depends on the context, because the dominated defined in this way can have reasons (or even rights) that the dominant do not have. Basically, these ladies played the game for which their academic position destined them. No more no less. This is no less fascinating.
Grip of the political correctness
Of course, we fiercely defend freedom of expression in America. But how could they obscure to this extent the other elements of the “context”: the monstrosity of Hamas’s attacks, its expressed desire to eradicate Israel, the growing empire of left-wing anti-Semitism under the guise of anti-Zionism, the almost total disappearance of the Shoah in the imagination of new generations, the very magnitude of what they expressed? How could they have made themselves so blind and so stupid? Are they simply complicit, wokists at heart, communing in petto with their prefabricated declarations? Hard to say. Two of them have since resigned; the other flatly apologized, but that doesn’t prove anything.
The worst – and most likely – would be that they saw nothing: that their obsession with not shocking their nationals was enough to make them lose common sense; that the influence of this political correctness unthought and mechanical has succeeded in cutting them off from all reality. Beautiful theme of meditation and real subject of anxiety even in our regions, today more than ever. Obsessed minds – whatever the subject of their obsession – always lose their north at the same time as their compass and their awareness of the relative. They collapse in all candor, looking serious. They get lost, lead us to the abyss, ingenuously…