Shortly after taking office in January, Donald Trump signed into law an executive order (EO) that ostensibly was aimed at reducing anti-Semitism at America’s colleges and universities.
Since then, the administration has launched a barrage of measures to back up the EO with action: they’re detaining and deporting foreign students, opening civil rights investigations into universities, and withholding federal funds from top schools.
Trump’s critics view this, with some justification, as a campaign about silencing critics of the Israeli government. Indeed, the administration hasn’t produced any evidence that Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder and student activist at Columbia University who is slated for deportation, broke any serious laws or engaged in civil rights violations against Jewish students or anyone else. More recently, the administration moved to deport Mohsen Mahdawi, another Palestinian green card holder and Columbia University graduate student, who had been involved in cross-campus dialogue with Jewish and Israeli students.
But regardless of the administration’s motivations, there is still a serious conversation to be had about how we should address rising polarisation on America’s campuses and elsewhere following 7 October and the onset of the war in Gaza. Tensions remain high, and many university administrators are flummoxed with how they should respond to raucous debates on their campuses.
The Trump administration and its allies have picked a punitive framework to respond to campus upheaval: simply punish one side of the debate until they stop causing a “ruckus”, a term used by the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, to describe the behaviour of foreign students who have joined protests against Israel’s war in Gaza.
The problem with trying to punish someone out of their point of view – or their prejudices, when we’re talking about actual anti-Semitism – is that it rarely works. It often makes people resentful and creates a backlash. The anti-DEI sentiment on the American right is fuelled by a belief, right or wrong, that liberals were trying to shame them for holding conservative worldviews or having white skin.
But there’s an alternative to using shame or punishment to change minds or soften hearts. I know because I lived it.
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I grew up as a Pakistani Muslim in the American South. I was a minority among minorities, and that often meant absorbing the cultural and social beliefs of my milieu. I love Pakistanis, but we’re hardly a perfect people. Our culture has prejudices just like any other. One of those prejudices I would frequently encounter growing up was anti-Semitism.
By the time I entered high school, I had absorbed enough of this prejudice to where it coloured my view of fellow students. There was a Jewish kid in my class with whom I quarrelled. But because of the biases in my mind, I interpreted our schoolyard bantering as a feature of him being Jewish. I thought: “Jews just don’t like us. So maybe I shouldn’t like him, either.”
Eventually, a school administrator caught wind of our dispute. He took me into his office and could have done what the Trump administration is doing now: threatened me with some kind of punishment, including suspension or expulsion. Instead, he had a thoughtful conversation with me about how we shouldn’t prejudge people. He encouraged me to look past my own prejudices. With his support, I ended up founding a multicultural club in my school where people from a range of ethnic and cultural backgrounds were able to get together and talk about their differences. The Jewish student I had fought with ended up becoming a good friend. Anti-Semitism became an embarrassing prejudice that I had overcome, not a permanent feature of my psyche.
Years later, during my journalism fellowship at the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, I interviewed leading social psychologists as part of a project where I helped design a playbook of skills used to battle social and political polarisation in American communities. While doing that work, I learned about intergroup contact theory, which says that when people from divided groups are able to interact with the support of legitimate authorities, work towards a common goal and create a sense of interdependence, their prejudices often erode.
That process I went through as a high school student more than 20 years ago was a sort of informal intergroup contact, and it worked.
Rather than making America’s colleges, universities and other civic spaces a rhetorical minefield where people are afraid that saying something that offends or shocks someone could lead to punishment for “wrongthink”, we should be thinking about how to promote healthy civic dialogue and intergroup contact that will break down barriers between students.
There are already organisations doing this important work. Seeds of Peace, for instance, brings together Israeli and Palestinian teenagers for a summer camp in Maine every year. The teenagers take part in typical youth summer -camp activities as well as tough but sincere dialogue about their lives and the Middle East conflict. Research conducted on Seeds of Peace shows that it actually works – many teens who come in with antagonistic attitudes towards the other side end up growing closer to them as the weeks pass.If young people living in the actual conflict can do this, why can’t students at Columbia or Harvard?
None of this is to say that overcoming the divides created by the Middle East conflict will be easy. But the punitive model adopted by the Trump administration risks creating even more resentment and providing ammunition to antisemitic pundits who claim that America is run by a Jewish conspiracy. By shifting from punishment to bridge-building, we at least have a chance at tamping down on campus polarisation rather than exacerbating it.
[See more: The capitulation of the American elite]