Readers of this blog may recall that I am no fan of Prof. Jasbir Puar, who teaches Women’s and Gender Studies at Rutgers. I think that her constant critique of Israel is exaggerated, distorted, one-sided, and hyperbolic. She recklessly invokes ancient stereotypes by falsely raising the specter of deliberate maiming, human experimentation and harvesting body parts by Israel. Nonetheless, I believe strongly that Prof. Puar is entitled to present her views wherever she may be invited, and to speak without harassment or interruption. Especially at a university, those who disagree with Puar must always afford her courtesy and respect.
Unfortunately, that did not happen at a recent appearance at Dartmouth, where an undergraduate was rude to Puar to the point of disruption, and succeeded in significantly delaying her talk at a symposium sponsored by the Gender Research Institute at Dartmouth (GRID). The student, who was a sophomore at the time, set up a video camera right in front of Puar and refused to remove it when requested by the GRID’s director Prof. Annabel Martin. According to an account in The Dartmouth (the campus newspaper), Prof. Martin repeatedly asked the student to remove the camera, explaining that the event was being officially recorded and that no other recording would be permitted. Ultimately, she had to call campus security, and then the Hanover police, who removed the student and his camera from the room.
The student’s behavior was boorish, immature, and unacceptable. As a private institution, Dartmouth is entitled to adopt whatever rules it wishes for academic symposiums, including a prohibition on outside recording. His actions evidently made Prof. Puar uncomfortable, and he should have removed the camera immediately upon Prof. Martin’s request.
The student is lucky that he wasn’t arrested, and his later complaint of unfair treatment was absurd.
But that was not the only absurdity in the room. Following Puar’s talk, the next speaker, Prof. Neel Ahuja of the University of North Carolina, made this statement:
Before I begin I want to thank Jasbir, whose work has been an inspiration to me and to many of us in this room. I also want to note the fact that our space has been disrupted and that Jasbir's space has been disrupted, throughout that last talk. I want to note the irony that controversy about filming or recording Jasbir's talk fulfills a certain algorithmic militarism that is evident from the comments she gave and capitalizes on the fact that black and brown bodies are on display opening critiquing forms of colonialism and racial power.
Comparing a nineteen-year old with a video camera to “a certain algorithmic militarism” is ridiculous. If there was any quasi-military force evident in the event, it was exercised by the police on Puar’s behalf. If there was a power imbalance, it also favored Puar – who was supported by the GRID director, the other symposium organizers, the panelists, and ultimately university security and the police – against a lone undergraduate.
Calling themselves the “Bully Bloggers,” a group of professors from other universities also weighed in on Puar’s behalf. In a letter posted on the GRID website, the Bully Bloggers asserted that Puar’s treatment, including subsequent criticism of her, demonstrated “that queer and feminist scholars, and specifically women of color, face disproportionate intimidation when taking public positions on political matters that we all have a right to freely address.” A kid with a camera may be obnoxious and rude, but he can hardly be characterized as intimidating to a tenured professor with the institution and law on her side. As far as I know — and according to several Google searches — there has never been a statement from the Bully Bloggers about the physical intimidation of Jewish and pro-Israel students on many campuses, whose events are regularly disrupted and worse, as in this recent situation at UC Irvine.
Universities must be places for robust and respectful debate. Had I been in the audience at Dartmouth, I certainly would have sided with Prof. Puar when she insisted that the unauthorized camera be removed. On the other hand, the rhetoric of Puar’s friends and supporters was completely out of proportion to the offense. Their apparent silence about the actual intimidation of Jewish and pro-Israel students seems hypocritical at best.
[Update: this post has been slightly edited.]
I think I agree with this, though I'd suggest that it's a closer call than this post indicates — mostly going to whether or not the request that there only be an official Dartmouth recording is a legitimate one. While I don't want to die on this hill, I'm not convinced — it seems contrary to the spirit of open academic inquiry that professors be allowed to insist that their general-purpose academic lectures be kept under cloak or that only "official" representatives of the university administration be allowed to record them. While I actually think there is something to Prof. Ahuja's narrative — though clearly wildly hyperbolic, it is fair to talk about the degrees to which women of color are placed under increased scrutiny and surveillance to micromanage their public contributions — I think you also get at an important counternarrative wherein this student, who had every reason not to trust the impetus behind or the accessibility of the "official" recording, took it upon himself to create an independent record, only to be stymied by the invocation of private property and state violence. Under this view, his role is more akin to the bystander recording a police encounter, and Puar (who, as you note, is backed by considerable institutional, social, and governmental power in this encounter) takes on the role of the officer who prevents such recordings under the guise of it being, well, "disruptive".
Further, we should be clear that it looks like this student did not wish to "disrupt" Prof. Puar's speech in any way — he only wished to passively record it. The "disruption" occurred because the university acceded to Prof. Puar's request that no such recordings be permitted (Prof. Martin says they were legally obligated to accede to this request, which I cannot imagine is true — certainly, it seems like Dartmouth could if it wished require all speakers on campus assent to recordings by members of the Dartmouth community), and the student did not cooperate. As I said, I think he should have cooperated, but this is a far cry from a "normal" disruption which actually seeks to prevent the speaker from speaking.
It depends on your definition of "legitimate," David. Dartmouth can make its own rules about recording speakers on university property, and students cannot violate them simply because they are ill considered. In any case, Puar believes she has been singled out for harassment, and she might have been concerned about how the student's video would be edited.
As you probably know, Harvard edited out the segment of its video in which a law student insulted Tzipi Livni. I think that was the humane decision, basically trying to save the student from the consequences of his own poor judgment. Perhaps Dartmouth had the possibility of something like that in mind.
I agree that Prof. Martin's claim of legal obligation is dubious, and Dartmouth could have adopted an open recording policy, in which case Puar could accepted or declined the invitation to speak. But Dartmouth chose another approach, and it was boorish of the student to act as he did.
". . . queer and feminist scholars, and specifically women of color, face disproportionate intimidation when taking public positions on political matters that we all have a right to freely address.”
This strikes me as backwards descriptively, at least in the academic context, especially the notion that feminist scholars face "disproportionate intimidation" when "taking positions on political matters." On the contrary, those who dare challenge them with as much of a pretense of epistemic authority as feminists so often display essentially set themselves up for the most severe kind of moral bullying there is: "misogynist!"
I've heard people literally say that (especially male) scholars risk tenure if they want to, say, publicly challenge the feminist framing of intimate partner violence, or dissent from feminist explanations for the nature, causes, and severity of the sexual assault problem on college campuses. Talk about algorithmic militarism; what an (ironically ironic) apt phrase!
Our nation is sliding. Sorry, but it's true. Vigorous dissent and debate is good IF there is a reasonable good faith basis. The radical feminists and make bashers, and other assorted types bash Israel yet they are strangely quiet on say Saudi law prohibiting women from driving and until recently from voting. In Israel there are Muslim members of Parliament and mosques. Are there synagogues in qatar? No. Santa on saudi sure if santa wants to be in jail or worse. Aren't gays thrown from roofs in gaza? Yes it's a fact. Christians and Jews and women just ain't treated the same. Yet these lunatics only hate white men and Isreal.
These folks remind me of a Donald Trump with some literary skills. Just because one is intellectually gifted, doesn't mean they are smart.
Help Us:
Israel, the US and a few other nations are held to a higher standard than Gaza, Qatar, Saudi Arabia. Nobody expects these nations to act right. We hold ourselves to much higher values…and the world has been conditioned to expect it.