On courage, cowardice, and civil disobedience at New York University.

Do they still assign Thoreau at our centers of higher education?

Today I want to talk about the courage of NYU student Logan Rozos, and the cowardice of the NYU administration. It won’t take very long.

But first, there’s a reason that I call this Substack newsletter “Words for the Wise” and not “Words to the Wise.” The latter phrase is actually somewhat pejorative, because it assumes that the person or persons being addressed need either to get some additional wisdom or need to be taught some kind of lesson. It is an ironic phrase in that sense. But “Words for the Wise” implies that the reader is already wise, and that they will appreciate being either reminded about something they already know, or told something new they may not know.

That said, I think it very likely that most readers here will have heard about what happened to NYU student Logan Rozos when he tried to—what shall we say, “slip in”?—some very short references to “the atrocities currently happening in Palestine” in a very short speech he gave at the graduation ceremony at the Gallatin School. The university is withholding his diploma for allegedly violating the rules and misleading the university about what he was going to say.

These days, of course, you don’t give a whole speech about what many human rights organizations and experts consider to be a genocide that Israel is committing in Gaza—at least not in polite company, including the polite company one finds at a university. In Germany, after World War II, it took many years before you could give a speech about the Holocaust anywhere. Now you can, of course, but you cannot give one about Gaza. Perhaps before the middle of the century that will be allowed as well.

So yes, if you want to talk about the atrocities in Gaza, you often do have to slip it in somehow by ambushing your audience, the way that Rozos is accused of doing, or during an awards ceremony when it is all happening so fast no one can stop you before you walk away with your Oscar or other prize.

This is what we are teaching our young people today. If you sincerely think a genocide is taking place, whether you are right or wrong about that, you must be quiet about it. You must keep it to yourself and not take a moral position on that alleged genocide, lest you offend someone and get kicked out of school.

In its coverage of this episode, the New York Times quoted an NYU spokesperson named John Beckman to the effect that Rozos had “lied about the speech he was going to deliver” and had violated university rules. Beckman added that the university was “deeply sorry that that the audience was subjected to these remarks” and that Rozos had “abused a privilege that was conferred upon him.”

We will pause only briefly to consider the statement that speaking one’s mind about a genocide is a “privilege,” or that free speech itself is a privilege, not to mention the notion that an audience has some right to be shielded from hearing about a genocide. That last one is an old debate and we don’t need to have it now.

I suppose if I were a really thorough reporter I would study the NYU university rules, examine the speech Rozos said he was going to deliver (assuming that he actually did make any such agreement), and then write at length here about whether or not Rozos violated the rules and how he might have violated them.

But I actually prefer to get to the essence of things: Rozos is being punished because he said something he was not supposed to say.

At the risk of being repetitive, this is the moral lesson we are teaching our young people today. We are teaching them, affirmatively and often with no shame, to shut up and be cowards in the face of even the most blatant and atrocious human rights violations and war crimes. And if they do not learn the lesson quickly enough, or they resist the lesson, we punish them by kicking them out of school or withholding their diploma.

I haven’t taken the time to consult the curriculum at NYU, but I will bet that there are still professors, perhaps of history or social sciences, or literature or philosophy, who assign Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to their classes. That short text has inspired many, including Martin Luther King, Jr., to not just violate rules but to violate laws. The essence of Thoreau’s position was that laws can sometimes be wrong, and life is too short to wait until the majority gets around to changing them—if ever.

If sometimes laws have to be broken so as to uphold a higher value, which Thoreau identified as the moral “right,” so be it. If fighting for justice sometimes means violating the law, then violating an arbitrary university rule really is a trivial matter.

Let Thoreau speak, lest I be accused of putting words in his mouth:

“Law never made men a whit more just; and, by means of their respect for it, even the well-disposed are daily made the agents of injustice. A common and natural result of an undue respect for law is, that you may see a file of soldiers, colonel, captain, corporal, privates, powder-monkeys, and all, marching in admirable order over hill and dale to the wars, against their wills, ay, against their common sense and consciences, which makes it very steep marching indeed…”

No wonder MLK Jr., during the civil rights movement, found inspiration in this most American of moral tracts. No wonder that those of us who fought against the Vietnam War found inspiration there too.

We don’t have to wait decades for historians to tell us that Israel has committed war crimes and perhaps even genocide in Gaza. The historians are actually telling us that now, along with human rights experts, journalists, and doctors and nurses working in Gaza’s hospitals. They are telling us how many thousands of children have been killed already, and how many dozens are being killed each day.

So if a student manages to slip a mention of this horrible reality into their commencement speech, let’s not withhold their diploma. Let’s send them on their way into the terrible world of injustice that we, their elders, have created and left for them to set right.

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