On Professor Derek Peterson’s Comments at the University of Michigan Commencement and President Domenico Grasso’s Harmful Response

The Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace extends its gratitude and admiration to Professor Derek Peterson, the outgoing chair of the faculty senate of the University of Michigan, for his comments, at the university’s spring commencement ceremony, urging recognition and appreciation for Michigan’s “pro-Palestinian student activists who have…opened our hearts to the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war in Gaza.”  

These were words of basic decency–and love.  And yet, as the response later the same day from the university’s president quickly demonstrated, speaking these words at the commencement was also an act of public courage, given the pervasive hostility of higher education administrators to faculty and students who bear witness to the humanity of Palestinians and the injustice of the Israeli state.  In his response, Michigan president Domenico Grasso shamefully “apologized” for Professor Peterson’s humane words of decency and love, smearing them as “hurtful and insensitive.” 

The Academic Council condemns President Grasso’s response. This includes the inaccurate and misleading claim that Professor Peterson “deviated from the remarks he had shared before the ceremony.” We take Professor Peterson at his word that he shared with the administration his intention to condemn the war on Gaza and support the student protestors. The few words he added for clarification do not constitute “deviation” in any reasonable or honest sense of the term. This means that President Grasso knowingly and intentionally tarnished the reputation of a member of his faculty in ways that have placed Professor Peterson in harm’s way. We find this unconscionable.

President Grasso’s response is, moreover, an attack on academic freedom.  Here it is crucial to note that the president’s statement at no point offers anything akin to legitimate counter-speech to Peterson’s comments–that is, it offers no reasoned basis for disagreeing with Peterson’s propositions about the university’s pro-Palestinian student activists or the Israeli state’s war on Gaza. Very differently, Grasso’s statement deploys institutional authority to admonish Peterson for having expressed his views. Put otherwise, the president’s statement effectively sanctioned Peterson’s speech, thus chilling future expression of support for Palestinian rights and lives–especially from the many faculty possessed of less security and stature than Professor Peterson. President Grasso certainly has the right to express his own views, but as president, he abuses his office and harms the university when he sanctions and chills speech he opposes (rather than engaging with that speech on a democratic and reasoned basis). Let us be clear: an attack on academic freedom by a university president is itself a failure to meet a core responsibility of that office.   

Grasso’s response is, in addition, wrong and harmful because of the sly way in which it mischaracterizes Professor Peterson’s comments about the pro-Palestinian students as “hurtful and insensitive.” The key move here is that Grasso’s statement identifies these feelings as the feelings of “many members of our community.” But given that many others must have had the opposite reaction to Peterson’s words, what Grasso’s text elides is any serious assessment of why some persons would find Peterson’s words of decency and love to be “hurtful and insensitive.” White supremacists, for instance, typically find “hurtful” the opposition of racial justice advocates to the display of the Confederate Flag.  This does not, however, mean we should credit or accede to these feelings–or fail to tell the important truth that these are the feelings–the resentments–of persons invested in white supremacy. Grasso, in turn, should recognize, rather than obscure, the basis of anyone finding “hurtful and insensitive” Peterson’s recognition of Palestinian humanity and suffering. The claim in Grasso’s statement that these are the feelings of “many,” without evidentiary support and specificity, is a rhetorical move that evades seeing these feelings for what they are: the feelings and resentments of anti-Palestinian hate, the feelings and resentments of a specific ethno-national supremacism (i.e., Zionism).  

President Grasso’s statement is especially shoddy and shameless in its final sentence: “To be sure, the world has injustices; the only way we can address them is to work together and not create more divisiveness.” The initial acknowledgment of “injustices” in general is, in an important sense, a refusal to acknowledge the specific injustice Peterson’s comments named: the Israeli state’s war on Gaza. In effect, Grosso’s comment buries this specific injustice in the vast pool of all of the world’s injustices, thus denying it the attention Peterson, following the lead of the student activists, called for.  The second part of this final sentence is even worse. It makes the Orwellian claim that fighting injustice depends on total social unity, as if injustice is something other than oppression and exploitation by persons of power. To speak such an inversion of truth is to travesty the intellectual integrity for which a university must stand and defend. 

Here we should return to the great clarity and beauty of Professor Peterson’s brief commencement comments. Without any note of apology, Peterson named the specific injustice of Israel’s war on Gaza, but he also took care not to privilege or isolate this injustice.  He did not lose this specific injustice in a vast pool of all the world’s injustices. Rather, he placed it in the context of other injustices, asking his audience to recall and recognize the importance of struggles to open the university to women and Jews. That President Grasso then singled out for sanctioning Peterson’s recognition of Palestinian suffering makes clear just which injustice he (President Grasso) felt compelled to support, with all the authority of his presidential office. 

Again, the Academic Council of Jewish Voice for Peace is grateful for and inspired by Professor Peterson’s careful and compassionate words, and concomitantly, condemns President Grasso’s stubborn defense of the injustice and inhumanity of Israel’s war–Israel’s ongoing genocide–against Palestinians.

The Jewish Voice for Peace Academic Council is a network of scholars dedicated to furthering JVP’s vision and values. Drawing upon our shared commitment to both progressive Jewish values and Palestinian liberation, we organize in solidarity with the Palestinian freedom struggle in educational and academic settings. We draw upon our skills as scholars, educators, and writers to develop critical analysis of contemporary censorship on Palestine. We oppose the deployment of the charge of antisemitism to censor or criminalize speech critical of the State of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians.  We defend employment rights, academic freedom, and rights of association within higher education and confirm the core values of Jewish Voice for Peace.