College student pro-Palestinian protests have dominated the news cycle of late.  

University administrators have been struggling to find the right balance between respecting freedom of speech, protecting students from hate speech, enforcing property rights against trespassers and confronting vandalism.

These are institutions of higher learning. I’m wondering if they should be taking action to seize an opportunity instead of defensively dealing with what administrators see as a problem.

We take for granted that education should be focused on reading, writing and arithmetic. The skills of nuanced conversation and complex thinking can be much more difficult to learn. Every issue that motivates students to protest is an opportunity to teach such skills. 

Here’s how I would approach it.

Create a controlled forum for free speech. Dedicate an assembly area for daily discussion until an issue exhausts itself. Use professors to moderate the discussions, teasing out the nuances or layers of complexity in the topic. Only students would be admitted, creating a safe area for student dialogue without outside political agitators.

Students would sign a form committing to respect opposing points of view and listen without interruption.  Violations would be penalized with expulsion from the forum. Attendance would be recorded toward offering course credits for a level of participation.

As long as a forum for freedom of speech is provided, all other forms of protest and associated trespassing and vandalism would be criminally prosecuted.

I would love to participate in such a discussion. I am horrified at the civilian casualties being inflicted on Palestinians living in Gaza.  But what, exactly, can we recommend Israel should do? 

Hamas is the elected government in Gaza. They authoritatively crush all political opposition in Gaza.  They militarily invaded Israel, killed people and took hostages. Is it realistic to expect Israel to not respond because Hamas is hiding among the civilians in Gaza?  How innocent are those civilians if they elected Hamas to lead them?

A historical analogy to this is when the Nazis seized power in Germany.  Democratic opposition was first stifled and then violently eliminated. If you were a German and learned of the death camps, any spoken opposition would’ve been a death wish. Countless German citizens that abhorred the Nazis were killed in World War II.

Universities invest endowment funds to make money that finances scholarships. Universities also affiliate with corporations who provide support to aid education in industry-relevant technologies such as engineering or computer science. 

Boeing is such a corporation. Protestors have been calling for their university to divest Boeing stock. Yes, its products are being used to kill in Gaza. Boeing also makes defense products for all the free world to protect itself – especially the United States.

Genocide is a serious war crime accusation. Is Israel’s military response to an unprovoked invasion a war crime because civilians are being killed? 

The Allies fire-bombed Tokyo during WWII, killing more Japanese civilians than either of the atomic bombs we dropped. Was this a war crime?

Again, history provides us the example of the Nuremburg Trials where Nazis were prosecuted for war crimes. There are comparative nuances to consider.

“From the river to the sea” is a current protest chant that ignores all implications. In practical geographic application, it calls for the elimination of Israel. Is this anti-Jewish hate speech? Is it protected by freedom of speech?

We live in a world of extraordinary complexity.  Very few contemporary issues present a simple black or white choice. At the same time, we have increasingly limited our communication to texts, sound bites, judgmental slogans and unverified social media posts.

At the least, it seems like our highest institutions of learning should be teaching how to have nuanced conversations and exercise complex thinking.

Our need is actually much broader. Those of us who are engaged citizens need to up our game. All it takes is putting your emotions aside and making an effort to understand other points of view. Listening and thinking doesn’t require a college degree. 

For all the talk about “making America great,” I think it’s going to require collective nuanced conversation and critical complex thinking.