Omid Memarian, a journalist, analyst and recipient of Human Rights Watch's Human Rights Defender Award, is the Director of Communications at DAWN.
When Hisham Matar sits down to write, he says, "I don't really know what's going to happen." It is one of the things that draws him to literature—the ability to explore the depth of human relationships and the revelations along the way. "I've always felt that the novel is the place for human temperament," he tells Democracy in Exile. "Why people behave the way they behave isn't just because of what they believe. It's also because of their sensibility." Novels offer the space for voices that are more open and honest at a time, he says, when public discourse has closed and "become more vengeful."
Matar, 53, was born in the United States to Libyan parents and raised in Libya, Egypt and the United Kingdom. His father was a prominent critic of Moammar Gadhafi's regime, which forced the family into exile in Cairo when Matar was only nine years old. When Matar was 19 and studying at university in England, in 1990, his father was abducted in Cairo by Egyptian police and taken to Libya, where he was held in Tripoli's notorious Abu Salim prison. Matar never saw his father again, and his family, like many Libyans under Gadhafi, never found out what happened to him or his remains.
After the fall of Gadhafi in 2011, Matar returned to Libya with his mother and his wife, to a homeland they thought was gone. The Return: Fathers, Sons and the Land in Between, a meditative memoir about exile, Gadhafi's brutal legacy and the hope that Matar still might find his father, won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 2017, among other awards.
"The Return reacquainted me with my country and my people after 33 years of exile," Matar says. "But it also reacquainted me with myself. It exposed to me to what extent I have in these years been making a home elsewhere."
Earlier this year, Matar published his third novel, My Friends, the story of three Libyan exiles whose friendship is intimately tied to the mutual loss of their homeland. Matar's two others novels—his debut, In the Country of Men, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2006, and Anatomy of a Disappearance, published in 2011—are both narrated by boys whose father has been abducted.
Matar lives in London but also teaches at Barnard College in New York as an English professor. He has an inside view of the campus protests against Israel's war in Gaza, and in particular what he calls the "scandalous" response by administrators at Barnard and Columbia University, shutting down student protests and even calling in police against their own students. "What's been fascinating is that the faculty, by and large, and the students, by and large, are in great harmony, and able to exchange opinions and have a civilized discourse," he says. "All the trouble comes from the administration."
He describes the war in Gaza as "the tragedy of our moment. The scale is unfathomable." In addition to exposing whether an American university campus can really be a "free environment where people have different opinions," the war in Gaza has also "exposed a lot about the region," including "why the Arab Spring had so many enemies." As he says, "Palestine has always done that."
The following transcript has been edited lightly for clarity and length.
Regardless of where we're from and how displaced or rooted we might feel, I think the moment we are living in is a moment of deep estrangement and uncertainty and fragmentation on so many levels.
- Hisham Matar
Omid Memarian: Your novel, My Friends, has resonated deeply with readers worldwide. Why do you think people have connected so profoundly with this book? Is it because it explores universal themes such as friendship, perseverance and resilience, much like your own experiences and friendships you have detailed in the book, which have been central to your life as an exile?
Hisham Matar: I think so. I always think it's a dangerous pursuit to try to guess what has connected with people, but from the few but very meaningful letters I've received, it's some of the things that you describe. But I would also say, and this is more my instinct speaking, I think that we are all, regardless of where we're from and how displaced or rooted we might feel, I think the moment that we are living in is a moment of deep estrangement and uncertainty and fragmentation on so many levels. It seems that the discourse—whether it's on politics or whether it's about humanity and nature, whether it's about questions of intelligence and its authenticity or artificiality—all of these things, I think, have cast a sort of atmosphere, even for people who have never left their homes and have been afforded the good fortune of living in the same place and with the people that they grew up with, still feel in some strange way exiled.
The other thing is that a lot of us are looking for a single voice that is open about its compromises—that is not ideal, in other words, and is not looking to condemn anyone or justify itself. I think that space has become narrower and narrower, and the public discourse has become more vengeful. These are some of the reasons why we go to books, and particularly novels, because novels have that space.
My Friends explores the complex friendships among Khaled, Mustafa and Hosam. What insights do you hope to convey about the nature of friendship, especially among those living in exile?
I didn't think when I was writing the book that I was writing in praise of friendship. I knew I was writing about friendship because it fascinates me. Friendship has always fascinated me, all of it, but maybe with more complexity, my male friendships. I haven't encountered portraits of friendship like this. Maybe they exist, and I just haven't seen them. I also felt it was an area that I wanted to explore.
But I think the fascinating thing about friendship is that it really does look simple. The word now has been undervalued, with social media. He's my friend. How many friends do you have? That sort of thing. The word itself has been diminished. Yet the social creation of friendship is as mysterious as ever. It seems without any rules. In fact, the best way to destroy a friendship is to say, well, these are the kind of friends you and I are going to be. Whereas lovers do that; they give vows to one another. And family ties have historic norms and protocols about the bounds of kinship. But with friendship, it really is a work in progress. It's something that the people involved in it also aren't masters of. They don't really know what will happen. We know from certain friendships, they just—for any, or for no clear reason, at least to us—wane and disappear. And some friendships deepen and become more intense. And sometimes you have all of that variation in the same friendship—different tides. I've always found it really quite amazing. And given the fact that there are no vows, given the fact that if you and I are friends, really the only thing that holds us together is our mutual affection and fondness for one another, and which is rarely declared, it's actually only acted upon.
I'm talking about real, deep, powerful friendships. So much emotion and imagination are invested in them. Our friends, our dearest friends, are both the most known people to us and the most mysterious. And so, given all of that variance, and given its promiscuity—the fact that we have more than one friend at the same time, and given that each friendship itself is promiscuous in the sense that it's not bound by a rule or a vow or a promise—I'm just astonished by how many of us are lucky enough to have friendships that last a lifetime.
All of that has always fascinated me, plus the other stuff that I think is familiar to all of us. The questions of the mysterious nature of the desire that exists between any two friends. How both unfulfillable and infinite it seems at times. As well as questions of frustration and competition and love—all of these things are very present, I think, in friendships. I've just always found it fascinating, and I found it under-praised. I do think it's one of the social creations that, if the history of humanity is going to be told after we are no longer here, might be regarded as one of our miraculous creations—one of our great achievements. Bach and friendship.
Has this concept of friendship changed over time? Do you have a different perception about friendship right now than when you were 20 years old, and or has the current situation in the political environment, the cultural environment, all these divisions, impacted the way you perceive of friendship?
Very good question. Absolutely. All of our ideas, including our ideas about love and friendship, and even the things that we think are beyond variation—our commitments to our family—I think they're all subject to the weather. The weather of one's mind and the weather of the world, what happens around you. So certainly, and a lot of it is pretty predictable. All of our ideas about friendship shift. I mean, those very early friendships, when you're seven, you'll never have a friend like that again. Those friendships, when you really have the dream of being united, as if you're one body…
But I think to the question of politics, I've always been fascinated by how people I know and people I have known—over a long period of time since they were children or young men and women, and who have been, for one reason or another, subjected to political upheaval—who come from places where there's great political pressure on the mind, on society, but also on the individual and the family. One of the things that I found interesting is to see how a lot of what ends up happening to them—what they do with it, what we all do with this—is of course influenced by questions of ethics and political leaning. But I think it's also equally influenced by something that is very difficult to talk about in the political terrain. Political language doesn't have words for it really—which is to do with questions of human temperament. And I've always felt that the novel is the place for human temperament. Why people behave the way they behave isn't just because of what they believe. It's also because of their sensibility, of their likes and dislikes. I'm sure, you know, people like that. I've known people who are equally politically committed and passionate, but some of them don't have a fancy for argument, and some of them are excited by arguments. They say, just give me an argument and I'll get stuck in. And others agree with the poet who says arguments will convince no one.
This is an example of what I mean by temperament. It has huge consequences on the political actions of an individual. But it's not necessarily a political question.
Sarah Leah Whitson: Let me ask you to compare the focus on male friendships and female friendships, or the main characters' friendships with women. Was that deliberate? Was that an attempt to contextualize who he was as a Libyan man in England? And to push you on the distinction you make between friendships, between lovers, and friendships that are non-sexual, let's say, do you see those friendships as essentially different?
No, not necessarily. And I didn't intend for a moment for the book to be a kind of expression of my kind of thesis on friendship, or what male friendship is, as opposed to female friendship. In this book, the title My Friends extends to male and female friends. But obviously the central three characters are men, and their relationship with each other is really the heart and soul of this book. But anecdotally, from my experience, for whatever that's worth, and as someone who has very intimate and has had for a very long time very intimate friendships with both men and women, they are different. They're not always different in obvious ways. They're not always different consistently, or different in ways that, even to me, seem obvious or clear. But I think what men do with one another in a friendship is slightly different. Of course, there's lots of overlap, but that's sort of my sense of it. But as far as friendship between lovers and platonic friendships, I think, on some level, all friendships are love affairs in some way, platonic or otherwise. But certainly, friendship between lovers, I would say, is different.
Sarah Leah Whitson: Let me switch back to exile. How much is Khalid's experience of exile a reflection of your experience in exile? And I want you to reflect on the number one comment I hear from my friends who are living in exile—Arabs living in exile in Turkey, in Sweden, in the United States—and that is survivor's guilt. Maybe your situation is different because you fled and left Libya at such a young age, whereas the friends I have left as sort of fully grown political adults, in different contexts. But on those two aspects, and on your self-reflection as an exile, do you feel like an exile? And on survivor's guilt, where do you position yourself in that sentiment?
As far as the narrative itself, the narrative fiction, I've sort of made it up. But, of course, I've woven in lots of details from things that I've experienced or experienced on others. But these characters are really made up. The funny thing about fiction is that doesn't matter what you make up, even if you write a novel about a dog on the moon, it will still be coming out of your soul in some way. It will still be the DNA of your mentality.
So that question is always very fascinating to me. And in some way—and I don't mean that to say it's not an important question—but in some way, it's also redundant, because it's the same in the opposite. Having written nonfiction, having sat down and wanted to write a memoir, which was my book The Return, which contains testimonies by other people, about which I was incredibly fastidious—I wanted to make sure everything was correct. I went back to them. When I wrote it, I showed it to them. But even that, and even though I am writing about myself, and it's me, really, it's also not fact, either. It's not the whole truth. It's only a part of it, and it's an imagined truth. I know that's a complicated position, but it really does feel that way.
To your other question about exile and survivor's guilt—I think your point depends on the timing of when you leave home, and the conditions under which you leave. I left, well, I left in stages. I left when I was nine, but with my family, from Libya to Egypt. And then I left Egypt when I was 15, and I came to England, which felt that I was really alone, and remained here and made a life for myself. It is different without your family. You're exposed much more fiercely to the consequences. You're less protected by the accumulation of experiences. But you're also maybe, who knows, a little bit more ready to be changed in some way.
The fantasy of the exile is, I will remain the same, and my home will remain the same, and at some point in the distant future, these two things will be reunited, and we live happily ever after. But the truth is, everything is changing all the time. The place is changing and you're changing. And of course, when you're younger, you're changing much more. You have more space to change. Less of you is formed, and I see with friends of mine who have left as adults, particularly writers, because I think the thing about the vocation of writing is that one of your countries is the language that you write in. You really live in it, and it forms the logic of your thinking. In this book, of course, it's a book about people who are really invested in literature. They're all very passionate readers. One of them is a writer, and the title, My Friends, extends to the books and those list of writers that have accompanied them through their exile and have helped them, for better or worse, navigate it. But language for a writer, a fully formed writer—say, a fully formed Arabic writer moving to England—that's a very, very complicated thing. The isolation is much more powerful. It's much more difficult.
About survivor's guilt, I don't really know what to say about that in some general sense. All I can say is that I think I have very little interest in guilt. I think guilt is a very misplaced response. It's not to say that one should not feel or be careful about assessing one's conduct and various advantages. All of that is very important. But I don't think guilt is really the response. I think guilt is a bit like waste. It's a bit like throwing good food away.
My book "The Return" reacquainted me with my country and my people after 33 years of exile. But it also reacquainted me with myself.
- Hisham Matar
Just following up on what Sarah Leah said, and about your character Khaled— after the Arab Spring, Khaled had to decide whether to return to Libya. How did you explore the complexities and emotions surrounding this choice for Khalid, Mustafa and Hosam?
You know, I was just fascinated by this question of temperament that I mentioned to you. And I felt that here were three characters that really shared so much, experientially, but also, in the early days, their views about right and wrong, and about politics and about ideas of freedom, and in all of that. But their temperaments were so distinct that they then end up doing different things with those beliefs, with those same persuasions. I found all of that really fascinating.
Funny thing is that when you're writing a book, or at least for me, when I'm writing a book, I don't really know what's going to happen. I know some things. Like I knew early on that this will be told on a walk, but where the walk will go? What will happen in it? Will he meet anyone? Will he speak to anybody? For a while, I wondered whether he's going to meet somebody and speak with them, but he never does. I've tried it on the page and it just didn't ring true. I didn't know whether he was going to go back home to Libya or not. On some level, I still don't know, because the edge of my knowledge ends at the last page. And so, he might the day after the book finishes fly home. I don't know. But I was just made very curious by his temperament. I couldn't figure out if this was one of the bravest people I met, or one of the most reticent.
He has somehow managed to commit to the specifics of his life, regardless of how meager they are. He has a small flat that he rents in Shepherd's Bush. He teaches at a middling comprehensive school, a state school. He's not bad at his teaching, but he's not particularly good either. But he just sticks to the particulars, you know? He just goes to bed, gets up. He's trying to hold all this together. And we catch him at a moment when suddenly all of this shifts, and he's trying to understand, now that his friends have left the city for good, how he might navigate his future.
A couple of readers—and I got this more in the United States than anywhere else—asked me basically a different version of the same question, which is: Why isn't he more ambitious? Why isn't he a go-getter? I think the overwhelming majority of us are like him. We live our lives the best we can. We do the best we can with what we have. I'm always really moved and just amazed by how much courage it takes to live any life. I mean, even if you can imagine the most idyllic life, you need a lot of courage to pass through it. Those moments you wake up in the middle of the night and something seems to have shifted. Some veil has lifted, and you could glimpse how cruel life can be. Or the fact that all of us have to grow old. Everyone I know and love is going to die. Nothing, no one can prepare you for that. The only thing that prepares you for it is the daily living of it. It's like a knowledge that seeps into you very, very slowly. Notwithstanding how slowly it seeps in, it's constantly outrageous.
We share this, and it takes a lot of courage to endure it. So, the simplest life for me is still an incredibly heroic life.
How do you see your books contributing to conversations around the experience of exile and immigration in Europe and in the U.S.? Given your novels detailed exploration of the psychological impact of displacement, fear and the struggle to belong, do you hope they influence readers' perspectives on immigration and the situation of exile?
I don't write them, if I'm to be very honest, out of at least a conscious desire to transact a certain kind of response. But if I have any hope, it's that it motivates people to pay attention, really pay attention. If you really want to harm someone, don't pay them any attention. If you pay them attention, your attempt to harm them will become complicated—not impossible, but complicated. The way that we speak about immigrants—at least, I speak here for the places that I know, Britain and the United States—the discourse around immigration is actually quite insulting. It's very upsetting, and it's all designed not to pay attention to people, so you talk about them as though they're faceless ghosts. They don't have names. These boats that come here, people who have fled war and God knows what, and have risked their lives and the lives of their children to cross the sea, and then the boats are turned back. You can't turn those boats back if you knew a bit more about them—if you knew their names.
Why doesn't anyone tell us their names when they report on them? If you knew where they came from, what their story was.
This is why I think questions of justice and attention are connected. And narratives that can bring home to you how it might be to live as a gay man in an intolerant society, or how it might be to live as a woman in an intolerant society, or as an immigrant in an intolerant society, are narratives that complicate the picture of these other sort of really crude ways of looking at things. But also, I think more than that, they make us truer to our enterprise of being a human being, because it's very easy to underestimate what is happening here, what it is to be a man or a woman, what it is to be a human being. It's very easy to underestimate it—when it's a very complex, incredibly rich endeavor.
All of us are connected, but all of us are inheritors of so much complexity. Our ancestors are, literally… my sister is Virginia Woolf, but also my brother is Hitler. Mussolini is my brother, and Omar Mukhtar is my brother. This is a very complicated fate. How do you proceed from here? These are the questions that literature and art are constantly engaging with, and any other attempt to flatten the picture not only serves dogmatic ends, but also reduces the potential of our humanity.
You have a habit of spending hours with a single piece of art. How does this deep observation influence your writings?
Not in ways that I can list, but I'm sure, of course. I learned so much from art in general, from paintings and music and architecture and, of course, literature. But also, you know, when you stand in front of these paintings, if you choose to, we're talking about at least what I would think of as great masterpieces, so much has gone into them. The life of the painter, her attention, her knowledge. And the process is accumulative, because she couldn't have painted it in an instant. Every time she goes to it, she's adding and editing.
Particularly these oil paintings that have been painted after the period that I am very interested in in my book, A Month in Siena. Pre-Renaissance, where the technology of the paint was such that it dried very quickly, so you had to paint fast. There's a particular pleasure to that too. They're beautiful and immediate, those Sienese paintings. But later, when you have the Renaissance—say, around the time of Titian and Velasquez and much later Cezanne, all these people—by then, the oil was such that it could take a long time to dry. So, you would paint a bit, and then turn the canvas, facing the wall, and you paint another picture, and then return to it after a month, and you could still work on it. And that moment meant that these paintings became reservoirs of accumulative acts of perception and close looking and close thinking and close feeling.
They gather. They're really dense. But then on the other side, once they're finished and hung on the wall, they also do something else. They start to absorb our culture. I think every single person who has ever stood in front of a painting and really looked, left something of themselves there. The painting is not the same. All of those layered gazes are present. It's like a conversation, a really good conversation. And then when the conversation, for whatever reason, ends, I move on to the next picture. But with some of these pictures, it takes a long time for the conversation to end.
Sarah Leah Whitson: I've noticed now in your prior book, the memoir, and this one, that your gaze is really focused on Western art, or Western European art and, I should say, ancient or historic Western European art. Do you follow contemporary art? Do you follow contemporary African or Arab art? And how do you appreciate or enjoy or experience the differences? I'm curious, because all of my attention is focused on contemporary African art, although I did just stand for hours looking at the mosaics in Ravenna this summer. So I hope my gaze left something there on those incredible mosaics.
I'm sure it has. I have written about contemporary work, more for magazines, and about some Arabic artists. But I have to be honest, and like you, I have—and I think most of us have—a particular sort of passion. Mine is for the old masters, and it has been for a long time. Forever, really. I just find those paintings inexhaustible, and I keep returning to them. When you're asked if the book is autobiographical, the only truly autobiographical thing I can say about the book is that my protagonist, Khalid, has this idea that he really does believe that all culture is ours. These demarcations of periods and schools and nationalities—we understand why we have those classifications, we need them for the library, maybe for the museum—but in our personal life, they're not really significant.
And I've always felt that way. It's one of the very few things that I am propagandistic about. I really do try to foster it in my students. This sort of courage, whatever you want to call it—or if you want to be less kind, a kind of ruthlessness. To just look at all of culture as, really, it does belong to you, to all of us. It's all yours. Al-Mutanabbi and Shakespeare are ours. And Al-Jahiz and Rumi and Virginia Woolf. It'd be a shame to sort of say: No, no, no, because of whatever reason—my heritage, or where I was born—I'm only going to look at this, because the other stuff is either not mine, or belongs to my enemy, or whatever. I think that's such a shame, because it is all ours. And that's what I meant earlier, about the complexity of our inheritance. It is all ours, and all the bad is also ours.
I'm going to move to Libya now. Libya has undergone significant turmoil since the 2011 civil war, with ongoing conflict and instability. Recently, the U.N. envoy said that Libya will slide into disintegration if politicians don't move toward elections. How do you view the current situation in Libya, and how does it compare to the hopes and expectations that emerged during the Arab Spring?
I think one of the big tragedies in Libya is that the 2011 revolution had the aim of removing the dictatorship, which in itself was a very difficult task. The story of that is well documented. But I think what it overlooked is that you needed to also build a state, which is arguably much more difficult than removing a dictatorship. In other words, the Libyan dictatorship functioned in such an idiosyncratic sense that it didn't rely on a bureaucracy. It had a very, very minimal state structure—rudimentary, because it allowed it to control everything in a very closed way. And it limited the danger of a bureaucratic class that might have other political ideas about what the future might look like.
So once Gadhafi was gone, you had this very thin state, and the scrambling started very quickly to try to build something. But the situation was made even more difficult by the fact that the army was dissolved or fragmented. National security became dependent on unelected, unaccountable, militias, and those militias continue to grow and dominate.
Of course, in this sad story, there are several points that one now can look at and say, well, that was a point where things might have changed. And one of them was when the newly elected government asked the militias to fall under a national army. The militias, most of them, agreed, but with one condition, which was that they joined in their units. Each militia would have its own unit under the national army. The elected parliament refused—for understandable reasons, but now in hindsight, that was a strategic mistake. Because it's better to have them under a state structure where you can at least have some influence on how they mature and grow than what we ended up with, which is warlords who profit from national wealth and have become hugely powerful, with their own armies and prisons and sways of power. All of them. There isn't really an exception. They all resemble that kind of structure.
The problem then becomes very difficult. We need good politicians, but under the current structure, what would guarantee anybody's independence?
So that is really the grim side of the story. The positive side of the story is that it's very difficult to imagine any other place where you would have these sorts of conditions, and for it to still remain, not perfectly but to some extent, socially cohesive. There is, of course, a lot of crime, a lot of theft, a lot of people disappearing or being assassinated. But much less than you would imagine if you didn't have an army and a police force and everybody had guns. And that, I think, gives all Libyans a certain level of confidence. The trouble is that social cohesion is not to be taken for granted. It is corroding under the present situation. The longer this goes on for, the worst things will be for the future.
How do you think that this changing landscape of your homeland affects your writing or has affected your writing?
It's hard for me to say. Obviously, it weighs on me. My book The Return deals with this, and reacquainted me with my country and my people after 33 years of exile. But it also reacquainted me with myself. It exposed to me to what extent I have in these years been making a home elsewhere.
With hundreds of thousands of Libyans living in exile, what do you think the future holds for them and their connection to their homeland? Do you see a path for them to return, or will exile become a permanent reality for many?
That will very much depend on what happens. But most Libyans are not disconnected from the country. A lot of them return. A lot of them are living away because life is tricky or difficult there, not necessarily because they can't go back. That's also one of the interesting things about this moment, that Libyans of all political persuasion go back and can live there if they want to. And many do.
How does your experience and the situation in Libya resonate with the ongoing plight of millions of Palestinians who have been in exile for decades, and with the current tragedy in Gaza, with over 40,000 people killed and nearly 2 million people displaced internally? How do you see the parallel parallels between these two experiences of displacement and loss?
What's happening in Palestine is of a completely different order. It's the tragedy of our moment. The scale is unfathomable, and the numbers you mentioned are the numbers we know of. There's lots of people under the rubble that haven't been found yet. These numbers would be completely different if we were talking about another place where different norms of how you measure loss could be exercised. Whereas here is this moronic situation where everything is contested and everything is accused of being a lie.
It's also a moment that has exposed a lot about the region. Palestine has always done that. At this moment, it has really shown something quite dark and unpleasant about the region—and why the Arab Spring had so many enemies, not only in the individual countries where it sprung up, but from regional powers and international powers. Because if you were to have accountable and democratic societies, with accountable leaders, foreign powers wouldn't be able to control and marshal them in the way that they're being controlled and marshaled now.
But it's also exposed so much about what has been going on inside Israel over the past 25 years or more—how Israeli society has really changed. I've always found Zionism to be a deeply unjust project. But I'm also aware that Zionism itself has changed. These various politicians and pundits and the crew that are around them that make the public discourse in Israel have shifted public opinion to the right. There are reasonable people in Israel who disagree with what's happening, but they've become a shrinking minority.
The whole project about what Israel wants has also been exposed during this time. It has shown the extent to which it's willing to go, and what its language is. The language is fascinating—it's public, it's not a secret. It's all out there. I think it tells us a lot about what the new Israel is thinking.
But I would say also, the other thing that it has exposed is how impressive the Palestinians are—to try to survive under these conditions. To remain resilient, to remain committed to their ancestral rights, to their land, to their home, to their people, is very, very impressive. Like I've always told my African American friends, that I feel that in America, one of the things that is missing is a genuine celebration of African American resilience. The fact that they continue to write songs and write books. It's a cause to be proud of. If you're African American, you walk with your head held up high. I feel the same way about the Palestinians and what they have managed to endure so far.
Given the recent antiwar protests on U.S. campuses and the contentious coverage of Gaza, how do you perceive the role of academic institutions in these discussions? At Barnard College, where you teach, and across other universities, there have been concerns about censorship and silencing of certain perspectives. How do you navigate these challenges as an educator and as a writer, particularly when addressing such deeply polarized issues?
What happened at Barnard and Columbia, the way the administration conducted itself vis-à-vis the students, has been scandalous. What's been fascinating is that the faculty, by and large, and the students, by and large, are in great harmony, and able to exchange opinions and have a civilized discourse. All the trouble comes from the administration, whilst at the same time the administration is host to a lot of individuals who are in themselves reasonable. So then you have to stop and ask, well, what is going on? And what is going on is that the funding model of the Ivy League schools—not all of them, but I would say the great majority of them—exposes them to certain vulnerabilities. They have been very proud of that funding model; they're always competing about how much money each one of them is raising and celebrating their extraordinary accomplishments and raising their endowments by billions of dollars. But that money doesn't come without strings.
So then you have an administration that is sandwiched very aggressively between the people on whom they feel they depend for their donations, some of whom have very strong opinions about Israel and who find any criticism of Zionism on campus outrageous. This is very important because it's to do with an issue of great injustice happening in Palestine, but it's also of great importance domestically in the U.S., because it really means that this funding model has to be reassessed. Either the people who fund the universities need to understand and accept that an academic environment is a free environment where people have different opinions, and these universities must not be either aligned politically or economically with a state such as Israel, or you completely crush its academic vibrancy.
It's quite an interesting dilemma, because the reason you can raise all of those billions is because you're such an academically vibrant, independent, progressive, creative community. But now you're saying, well, actually we're not sure we like all of that progressive, creative qualities of yours, because they contradict with the politics of our donors. I'm oversimplifying, but that's basically what's happened.
The way the students have been treated is absolutely scandalous and has shown that they are really the only adults in the room. The way these students have conducted themselves—I have students who have been arrested, who have been in these camps, and I speak with them regularly—when you see how they conducted themselves, how professionally and maturely they've behaved, it's a real badge of honor. It's not only upsetting because the administration treated them so unjustly, but because they didn't celebrate their maturity, regardless of whether you agree with their politics or not.
I think this event has exposed a very profound weakness about the finest schools in America. And from here on, the road is only going to get more challenging. The choice is whether you guard the freedoms of these universities or you reduce them to basically being a shopfront of liberal education.
—Sarah Leah Whitson contributed to this interview.
