Why everyone should oppose Bennett’s academic ethical code
Op-ed: Under the guise of ‘preventing politicization' and all kinds of other excuses, the education minister and Bayit Yehudi leader is trying to create a terror regime—targeting the mind and mouth of every academic, of every lecturer and, as a result, of every student as well.
The ethical code was met with wall-to-wall opposition from heads of academic institutions and intellectuals, from Nobel Prize laureates Ada Yonath and Dan Shechtman to poet Sami Shalom Chetrit and historian Yuval Noah Harari. Because the “ethical code” must not be allowed to spread within the system.
Don’t let them fool you: Under the guise of “preventing politicization” and all kinds of other excuses, they are trying to create a terror regime here—targeting the mind and mouth of every academic, of every lecturer and, as a result, of every student as well. A real thought police, a system of external supervisors, disciplinary or financial sanction measures, and encouraging “snitches” among anyone who wishes to harass—with the goal of terrorizing you before you utter a single word.
It’s called an “ethical code,” perhaps because the way Naftali Bennett—the high-tech entrepreneur—sees it, people are programmed robots in need of “lines of code.” This is how blind obedience is achieved among the people: We’ll open more professional schools for all those Ohanas in the periphery, so they can keep working on the assembly line. And what about those who have made it to academia after all? Bro, Big Brother watches everything.
The approval of the Council for Higher Education is ridiculous in itself. The council is very capable of announcing its opposition to “politicization in the academia,” while approving a one-sided political move by the education minister. After all, this entire farce was an opportunist move carried out by the Bayit Yehudi leader. The code was worded by only one person, who has past his prime: Prof. Asa Kasher. Kasher wasn’t appointed in a bid (they found some kind of breach—his work was “voluntary,” so there was no need), and no other experts were invited to discuss the need for a code and, of course, its language. It was imposed by the commissar from above, like in the bad old days of bolshevism.
There is essentially no academic freedom without complete freedom of speech. That’s the meaning of democracy and of the “opinion marketplace”: The ability to speak your mind, without any fear, to make other people aware of your opinion and perhaps even convince them—and academia is the clear incubator for that and the gate to our society’s progress.
The attempt to distinguish between proper expression and an “indecent political agenda” is doomed to failure too. Because everything is political: From the debate on immigrant absorption after the state’s establishment, through criticism against a neo-liberal economic policy, to the implications of the War of Independence—yes, including that word, Nakba. And if Bennett is afraid, that’s no reason for you to be afraid of him.
And anyway, this is 2018. Every Israeli enjoys clear—and sometimes radical—freedom of speech on a daily basis, on Facebook or simply on the street. How can they come along now and try to take academia back 50 or 100 years? The academic years are many students’ best years. If you want to keep it that way, say a firm no to Bennett and Kasher.
