OP/ED: Jim Banks is a danger to academic freedom, democratic diversity and Hoosier pride

Jim Banks is a powerful Republican congressman who is likely to be elected in November as one of Indiana’s two U.S. Senators — unless Hoosiers wake up to the fact that his recent comments published by the Indianapolis Star about the campus situation at Indiana University Bloomington are lies designed to provoke precisely the administrative repression that faculty have challenged and that he celebrates.

It all started back in November, in the wake of the horrendous Hamas attacks that I and many other colleagues publicly condemned. Israel’s overwhelmingly destructive military response — which played right into Hamas’s hands — predictably generated the development of student protests on campuses across the country, including at IU Bloomington. And Banks, in an unholy alliance with far-right Zionist groups — and I do not think all Zionists are far-right — immediately sought to pressure IU’s President Pamela Whitten to crack down on the students, in ways that threatened both academic freedom and the First Amendment.

From the Indy Star: Jim Banks: Stand with Pamela Whitten against IU's radical, immature faculty

Along with colleagues, I drafted a letter, signed by 400 IU faculty, criticizing Banks and calling on IU to defend academic freedom and civil liberty. IU responded by suspending Abdulkader Sinno, a tenured faculty member, for advising a pro-Palestinian student group — a punishment that led to sharp criticisms from human rights groups across the country, including the conservative-libertarian Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Our faculty then drafted a second open letter denouncing the suspension.

Banks responded to these defenses of academic freedom by ignoring our words and describing us as “woke” defenders of Hamas — which is a lie.

When I published a piece in the Indianapolis Star responding to Banks’s slander, explaining that I am a proud Jewish American who has literally fought antisemitism my entire life, Banks responded on “X” by describing me, by name, as a “radical Marxist professor” and “communist” who defends antisemitism. The accusation of being a “Judaeo-Bolshevik” is a vicious antisemitic canard with Nazi origins.

Such rhetoric is second nature to Banks. Shortly after denouncing me, he publicly defended Turning Point USA, a far-right group that has been accused of racism and antisemitism by the very Anti-Defamation League with which he now cynically allies.

Back on April 26, he followed up by posting that “George Soros is paying student radicals who are fueling nationwide explosion of Israeli-hating protests.” This too is a lie, and this too draws on an antisemitic conspiracy theory popular on the far right — that George Soros, a Jewish billionaire, opposes “American Greatness” and “Hungarian Greatness” and uses his money to support open borders and “wokeism” and the “Great Replacement” of white, Christian America.

Banks is a liar, about Soros — who has nothing to do with the protests — and about what is happening on the IUB campus. I say this as someone who has taught at IU, and lived in Bloomington, for 37 years, and is a proud Hoosier; as someone who has regularly observed the student protests and encampment at Dunn Meadow, and who has supported the right of the students to protest while also criticizing them when I disagreed with them; and as one of the over 800 faculty members, including many conservative faculty members, who overwhelmingly supported a vote of no confidence against Whitten because she was undermining academic freedom and civil liberty. Her response: call in the Indiana State Police to disperse and brutally arrest student protesters.

The encampment at IU was set up on Dunn Meadow, on the edge of campus, in a designated “free speech” zone far away from any classrooms or major academic buildings. It has disrupted nothing. The demonstrations there were absolutely peaceful.

Student leaders, some Jewish, often chanted anti-Zionist slogans with which I disagreed and said so. But I heard not a single statement or chant that was violent, hateful, or called for any harm against Jews. Not one.

I have spoken with the students. They are idealistic, some of them are politically naïve — they are students! — but the students at IU are not antisemitic at all. They are passionate about the current war on Gaza, and about Palestinian rights, and they are making some reasonable and some radical demands. But they are good young people exercising their constitutional rights. They do not deserve to be attacked, harassed, or arrested. Whitten has never sought dialogue with them. And that is because she is a poor leader with no confidence and no credibility. For shame.

Banks lies when he says that IU professors are calling for divestment from Crane. That is one of the student demands. None of the very public faculty statements, some of which I have drafted, has made this demand, which for most faculty is unrealistic and ignores Crane’s indispensable role in the state’s economy.

At the same time, my faculty colleagues and I have defended the students’ right to make such demands; we have opposed efforts to prevent them from saying what they think; and some of us — not I — have tried to stand between the students and the heavily armed state police, and to plead with the police to please not violently arrest students for peacefully assembling in a free speech zone. The faculty who did this were thrown to the ground, stepped on, zip-tied, arrested, and banned from campus for a year.

This is a national and international embarrassment. Apparently Banks considers this “American Greatness.”

We faculty are dedicated academic professionals and citizens of the state of Indiana. We are not, as Banks viciously implies, “outsiders” linked to “the Ivy Leagues” — though most of us have degrees from the top universities in the country.

Banks wants Hoosiers to “take back” the university from us and from our students because he is a small-minded and provincial man. IU is a world-class university with “outside connections” in every part of the world, and tens of thousands of “foreign” and out of state students whose tuition dollars comprise a huge part of the operating budget and whose experiences on campus have made IU an important engine of economic growth in the state and the country and an engine of intellectual freedom in the world.

The measures that Banks supports have no regard for IU’s traditions, values, or academic autonomy. He lies and says we oppose Crane. I tell the truth when I say that his approach would ruin Indiana University and undermine everything — economic, educational, scientific, civic — that the university contributes to the state.

He is a danger to academic freedom, democratic diversity, and Hoosier pride.

What he says should not be taken seriously by any self-respecting Hoosier, whatever their politics.

We deserve better.

Jeffrey Isaac is the James H. Rudy Professor of Political Science at Indiana University.

This article originally appeared on The Herald-Times: Columnist writes Jim Banks approach would ruin Indiana University