On February 25, Governor Kathy Hochul of New York closed down a faculty search on Palestinian Studies at the City University of New York, citing her responsibility to fight against antisemitism on the CUNY Hunter College campus. About the faculty position description, which was to have been part of a cluster of hiring, a statement from Hochul’s office said: “This vile, antisemitic propaganda masquerading as a job posting should outrage every New Yorker. It lays bare a chilling reality: at CUNY, antisemitism isn’t just tolerated—it's institutionalized, taxpayer funded, and now, apparently, a hiring prerequisite.”

Some Jewish groups have applauded Hochul’s action, seeing it as a long-overdue response to antisemitism at CUNY. Some defenders of academic freedom have objected to Governor Hochul’s action, arguing that it violates the principle of faculty self-governance. Others have worried that Hochul’s action is a form of censorship, specifically an attempt to censor speech that is critical of Israel.

These are all important issues. But there is a more basic question raised by the CUNY job posting and by Governor Hochul’s response: What is the purpose of a university?

When a university like CUNY lists the criteria by which it chooses faculty, it publicly declares its answer to that question. Is the primary goal of a university political activism? If so, faculty should indeed be recruited because of their commitment to advancing some preferred political view.

But what if the purpose of the university is the widening and sharing of human knowledge? In that case, faculty should be selected because of their commitment to a life of learning, which requires constantly and relentlessly questioning ones’ own assumptions and teaching classes in a way that encourages students to think for themselves.

At Heterodox Academy (HxA), we believe that the core mission of the university is the discovery and transmission of knowledge. The controversy over the CUNY job advertisement opens an opportunity for us to consider: at a university committed first and foremost to improving human understanding of the world, and to sharing the excitement of that adventure with students, what should a faculty job posting look like?

The original CUNY job posting, now cancelled by Governor Hochul, stated: “We seek a historically grounded scholar who takes a critical lens to issues pertaining to Palestine including but not limited to: settler colonialism, genocide, human rights, apartheid, migration, climate and infrastructure devastation, health, race, gender, and sexuality.”

Hochul objects that the advertisement is antisemitically coded. I share that concern. But however that may be, it is clear that the CUNY faculty advertisement is coded for political activism. It is this feature of the CUNY job advertisement that I wish to explore.

The activist coding of the CUNY job description is not hard to discern. First, this open rank (tenured or tenure track) job listing states that the successful candidate must examine the conflict in the Middle East through “a critical lens.” So this faculty position is specified to be for a scholar who works in critical theory. Critical theory can be used in a variety of ways. But in its most common application, critical theory is a Manichean paradigm that works from the assumption that the social world can be divided into two categories, oppressor and oppressed. Especially when applied to political controversies, mainstream critical theory, far from questioning this assumption, focuses on reinforcing it (typically by channeling research energy toward “unmasking” hidden forms of power). In the context of an advertisement for a scholar of Palestinian Studies at CUNY, there is little doubt that this position is to be filled by a scholar who looks at the history of the Palestinian people through a simplistic, morally binary lens.

If there was any doubt that the position is looking for a political activist, other sections of the ad dispel this doubt. Most notably, after specifying their preference for “candidates interested in public facing work,” the final line of the job posting reads: “Ideal candidates will also have a record of public engagement and community action.”

With this ad, CUNY was not looking for a scholar—a person trained to question premises and to embrace historical complexity—but a community-activist in scholar’s clothing. Granted, the CUNY advertisement includes a nod to traditional scholarship, for example noting that the successful candidate “must provide evidence of a publication record.” But this is weak tea, no doubt.

Perhaps in the actual process of departmental deliberation, the decision-making of departmental colleagues will be guided by the better angels of their scholarly nature—regardess of the precise wording of the advert?

Insiders know that this is not how academic job searches work. In the zero-sum context of a departmental hiring decision, phrases in the advert are not merely codes or signals: these words and phrases are also leverage points. They send the search process in a certain direction, and, for reasons I’ll describe, within many departments, the specific wording in the job advertisement intensifies movement of the search in that direction.

For most tenure-track faculty jobs in higher ed, hundreds of hopeful PhDs apply. The competition among candidates is ferocious. Less obvious to outsiders, but painfully familiar to any professor who has lived through the experience, the competition inside the department can be just as intense.

Inside the department, colleagues, even when sharing a single ideology, often battle over exactly which candidate will be chosen to fill each position. A tenured or tenure-track hire is a departmental investment that can last decades. Each tenure-line hire may turn the direction and reputation of a department, potentially elevating the professional standing of colleagues working in that subfield, or elevating that of colleagues in rival subfields.

Within departments at large research universities, a hire in one subfield is often later pointed to as a sign that the department has committed to building in that area—laying the foundation for a case to be made that future hires should also be in this area. At small colleges, this may be the department’s only tenure-line hire for years. In every case, the stakes in making each tenure-track hire is, from a professorial perspective, skyscraper high.

This is the origin of the old saw that professors fighting over resources in their departments are like “sharks in a bathtub.” This is often true—and it remains true even if the sharks share the same ideological genus.

You might say: But surely, in the end, they’ll just choose the best candidate. In the context of a shark fight, that’s no use. In any pool, there are many candidates very well qualified to be faculty. The “best candidate for this job” is narrowed by looking to the written criteria in that job posting. (Criteria, the precise wording of which, was itself likely the product of a previous departmental shark fight).

In the context of a job search with an ad like CUNY’s, a highly-published young scholar who does not have a record of political activism will be demerited and, given the competition, very likely ruled out. These leverage points focus the search toward the candidates who can be shown to meet the criteria, with a tilt towards candidates who can be shown to meet them in the most explicit and robust ways. In the actual process of selection, a historically grounded scholar of Palestine with just a now-and-then record of community action —say, a record of having attended campus protests once or twice a year while in grad school—will be disadvantaged compared to one who attended rallies every month. And, other things equal, that candidate in turn will be disadvantaged compared to the candidate who, while a grad student, organized and led campus protests. “The job description says we want someone with a record of community action and, on that dimension, my candidate is tops.”

Of course, as I noted, the CUNY advert also affirms the relevance of scholarly publications conducted through “a critical lens.” But the same selective formation trends operate on this criterion as well. On the publication question, a scholar whose published work contains a mix of publications written through a critical theory lens with publications written from non-critical theory or even anti-critical theory lenses (say, a lens that reveals the scholar’s commitment to exploring the historical and moral complexity of the Middle East conflict) will be disadvantaged compared to candidates whose scholarly record has been uniformly produced through “a critical lens.”

So, at present, the tendency is to select toward “excellence”—on both the community-action and scholar-activist dimensions, as specified in the advert.

At this point, readers might well wonder: What is to be done?

Now, in a world where the norms of scholarly integrity were strong, a world where university leaders consistently make clear in word and deed that the mission of the university is indeed the search for knowledge, one might resolve the problem simply by removing the offending politicized code words from the CUNY job and let the search run.

Regrettably, we do not live in that world. So some stronger, more proactive set of measures is required. Allow me to propose some.

Rather than cancelling the search, the CUNY job ad should be rewritten and explicitly coded so that candidates are evaluated in terms of scholarly and pedagogical excellence. With the wording of the job description “coded” in that way, we can harness the same internal departmental forces I described above. The large and talented pool of candidates now gets winnowed towards applicants who are most committed to studying the Middle East conflict in serious and open-minded ways, and who have strong records for creating classroom spaces where students are encouraged to work together, thinking across differences, and questioning their own assumptions. (If the relevant departments at CUNY are too far gone to muster a faculty committee capable of conducting a search on this basis, then the CUNY president might create a university-wide committee, or an external committee of area-specialists, to carry out the search in their stead).

But what about Governor Hochul? First, as HxA’s Policy Director Joe Cohn explains in a legal analysis of the situation, “the Governor should make clear that curricular decisions are not subject to Government review, that no viewpoint is off limits at CUNY even though the institution should hire scholars for scholarship not activism, and that hiring decisions are ultimately up to the institution’s leadership.”

With those caveats, instead of ordering the CUNY search to be cancelled, the governor might urge CUNY’s Board of Trustees to carry out the search according to the broad principles I have described. In case it’s any use to the leaders of CUNY, or to others approving searching in the area of Middle East Studies, I’ve taken the liberty of drafting a job advertisement myself:

We seek a historically grounded scholar who uses an academic, open-minded lens to study the Middle East conflict, including but not limited to: Jewish and/or Palestinian histories, state sovereignty, human rights, state violence and terrorism, comparative religion, memory and forgiveness, and conflict resolution.

We seek candidates with publication records that demonstrate scholarly excellence, and a commitment to undergraduate teaching that encourages students from diverse backgrounds to encounter difficult questions in rigorous and constructive ways, and to think for themselves using appeal to scholarly evidence and careful reasoning.

Ideal candidates must have a record of commitment to the ideals of open inquiry, viewpoint diversity, and constructive disagreement. (Members of HxA are especially encouraged to apply.)