The case of Jonathan A. C. Brown
A friend is circulating an Open Letter to Interim President Robert Groves of Georgetown University in defense of Professor Jonathan A.C. Brown, the Alwaleed bin Talal chair of Islamic Civilisation in the School of Foreign Service. Apparently, during the recent US-Israel-Iran war, Brown made this comment on X:

“I’m not an expert, but I assume Iran could still get a bomb easily. I hope Iran does some symbolic strike on a base, then everyone stops,” Brown wrote on X.

Brown has tenure and a chaired professorship at Georgetown, but apparently the comment was regarded as frightening enough to call for his suspension. The President forced Brown to delete the tweet, and he’s now been suspended. He’s also been removed as chair of his department, which I believe was intended as punishment.

I’ve signed the Open Letter, and encourage others to do so. I think the organizers are simply looking for signatures from college alumni. The form asks what degrees you’ve earned, and from where. The preceding hyperlink gives background on the story from Middle East Eye.

That said, like so many of these episodes, this one prompts an obvious question: is loyalty to the United States of America really a pre-requisite of holding an academic position at an American university? I don’t see why. We keep hearing about the supposed academic and moral imperative of “viewpoint diversity.” Well, one under-represented viewpoint is the one that says that the United States and its allies deserve to be attacked by their enemies. To be clear, that isn’t what Brown said. It’s what he’s been misinterpreted as saying. My point is simply that it’s a grossly under-represented viewpoint in American discourse, and sincere advocates of viewpoint diversity should be happy to give it a home in higher ed.

Meanwhile, advocates of viewpoint diversity are going around whining about the under-representation of right wing views in academia. It’s highly disputable that the under-representation of right-wing views in academia is really something worth crying about, and obviously false that right-wing views are generally under-represented in American discourse as such. But where in American discourse do you find people saying, explicitly, that the United States deserves to be attacked by its enemies? Is the belief so obviously false or evil as to render its assertion impermissible?

Jonathan A. C. Brown, Georgetown University

I don’t think so. And here’s a test of the claim underrepresentation. Do a literature search on articles discussing “the Iran-Israel war of 2025,” also known as the “Twelve Day War.” Restrict your search to American authors. Now find the subset of American authors who explicitly describe both the Israeli and American military actions against Iran as acts of aggression, and say or suggest that an Iranian counter-response against Israel and/or the United States would have been justified. Sum the number, and then calculate the percentage of articles satisfying that description as against the sum total of articles published on the subject. Once you complete that fool’s errand, you’ll arrive at a figure that is either in the single digits or some fraction of 1. That is what “under-representation” really means.

Now ask yourself: what is so controversial about the proposition that the United States and Israel deserve to be attacked by Iran? It’s really not controversial that the United States and Israel aggressed against Iran. And it’s not controversial that aggression invites and justifies a counter-response. So it should not be controversial to suggest that Iran was justified in making a symbolic attack on the military bases of the country that attacked it. And yet it is. Apparently, we live in a country that can’t admit that aggression is aggression, and can’t admit that aggression deserves a retaliatory response in kind. The mediating assumption is that if you’re an American, or if you simply live in the United States, you owe a duty of loyalty to this country that precludes your saying the obvious–that if we aggress against a country, they are justified in a retaliatory response in kind against us. The simplest test of ethical consistency, universalizability, is either taboo or against the law, or both.

Well, I don’t recognize any such duty of loyalty to anyone. The principle of universalizability implies that Iran was justified in attacking us, not just symbolically but substantively. I accept the principle and accept the implication as well. I don’t care if that makes me disloyal to the United States. A country that demands the rejection of universalizability in ethical discourse doesn’t deserve my loyalty, won’t get it, and can’t claim it.

I actually don’t think Professor Brown should have deleted his tweet, apologized, or appeased Groves at all. He should have told Groves to go and fuck himself. That’s what should be said to all of these people wielding ad baculum arguments and making arbitrary demands, no matter who they are or what position of authority they hold. They need to be told in no uncertain terms that we simply don’t accept their moral assumptions and don’t regard them as having moral standing to judge us. If they want to reprimand us, go ahead. If they want to terminate us, go ahead. If they want to arrest us, or imprison us, or even kill us, fine. But they can’t expect us to agree with or show respect for them, or to comply with their arbitrary edicts. It isn’t possible to respect people with pretensions of academic and moral authority who, at the end of the day, are incapable of arguing their way out of a paper bag.

What isn’t possible shouldn’t be attempted. Let these self-styled commissars enact their King Canute fantasies without our help. Eventually, they’ll discover on their own that the tide around them is rising despite their desperate efforts to hold it back. It should be our hope to watch them drown, not to give them any equivalent of a life raft. Every concession we grant them is the equivalent of a life raft. It’s time to stop.