Mahmoud Khalil and the Battle of Technocrats vs. Activists

The arrest of Mahmoud Khalil is one of those events that can divide a room, or an X space, just by being referenced. The facts are deceptively simple. A Palestinian student at an Ivy League University on a foreign visa who organized protests at which some participants disseminated “Death to America” pamphlets, intimidated fellow students, and illegally occupied a university building is threatened with deportation by a duly-elected president wielding the constitutional power of the executive branch. The executive has called him a threat to national security, apparently (so far) based on his speech.

The legal questions in the case are thorny; Supreme Court rulings have gone different directions on the issue. The political questions are ugly, and shot through with self-interest; federal judges, liberal non-profits, the Democratic Party, and even neoconservatives are using Khalil’s arrest as a weapon against Donald Trump.

But all of this does little to alter the actual political or social significance of what’s occurring. Indeed, the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil and a host of associated actions by the federal government have very little to do with any of the questions above. Instead, they represent the silencing of one point of view about foreign policy in favor of another—and in ways that will likely redound on Americans now and in the future.

Crucial to the significance of what’s happening to Mahmoud Khalil is where it’s happening: a DC-funded research university, which is a very unusual space. As scholars have documented, the modern elite research university serves as a vessel for two mutually dependent activities. The first is training future national leaders via specialized instruction in political science, economics, management, business, law, and whatever other skills can be used in Washington DC’s civil service and its corporate outgrowths: “technocrats.” The second is training intellectuals to critique the very system of which these technocrats are a part and allowing them to promote vigorous protest against national leaders’ policies, via giving instructors tenure and allowing wide room for student protests.

The purpose of this divide is so that the same institutions which mint the operators who take us, say, into Vietnam, will also serve as bastions of resistance to this type of overreach. The technocrats move up through institutional ladders, beginning with the university, and exercise quiet power with outsized effects. Think of the rise of Robert McNamara from Harvard to Ford Motor Company to pulling the levers that got American into Vietnam. Conversely, the intellectuals and activists, lacking influential connections or access to the levers of power, make their point through disruption which sometimes gets out of hand, for example the takeovers of university buildings protesting Vietnam.

In this sense, the modern research university is a completely unique and uniquely balanced ecosystem. It has nothing to do with the tasks of state universities or small private colleges equipping students with a marketable trade and to engage in society and civic life. Instead, it deals in the zero-sum calculus of national power, both minting it and ensuring that it’s opposed. As one of the technocrats’ more vocal representatives, William Ackman, recently put it, “the real purpose of a university…[is] ‘to distribute privilege’” and to answer the question “‘Who is going to manage society?’” What he forgot to say is that its corresponding purpose, expressed via academic activists whose only recourse is loud disruption, is to make sure these managers exercise power responsibly.

Many America Firsters, myself included, believe that these management-and-activist-minting research universities should be defunded significantly, so that both technocracy and activism are reduced. But, so long as they exist in their current form, they should serve as a forum for differing geopolitical views—because the alternative is that they’ll become powerful vessels for the government to encourage the promotion of one view as opposed to another. This seems to be what’s happening here: the voices of technocrats are being given precedence over those who resist them.

For one example, the head of the Columbia School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA), where Khalil studied, is Keren Yarhi-Milo, who grew up in Israel, served in the Israeli Defense Forces and has extensive connections to Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The Belfer Center is where Jared Kushner first floated the idea of the “raze-and-rebuild” Gaza play I have reported on in the past. It is also where, the same week as deportation proceedings against Khalil began, former Biden National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, who along with Secretary of State Anthony Blinken was most responsible for the proxy wars in Ukraine and Gaza, became an affiliate; he also serves at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government as the inaugural Henry Kissinger Professor of the Practice of Statecraft and World Order. Like Sullivan, Yarhi-Milo is a powerful pro-interventionist player with deep Washington connections, and, like Sullivan will help do at the Belfer Center, she works at Columbia setting the agenda for a flagship research university’s main institution for foreign affairs.

Read more at The Libertarian Institute.