Thread by @lee_kovarsky

UNDERSTANDING THE FURY ABOUT SHAI DAVIDAI

People outside of uni communities might not understand why there is such a strong reaction to what he’s doing – that is, why so many of us find his narcissistic grandstanding to be especially worthy of peer-group scorn.

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https://twitter.com/yashar/status/1782434024100938160

If you are a tenured faculty member at university, you are a principal member of a community, and you are expected to take care of other people in it.

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That responsibility is especially sacred with students, and it means giving them a cocoon that allows them to do things and say things – even mistaken things – without the consequences that might not otherwise attach in the real word.

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Obviously that can be especially hard for the community when some of its members are doing and saying things that degrade the safety and learning experience of others.

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At those moments – where community caretaking becomes a little more zero sum – that our burden to act like grown ups is especially high.

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We, too, are going to make mistakes, especially in the crucible of the zero-sum moments. But it’s our job to try to calm things down, to make things safer for everybody.

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But Shai acts like a 12 year old in need of attention, desperately staging viral videos and demanding retweets at the direct expense of the community for which he’s got a caretaking responsibility.

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He’s been a cheerleader in getting the outside world to equate peacefully protesting students with Hamas, he’s worked impossibly hard to obscure the tactical difference between students and more agitated elements from outside the university,

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and he’s compromised the immediate safety of the Jewish students so he can see himself on television.

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All of us are accustomed and ready for the outside world to demand that our students be sanctioned severely for unpopular conduct. It's just shocking, and a little pathetic, to see someone from the inside do it this shamelessly.

/e