Probably the biggest PR crisis I personally dealt with during my years at Columbia involved law students who demanded their exams be postponed because of the “trauma” of grand juries declining to indict police officers in the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The Law School had initially refused, but after a brief firestorm of protest the weak interim president backed down. The story got a fair amount of play, particularly in conservative media, and my office got blanketed with emails of mockery and contempt. The unflattering headlines probably dinged the school’s fundraising that fiscal year, but internally it was pretty quickly able to smooth things over because of the us vs. them dynamic: who were those racist outsiders to question our enlightenment?

But when it comes to the fraught Gordian Knot that is the issue of Israel and Gaza, there can be no pivoting to some external villain. Regardless of the merits of individual scholars’ work, the overarching narrative that many of the more militant protestors have absorbed is that every conflict boils down to loveable scrappy underdogs heroically battling some odious combination of the Nazis, the Klan, the Afrikaners, and the Evil Empire from Star Wars. Nuance is irrelevant, careful parsing of historical contingencies a distraction, with so very just a cause.

It's a childish, reductionist, thoroughly unproductive worldview, but it’s what they’ve been taught and, even more, it’s what’s been incentivized.