When Moral Clarity on Campus Feels Unusual, the Problem Isn’t the Clarity

A 23-year-old who survived 505 days in Hamas captivity speaks at a university. The student government condemns the event. And what should be self-evident has to be argued for. University of California Regent Jay Sures confronted this mess last week and Sures, writing on Board of Regents letterhead, told members of the UCLA Undergraduate Students Association Council that he was “disgusted and appalled” by their formal condemnation of an April 14 Yom HaShoah event. The program featured Omer Shem Tov, who was kidnapped from the Nova music festival on October 7 and freed in a February 2025 prisoner exchange . The council described Shem Tov’s appearance as “selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence.” Sures, in an interview with Jewish Insider, called the signatories “shortsighted, antisemitic or both.” Defenders praised Sures’ courage. Critics accused him of overreach. The more revealing question is why a regent’s plain moral statement felt unusual in the first place. It should not. A hostage is not a geopolitical abstraction. A young man’s testimony about being held underground for 17 months is not a “narrative.” And the refusal to listen is not a form of intellectual rigor. These are not contested propositions in any serious moral tradition I know: Jewish, Christian, classical, liberal, or otherwise. Yet on the contemporary campus, they have become claims that require defense. This is the inversion worth naming. American universities have spent two decades elevating the language of empathy, lived experience, and dialogue. In practice, those goods are now distributed unevenly. The council did not deny that Shem Tov suffered. It treated his suffering as politically inconvenient and therefore subject to procedural objection. That is a remarkable thing for a representative body of almost 30,000 undergraduates to do, and it ought to disturb people across the political spectrum. Tocqueville warned that democratic societies generate their own forms of conformity—soft, social, mediated through institutions that present pressure as virtue. The campus version operates on a frictionless track. Administrators avoid clarity because clarity invites mobilization. Student governments pass resolutions whose moral architecture has been outsourced to a handful of activist templates. The result is not deliberation; it’s sorting. This is precisely why trustees exist. Boards were not designed to ratify whatever the campus produces. Under the law, trustees hold three fiduciary duties —care, loyalty, and obedience—owed not to the loudest constituency but to the institution itself and its mission. As Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges general counsel Tom Hyatt puts it , ” Higher education needs conscientious trustees who support their institutions more than ever right now, and there is no room for ‘absentee trustees.’” Sures did his job. He named a double standard, defended the right to protest while challenging the rush to condemn, and reminded students that “balance, by definition, inherently involves equal consideration of more than one point of view.” UCLA itself eventually distanced itself from the council’s letter. This formal student condemnation never should have reached a regent’s desk. That it did is the story. The deeper problem, however, is that most trustees do not understand that what Sures did here is their job. Too many treat board service as ceremonial—a credential, a fundraising perch, a quarterly dinner—and defer to administrators on governance and to faculty on judgment, leaving the institution without a fiduciary spine. The cost surfaced in December 2023, when the boards of Penn and Harvard discovered the limits of passivity only after their presidents collapsed on national television. Catastrophe, not foresight, woke them up. I write as a faculty member at an institution where the board has been asleep for years. At Sarah Lawrence College, the trustees have presided over a sustained collapse of basic norms—a Jewish student told he “should have been killed in Israel,” a Jewish Zionist professor—me— targeted by an organized boycott campaign for being “a staunch advocate of Israel’s right to self-defense,” a dangerous occupation of the main campus building, all documented in a sustained House Education and Workforce Committee investigation —without doing what Sures did in a single afternoon. They have mistaken silence for prudence. This is not balance. It is antisemitic drift that runs against the school’s purported values and has been allowed to proceed unchecked for years. A university worth the name does not need a regent to remind its students that a hostage’s account of captivity is worth hearing. Trustees should speak, though, when an institution’s stated values are at risk. That should be the floor, not the ceiling, of campus citizenship. When clarity at that floor reads as bravery, the building has settled further and the people sitting on its boards need to remember why they were given the keys. The post When Moral Clarity on Campus Feels Unusual, the Problem Isn’t the Clarity appeared first on American Enterprise Institute - AEI .