The protest season at universities usually crescendos just before commencement: The weather is balmy and most term papers are done, but what student or professor would wish to stay around campus during summer break if they did not absolutely have to? This year, the protests have taken an uglier turn, as encampments have sprouted up. The demonstrators—most of them students, many not, often masked—are calling for divestment by their universities from companies based in or doing business with Israel. Some of the protesters see this goal as an interim step toward the destruction of the state of Israel.

In each case, students, faculty, and administrators participating in or supporting the protests assert that universities have a special obligation to take an institutional stand, separate and apart from what any of their members believe, say, or do as individuals.

Universities have reacted in various ways. University of Florida President Ben Sasse was firm and unambiguous; the administrations at Tufts and Cornell similarly refused to fold, and the students threw in the towel when they realized that their protests were going nowhere. Union Theological Seminary, which is affiliated with Columbia, accepted the demands, while the larger university vacillated between tolerance and crackdowns, ultimately having the police storm an occupied building. But some elite institutions—Brown, Northwestern, and Harvard among them—have chosen to end the encampments by offering disciplinary amnesty for nonviolent protesters, and promising to review investments in Israel, often through expedited processes.

The reality behind this last approach is a desperate squirm.

On the one hand, university presidents do not want riots in the quad, and they know that calling in the cops can trigger more extreme demonstrations by faculty and students. On the other hand, they are feeling the fury of pro-Israel alumni and donors and, after watching congressional hearings on television, have a healthy fear of being, as one might say, Stefaniked.

Their solution, however, is no solution, resting as it does on flawed practical politics, wishful thinking about the real animus on their campuses, and, most seriously, a misunderstanding of the moral concerns and values that universities can legitimately represent.

[Michael Powell: The unreality of Columbia’s ‘liberated zone’]

The amnesty and investment reviews are attempts to buy off protesters, in the hope that by the time the university committees do their work, the war in Gaza will be over, and in any case the divestment decisions (almost assuredly negative, because the alternative would open up an equally ugly can of worms) can be made this summer or next, while the kids are backpacking in Mongolia.

The problem is that the appearance of caving is caving. If you tacitly tell students that violating university rules will bring no sanctions, they will do it again. The chances are pretty good that the students and others will see through the “we will look carefully at our investment decisions” dodge and come back, with more insistent demands and an awareness that the university lacks the gumption to suspend or expel them for setting up tent cities, blocking access to buildings, and disrupting study in libraries and dormitories.

The wishful thinking about what is actually going on is much worse. The brute fact is that many American universities and colleges, including some of the best, have seen a surge in anti-Semitism, including protesters mobbing students wearing kippahs and shouting that Zionists—that is, people who believe that the Jews deserve a state of their own—deserve death. Many Jewish students, as a result, feel unsafe and unwelcome, and university leaders have only rarely denounced anti-Semitic outbursts without reference to other forms of bias, thereby skirting the core problem.

The deeper misunderstanding of universities’ roles and moral standing, however, is the most troubling aspect of the Great Academic Squirm of 2024. Universities cannot claim and do not deserve some special status as arbiters of a moral foreign policy. After all, they are not, and have never been, paragons of moral virtue. Both Harvard and Johns Hopkins, universities with which I have been proudly affiliated over many years, in the past century had rabidly anti-Semitic presidents: A. Lawrence Lowell and Isaiah Bowman, respectively. They were accomplished academic leaders and architects of much of the modern university. They had academic vision, and they did good things for their institutions. They just also happened to be bigots.

Modern university leaders have recognized the sins of their predecessors and apologized copiously for them, but that is not the point. The lesson, rather, is that as individuals, they are probably every bit as fallible, albeit in different directions. They should aim for humility, not self-flagellation.

The students and faculty are even worse from this point of view. Nineteen-year-olds make good soldiers, but not good generals, judges, corporate executives, or bishops, for the excellent reason that their emotions and passions, noble or ignoble, have yet to be tamed by wisdom and good judgment. It was the best and brightest on our campuses who signed up for the original America First movement, after all, pushing for isolationism as the Nazis seized power in Germany. (Many, of course, more than compensated for the puerility of their collegiate political views by honorable service in World War II.)

Today’s students are no better or worse than their predecessors. They are, as befits their age, morally selective to a fault: Can anyone recall a demonstration against Pernod Ricard for failing to fully halt exports of Absolut Vodka to Russia until about a year ago? Where are the mass demonstrations about the Rohingya, Sudan, the Uyghurs, the Syrian massacres, or for that matter the Chinese laogai penal-labor system or the prisons of North Korea? Or, in an earlier era, against Robert Mugabe’s murderous tyranny in Zimbabwe or the Vietnamese gulag after the fall of Saigon?

Presumably, students come to a university for an education, which implies that they need to be educated, which means that they are not, in fact, ready to make the deeper judgments on which society depends. They are high on passion, and, as interviewers have found, many of them are extraordinarily ignorant about the causes for which they are demonstrating.

As for faculty, reading the novels of David Lodge and Julie Schumacher—not to mention viewing Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?—would confirm the view that I have come to after 40 years in departmental meetings, that one should not expect too much by way of prudence and profound moral and political judgment from them, either.

There are sterling characters among the professoriate—heroic, self-sacrificing, and wise. There are a great many more who are simply passionately dedicated to a subject, be it broad or arcane, and just want to teach and research it and otherwise be left in peace. But in addition, there are the garden-variety intriguers, backstabbers, prima donnas, and bullies. There are also quite a few adulterers, predators, egomaniacs, and borderline swindlers, and even a sociopath or two. Some professors are experienced in the ways of the world; most of them are not, having viewed it with all the blessed autonomy and freedom from the constraints of politics or war that universities appropriately provide. They have no special qualification for the role of society’s conscience.

The university’s real missions are noble: education, particularly of the young, and the pursuit of the truth. The people engaged in that mission may or may not be the finest characters in the world, or have the best moral or political judgment, but the missions are of the highest importance.

It is the business of academic leaders to sustain their institution’s commitment to those missions, and nothing more. They have neither the moral standing nor the credibility in wider society for exceeding that mandate, or doing anything other than creating an optimal environment for learning and research, upholding the rules, and stewarding the institution’s finances.

The leaders of universities do not exist to pass judgment on politics, or twist their endowments into moralistic knots, or attempt to shape the course of American foreign policy. As individuals, they (and students, faculty, and administrators) may have something useful to say about politics and every right to do so. In their official roles, they should have none.

When educational leaders exceed their mission or, conversely, lack the courage to defend it resolutely, they will bring more discredit, more unwelcome political attention, and more turmoil upon themselves and their institutions than they already have. And however much they squirm today, the protesters will come back to make them squirm more tomorrow.

In a recent scene from HBO’s The Sympathizer, a communist spy whom we only know as the Captain (played by Hoa Xuande) sits outside a Los Angeles car-repair station, staking out the man he’s planning to kill. His target is a former senior military officer, Major Oanh, who fled with him from Vietnam to the U.S., and who is starting over as a mechanic. When the Captain learns that Oanh is importing expired Vietnamese candy as a side hustle, he confronts him. To his shock, the man embraces him. “It’s a new world here,” Oanh tells the Captain. “If you fully commit to this land, you become fully American. But if you don’t, you’re just a wandering ghost living between two worlds forever.”

Adapted from Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Sympathizer follows a protagonist who seems perennially trapped in this between. The Captain is a North Vietnamese secret-police agent embedded high up in the Southern Vietnamese military. As a biracial, half-French man, the Captain is at once strikingly visible in public and yet socially invisible; he’s been, as he says early in the first episode, “cursed to see every issue from both sides.” But what vexes him even more is the realization that he uses his identity as an excuse to avoid taking firm moral stances. By circumstance and by choice, he moves through society as a specter.

Although The Sympathizer isn’t a literal ghost story, this is a compelling prism to view the adaptation through. The series, created by Park Chan-wook and Don McKellar, introduces the Captain after he’s been captured by the North Vietnamese army (which he’s spying for), sent to a reeducation camp, and stuck in a room to write his confession. He begins by writing words we hear in a voice-over: “I am a spy, a sleeper, a spook, a man of two faces,” a nod to the opening of Ralph Ellison’s 1952 novel, Invisible Man, whose similarly unnamed narrator unpacks feeling adrift and anonymous “because people refuse to see me.” In The Sympathizer, the word spook takes on a dual meaning, describing a spy—a job that hinges on being imperceptible—and also a disembodied presence that’s neither dead nor alive.

The Captain narrates his imperfectly detailed memories, which span decades and move between Vietnam and the U.S. He jumps back and forth through time, revealing a man caught as much between physical and psychic worlds as between loyalties. The two people he cares most about in the world—his best friends and “blood brothers” Man and Bon—were on different sides of the war: the former was a higher-up in North Vietnamese leadership, the latter was a South Vietnamese paratrooper and assassin.

[Read: Viet Thanh Nguyen on why writing is a process of “emotional osmosis”]

But unlike in many traditional ghost stories, the Captain isn’t an omniscient figure narrating from the afterlife. He is wrestling with competing political and cultural ideologies and with Vietnam’s legacy of colonialism and war. He is a frequent subject of derision as a mixed-race man: In one scene in Vietnam, the Captain explains that he’s long endured acquaintances and others “spitting on me and calling me bastard,” dryly adding that “sometimes, for variety, they call me bastard before they spit.” Even those who the Captain believes respect him see his humanity as conditional. In the novel, his longtime boss—known only as the General—fires him for flirting with his daughter: “How could you ever believe we would allow [her] to be with someone of your kind?” the General asks.

This sense of alienation is exacerbated in the U.S., where the Captain embeds within the exiled South Vietnamese community. There, he and his fellow countrymen are, as he describes in the novel, “consumed by the metastasizing cancer called assimilation and susceptible to the hypochondria of exile.” At one point in the show, a fellow émigré and journalist named Sonny (Alan Trong) tells him, “Arguably, I’m more Vietnamese than you … biologically”—and yet the Captain is regarded as being too Vietnamese by many of those he meets in the U.S. In an especially atrocious scene after the Captain’s arrival in Los Angeles, a former professor he connects with (Robert Downey Jr.) gives him the dehumanizing assignment of writing down his “Oriental and Occidental qualities” side by side. Afterward, the professor pressures the Captain to read the list aloud to university donors at a cocktail party.

[Read: The Vietnam War, as seen by the victors]

Not even the Captain’s Marxist proclivities can anchor him after he moves to America, a bastion of capitalism that he's been taught to hate but secretly enjoys. Though he technically identifies as a Communist, in the series he doesn’t come off as an active, passionate believer. He also becomes involved in American pop culture, when he's asked to be a cultural consultant on an Apocalypse Now–esque film. Yet the Captain is frustratingly static in these Hollywood scenes. He’s unconvincing when he implores a movie director named Niko Damianos (also played by Downey Jr.) to hire Vietnamese actors in speaking roles. Even the way he pushes back against the inclusion of an unnecessarily violent scene feels tepid; when the director fires him, the Captain walks away in indifferent silence.

In interviews, Nguyen has said that hauntings are inextricable from stories about war and the trauma it leaves behind. He has also noted that Vietnamese culture is full of ghost stories, whose spirits bear both malicious and benevolent intent. The visual language of The Sympathizer takes care to point out that those hovering in the afterlife stay close to the living. Shrines to the deceased, many adorned with fruits, incense, and vases full of flowers, pervade the show’s world, including in the Captain’s home and in the General’s office. Later in the series, literal ghosts also take shape: Major Oanh and another person the Captain murders constantly reappear to taunt him and offer unsolicited opinions.

As the series progresses, the Captain becomes more and more numb, stymied by the realization that neither communism nor capitalism—nor either of the two countries, or racial identities, or best friends he’s torn between—will make him whole. The Sympathizer drives home the salient point that social invisibility has a way of hollowing someone until they’re unrecognizable, even to themselves. It gestures toward a haunting truth: To stand for everything is akin to standing for nothing.

The only victims of transnational migration are not those who are on the move.