Reflecting on Israel and Gaza – a view from a Wharton classroom

A year ago I taught one of the most remarkable classes of my career. A note on Israel, Gaza, and the ethical courage of Wharton MBA students.

In this week’s teaser I said I would explain how I became a business school professor, a career path I did not plan and did not understand until well after I got started. I’ll save that post for a future Tuesday, though, in favor of a much more important and timelier topic.

A year ago yesterday, Hamas terrorists invaded Israel and murdered, kidnapped, and terrorized Israelis. It has been compared to Israel’s 9/11. The Israeli military response has been overwhelming, expansive, and is ongoing.

A year ago Thursday, I was in San Francisco teaching the final sessions of my required course, Responsibility in Business, to students enrolled in Wharton’s famed Executive MBA program. We had created a phenomenal classroom culture in those few hours together and I looked forward to our discussions. The students always choose the topic in the penultimate session of my course, which was scheduled for that day. By popular demand, the topic was “AI and Business Ethics.” I had come ready for the intellectual and ethical combat with the students on that cutting-edge topic.

To engage - or not - with my students about Israel and Gaza

My TA sent me an email saying that many students had asked me to address the Hamas attacks and the Israeli response. I wrote a somewhat pedantic reply that I thought I should most emphatically not do this. My expertise as a scholar is in financial history, financial regulation, and central banking. I have no useful expertise to offer about the Middle East, except as a citizen. My expertise as a teacher is in fomenting raucous but friendly debates about the hardest, thorniest problems of business ethics. I saw any effort to weigh in on those topics as becoming raucous, but decidedly unfriendly.

My TA pushed back and said that while he understood the point, my silence would be very pregnant and would lead students to wonder why I did not condemn Hamas or speak on behalf of Palestinian civilians or otherwise weigh in.

I wrote back again, still on a high horse, that nothing good could come from my weighing in. Any reference to geopolitics in the course – and there were plenty – was always from the perspective of business executives navigating the often competing and conflicting responsibilities they owe to themselves and their families, their business and their stakeholders, and their societies as citizens. I did not see how to engage the class in so raw a discussion given that frame.

In defense of pedagogical non-engagement

My TA didn’t write back. His points and silence weighed on me as I prepared the final slides on what AI companies organized as nonprofits owe to their investors, thinking that this was suddenly not so interesting or pressing a topic.

The question of how to engage this topic in a way that reflected my expertise but not my amateurishness loomed especially large on this topic because of my students that semester. I had students with deep ties to Israel. I had a student who was from Gaza. And I had a large group of students who felt passionately about the politics of the day and hoped to gain from my class a sense of what their Responsibility in Business actually means when the world is on fire.

So what to do? I stood by – and still stand by – the conclusion that I have no useful expertise to share on how to resolve crises in the Middle East. I have read probably 15 books on Israel and Palestine (my favorite is Ian Black’s Enemies and Neighbors); every time I do, I feel less certain of what should be done and which policies to support. I was firm – and am still firm – that I will not make my classroom into a pulpit of political condemnation, as many academics have done. It spins quickly out of control, blurring so quickly the difference between scholarly expertise and political passions, eroding confidence in the scholarly enterprise, and presenting a never-ending parade of adjudications about which causes deserve a professor’s sympathies and which do not.

If I were teaching one of my courses on antimoney laundering or financial institutions, those concerns above would have resolved the question in favor of non-engagement. But the entire point of Responsibility in Business is to equip students with the ability to have hard conversations of relevance to business leaders. Businesses throughout the world were at that very moment navigating questions about Israel and Gaza, many of them quite badly.

My TA and students were right. We needed to engage.

Why I decided to engage, Socratically

I ended up cutting the AI content in half and created a new slide. It asked three questions.

1.      When as a business executive are you ethically compelled to speak on questions of politics?

2.      When as a business executive are you ethically permitted to speak on questions of politics?

3.      When as a business executive are you ethically forbidden to speak on questions of politics?

In my class, I have a pedagogical tradition of a rather searing and classical use of the Socratic dialogue. This is not your law professor’s use of the Socratic dialogue, which is often not even particularly Socratic. In my law school experience, the Socratic dialogue was usually an opportunity to test whether students understood the readings with some limited test of the student’s reasoning. If the student got bashful, the professor would ask for volunteers.

I do it differently. I never do the Socratic dialogue on the basis of reading. I know my students will sometimes not complete it ahead of time. The dialogue is on a question all of them are hearing for the first time, so there’s no embarrassment if they came “unprepared” because it is impossible to prepare. And I never let them off the hook. Wharton students are good at many things: answering a hard question with a long answer that is full of polish and brio but lacking in much real content is among them. (This is one reason why I start this class with Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit as a required reading.) And so, I stick with the same student for 10 minutes, changing the questions, pushing for implications, trying to reach them to the Socratic endpoint of aporia.

The experience of rigorous, respectful debate about Israel and Gaza in the classroom

I made one exception that day from my usual rule. Students do not volunteer for the Socratic dialogue; they are cold-called. That day I decided to permit volunteers but assured them that the dialogue would be as searching and rigorous as they always were.

What followed was extraordinary. Students volunteered and spoke, initially, with the usual confidence. Firm rules came easily - only speak when it directly affects the business or its stakeholders, for example - but my relentless pushback destabilized the certainty of those rules. What does directly mean? Which stakeholders? What if they are split down the middle? What if 25% of employees demand intervention in one direction, 25% in another, and 50% don’t say anything at all?

Some first passes could be reduced to a kind of generic “do what is right, but not what is wrong” or “you’ll know it when you see it.” But such question-prompting platitudes found no cover in our discussion; some students admitted that they were punting while their gears turned to think through alternatives. Students spoke about the need to take principled stands, but also the need to take a principled stand against principled stands. We asked for exceptions to the rules and asked who would be in charge of interpreting the standards. When one student’s turn would end, I would ask for a student to articulate the best argument against the view we just heard, followed by the same rigorous Socratic dance that would work in exactly reverse.

The best part was when students started asking each other questions not to score points - by the end, we had all reduced our certainties so completely that there were no more points to score - but to genuinely understand each other and to understand themselves. One student spoke out against “selective empathy” in selecting the causes that will trigger response, but asked for help in identifying a middle ground between being always on politically and always off. This was the Socratic aporia: we had reached such a point of exhausted uncertainty that we could admit that we did not understand this hard problem and needed time, thinking, and more of each other to reach better conclusions.

When it comes to answering the questions I posed, we resolved precisely nothing that day. No consensus reached, no class-wide view, no Platonic ideal of when and how business leaders should intervene in political discourse. When it comes to modeling the hard work of taking on the thorniest questions in business and practicing the art of principled confrontation, however, my students put on a master class. And, as the saying goes, I was the student, they were the teachers. That day, my teachers – those close to Israel, my Palestinian student, my leftwing students, my rightwing students – engaged with me, the world, and especially each other in a way that made me emotional and very proud. They spoke to each other, taking seriously the gravity of the occasion and the insights available from even their starkest ideological opponent.

As a human being and an amateur student of Middle Eastern politics, I mark this awful anniversary with a heaviness that befits the time. As a business ethics professor, I mark a different anniversary of a day I watched with awe as Wharton MBA students demonstrated their profound ability to debate with vigor and panache, fearlessness and respect. Teaching them is one of the great privileges of my professional life. This class was a prime example why that is so.