Moral Clarity Is Not The Problem

A 23-year-old who survived 505 days in Hamas captivity speaks at a major university. The student government condemns the event. And what should be self-evident, instead has to be argued for. I don’t understand why I am surprised…but I am. 

    University of California Regent Jay Sures confronted this lesson in lunacy a couple of weeks ago, 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 Yom HaShoah event. The program featured Omer Shem Tov, who was kidnapped from the NOVA music festival when Hamas launched their sneak attack against Israel on October 7th of 2023. He was 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.” Tell me…where do we grow these piece of shit human beings? Sures, in an interview with Jewish Insider, called the signatories “shortsighted, antisemitic, or both.” Sures was much kinder than I would have been.

Defenders praised Sures’ courage. Critics accused him of overreach. The more revealing question is why a regents 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: Christian, Jewish, 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 over 20 years elevating the language of empathy, lived experience, the careful tiptoeing around feelings, and dialogue. In practice, those goods are now distributed unevenly. The council did not deny that Shem Tov suffered. Instead, 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 all across the political spectrum.

My old friend Alexis de Tocqueville, warned us 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 moronic activist templates. The result is not deliberation; it is sorting.

This is precisely why trustees exist. Boards were not designed to ratify whatever the campus produces. Under the law, trustees hold THREE (3) 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.’” 

Mr. Sures did his job. He named a double standard, he DEFENDED the anti-semites 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.” One would think that students at a big-time university like UCLA would know the definition of the word, “Balance.” But who knows? Maybe California is as fucked up as it seems to be in newspaper stories and/or on TV. UCLA eventually distanced itself from the council’s letter. This formal student condemnation never should have reached a regent’s desk. The fact that it did…is probably the real story.

The deeper problem, however, is that most trustees do not understand that what Sures did here is actually their job. Too many treat board service as ceremonial - a credential for the resume, 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 folded like lawn chairs and collapsed on national television. Catastrophe, not foresight, woke them up.

A university worth the name does not need a regent to remind its students that a hostage’s account of captivity is something that 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.

Write to Peter: magtour@icloud.com