Davidson College, a leafy liberal arts college in a charming, gentrified Southern village, seems an unlikely place for Hamas-allied activity. Davidson has punched well above its weight in producing Rhodes Scholars and other exemplars of academic excellence in the nearly two centuries since hardy Scotch-Irish Presbyterians carved an all-male, church-related school out of the lovely Piedmont North Carolina countryside. Unlike Columbia University, ground zero for pro-Hamas activity on campuses, Davidson’s small, entirely undergraduate student body has no contingent of aggressively anti-Israel Middle Eastern graduate students, or ready access to professional protesters and vandals to assist cosplaying student revolutionaries. But the inertia of anti-colonialist ideology and its administrative incarnation DIE at Davidson became evident soon after the October 7 massacre, starting with an October 17 letter from President Doug Hicks and culminating in the railroading of a student who dared question campus orthodoxy.
The letter begins by acknowledging the heinousness of the massacre, but immediately pivots to “the escalating violence in Israel and the Gaza Strip.” This is curious, as the letter was written before Israel’s full-scale invasion of Gaza, though well after posters featuring images of Hanas paragliders festooned universities across America, and anti-Israel encampments began springing up on campuses.
*The letter reports that alumni in “Israel, UAE, and Jordan” had communicated their concerns to President Hicks. The precise nature of the messages from the latter two aren’t shared, but, true to Davidson’s compulsively celebrated diversity, “judgments and beliefs diverge” about October 7 and its aftermath: “Some feel that the college should speak up more firmly and more often for Israel. Others have asked us to state more strongly the living conditions, dangers, and heightened desperation in which Palestinians in Gaza have found themselves.” The expression of concern for Gazans is markedly more concrete and detailed than for Israel’s massacre victims, and makes no reference to Hamas as the source of Gaza’s chronic misery, or to the spontaneous participation of many Gazans in the massacre.
The rest of the letter documents Davidson’s efforts to keep its students “safe.” Hamas does not menace rural Mecklenburg County just now, so emotional well-being is the president’s focus. Succor is equitably distributed among Israeli and Arab and North African students. Safety is to be secured in part by “mental health and drop-in hours” at the campus Center for Community and Justice, and by efforts of the Middle Eastern and North African Students Association to “seek community support between impacted groups” — an opaque formulation that leaves uncertain what the concerns of the association are, and whether its anguish is as significant as that of Israeli students, given the circumstances.
The letter is signed simply “Doug,” which, together with its earnest, leaden, therapeutic prose and focus on safety, evokes the image of a supremely empathetic leader. But the meretricious evenhandedness of Hicks’ concern for Israel and Gaza in the immediate aftermath of a pogrom of satanic cruelty suggests otherwise, as does the mistreatment by Davidson of a 2025 graduate who dared challenge leftist orthodoxy.
as Huang documents. In February 2025 she received an email from Davidson’s Director of Rights and Responsibilities, Mak Tompkins, charging her with violating the college’s Code of Responsibility by distributing a pamphlet detailing several pernicious myths about Israel spread by the pro-Hamas Left. This was said to constitute the harassment of anonymous students. Huang was also charged with posting a similarly unsafe “transphobic” Instagram message “’speculating [sic] the sex/gender identity of Imane Khelif, an Algerian boxer.’”
A glance at Director Tompkins’ page on Davidson’s website discloses her “she/they” pronouns. She declares her “work to be exponentially important for college-age humans to learn from any missteps they may take while they have the safety net of college (and support folks like myself) to catch them.” The director’s focus on safety, and her emphasis on the feelings of the allegedly harassed students, parallels President Hicks’ focus on emotional safety.
This is prima facie curious, given the putative commitment of liberal arts colleges to “critical thinking.” Rigorous thought presupposes a robust commitment to objective truth, not subjective inner states: The point is to close the gap between mere appearance and reality, even at the risk of prompting unwanted feelings. But “critical thinking” on campuses often means undermining the idea of objective reality when it conflicts with students’ feelings — at least feelings springing from leftist ideology. If one’s “gender identity” conflicts with “biological sex,” so much for recalcitrant reality. If one feels outrage about Israel’s invasion of Gaza, then Israel is “genocidal,” notwithstanding Hamas’ open commitment to genocide.
Director Tompkins’ prose suggests she was not hired for her ability to communicate clearly with “college-age humans.” Her indeterminate pronouns more likely clinched the deal. Anyone who has worked at colleges and universities these past few decades, as I have, knows that featuring such pronouns is not a cordial invitation to get to know their possessor. It is rather a shot across the bow, a way of declaring that one had better not question his/her/their gender identity or the ideology underlying it.
Part of Tompkins’ job is to make leftism great again, as evidenced by the fact that her solicitude toward students’ feelings cuts only one way. Cynthia Huang has surely had some unpleasant feelings of late. That didn’t stop Tompkins’ office from creating a dilemma for her: “concede to a Mutual Resolution agreement that would require me to accept my punishment and waive my right of appeal, or attend a Code of Responsibility Council Hearing,” as Huang says. Huang found either option “untenable.”
Huang’s contention that the tribunal would be a kangaroo court is supported by Tompkins’ inaction regarding a social media post by a Davidson student in response to a pro-life op-ed Huang published in the student newspaper. The student composed a bit of slam poetry, a screenshot of which appears in Huang’s article, that includes this arresting stanza: “CYNTHIA/Mmm Cynthia/YOU’RE DEAD/You are dead.” When Huang brought this up at a meeting with Tompkins, she was dismayed to find that Tompkins knew of it but did not act. “Instead, she seemed to be more concerned about students who felt ‘threatened and unsafe’ by literature that did not target any individuals but simply contained facts,” says Huang.
Tompkins is more Stasi than “safety net” and would have exacted punishment had Huang not publicly documented her ordeal. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education wrote an exceptionally forceful letter to President Hicks, imploring him to honor Davidson’s professed commitment to free expression. Davidson eventually issued a warning to Huang which, as anyone who didn’t just fall of the turnip truck knows, is really a warning to any future student imprudent enough to consider violating the tenets of leftist faith. Huang technically avoided punishment, but Davidson knows full well that in a case like this process is punishment, especially when the process has the odor of a star chamber.
The whole spectacle is a moment in the revolutionary left’s self-proclaimed long march through the institutions. The idea of freedom underlying anti-colonialist ideology denies that freedom of expression means being able to express one’s beliefs without interference. That freedom is said to be illusory, because (a) the stock of ideas and opinions we are supposedly free to express are products of indoctrination by our systemically racist, sexist, colonialist society, and those ideas harm various victim groups. (“Speech is violence” is a recent leftist epigram.) The Cynthia Huangs among us think they freely believe and should be free to say that Hamas, not Israel, is dedicated to genocide; that abortion is morally problematic; and that trans orthodoxy is crazy. But that only shows the extent of their indoctrination.
The prevalence of this Orwellian idea of freedom explains why Director Tompkins claimed to be the college-age human’s safety net but tried to defenestrate Cynthia Huang. It also explains President Hicks’ apparently greater concern for students from nations hostile to Israel than for Israelis: Those who think Israel was the victim of October 7 are prisoners of colonialist ideology. It is the job of contemporary college bureaucrats to liberate them from this and related heresies.
Image: Davidson College
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