Alsheikh: Kalaniyot, the Highest Stage of Institutional Restraint

I recently wrote a piece where I criticized the political rhetoric of “dialogue” as perpetuating the status quo. The piece, ironically enough, did end up generating some dialogue on campus, and I’ve since heard many different takes on my argument from my friends, some positive and some negative. In these conversations, I’ve come to realize that my original piece did not paint the full picture — that not only is “dialogue” more often than not a means of maintaining the status quo, but that it is also a way to push it in a particular political direction. 

We can see how this rhetoric has evolved in recent years by examining Dartmouth’s policy of institutional restraint, which curtails the ability of departments and other campus groups to make collective statements, and the Kalaniyot program, an academic initiative designed to deepen ties between Dartmouth and Israeli universities. 

These are not an arbitrary selection of initiatives. Our institutional restraint policy and the Kalaniyot program share a common denominator insofar as they were both seemingly a reaction to the wave of pro-Palestinian sentiment last year — institutional restraint was adopted in December 2024, after a series of protests, mass arrests and departmental statements in support of student protestors and Palestinians, while Kalaniyot, which came to Dartmouth that October, is transparent about its goal of reducing hostility towards Israel on college campuses.

The fact that these two events took place shortly after each other, in response to the same political events, seems to me a clear indication that not only are they connected, but that they both serve political purposes. Institutional restraint serves to moderate political expression on campus to protect the status quo of the institution and its funding, while Kalaniyot deepens ties between Dartmouth and Israeli institutions as a means of warding off divestment and normalizing ties with Israel. 

These two goals are connected insofar as the status quo of Dartmouth — our funding channels, reputation, and professional network — is intertwined with the status quo of national politics, where support for Israel is a given. In maintaining this state of affairs, both of these programs deploy the rhetoric of “dialogue” to make these goals seem apolitical and thus more palatable to the broader Dartmouth community, but in very different ways. 

Institutional restraint represents, in many ways, the version of “dialogue” that I criticized in my earlier piece, aimed at saving face and preserving the status of an institution while reinforcing the status quo. By imposing additional bureaucratic burdens on collective statement-making, dissent is individualized, and solidarity is discouraged in favor of individual expression. The policy thus creates a tightly regulated rhetorical space where the rhetoric of one-on-one “dialogue” is set up as the legitimizing discourse, at the expense of collective politics. 

Kalaniyot builds on this discourse to do something new; through a careful application of the language of institutional restraint, it stages an active intervention in campus politics that goes beyond merely restraining dissenting voices. This is accomplished by weaponizing the rhetoric of “dialogue” that institutional restraint has made official policy. Kalaniyot floats such terms as “community-building,” “open collaboration,” and “respectful living” in the same breath as it purports to deepen ties with Israeli universities, presenting these two goals as if they were natural complements of each other.  

Through this rhetoric, it becomes apolitical to present Israel as a liberal, democratic country with a system of higher education that shares our values — a contested characterization to say the least, as the protests of the last few years have shown. By disguising this political messaging about Israel in this “apolitical” way, Kalaniyot is able to quietly work at changing Israel’s brand image on campus while legitimizing itself in the language of institutional restraint. While the Dartmouth Kalaniyot chapter was founded shortly before the official institutional restraint policy was adopted, we could say it builds on the idea of “dialogue” that institutional restraint embodies in order to advance its political goals. 

In both cases, “dialogue” is deployed to achieve political ends, in ways that feed off of each other: institutional restraint creates the policy and precedent to restrain dissenting voices, while furnishing the language that allows certain political priorities to be advanced. To be sure, the use of “dialogue” in this way isn’t just limited to pro-Israeli politics, but is perhaps a defining feature of our two-party political system, which restrains the voices of those who would push for more radical change while allowing the upper classes to exploit the language of bipartisanship to advance their own agendas. 

I don’t mean to suggest that there is some grand conspiracy to use the rhetoric of dialogue to brainwash us by administrators — institutional restraint and Kalaniyot, while related, evolved independently. Instead, what I mean to point out is that, for those who benefit from the existing systems, “dialogue,” in its various forms, is a powerful rhetorical tool to beat back those who seek to make political change. In an organic, reactionary process, dialogue is deployed by different actors to different means and ends, with the unifying goal of containing, disciplining and reforming “radicals” who are not content with these systems as they are. 

Building off of the allusion to Lenin I made in the title, I ask: what is to be done? How can such rhetoric be resisted by those of us “radicals?” There is a need to dismantle the idea of the university as a neutral utopia of scholarly exchange, and instead of treating it as an institution ensnared in the power relations of the broader society from which it issues and for which it serves. To quote Foucault, we need to “abandon a whole tradition that allows us to imagine that knowledge can exist only where the power relations are suspended and that knowledge can develop only outside its injunctions, its demands and its interests.”

In other words, to stage a meaningful resistance to this rhetoric, we need to articulate a discourse that insists first and foremost that knowledge is power, and that as a result there is no such thing as an “apolitical” university. 

Tonight is my last night as opinion editor of this paper. In my four years I have tried to cultivate such a discourse on campus, through my own writing and in conversations with others. Looking back, I am beginning to realize that such a task is much larger than an op-ed, or any other form of writing, can handle. The solution to “dialogue” lies in action, not more words.

Opinion articles represent the views of their author(s), which are not necessarily those of The Dartmouth.