When to Be a Hero (guest post)
“Is now the time to be a hero?”
The Trump administration’s brazen interferences with academic freedom and university governance, its punishment of students for exercising their freedom of expression, its drastic cutting of research funding and financial aid, and its attempts to block international students from studying in the US, taken together, constitute an unprecedented attack on higher education.
What are you going to do about it? What should you do about it? What’s at stake is important, but speaking out or taking action in response to this attack, or to other moves and policies of the current government, may be dangerous. Heroes stand up for values even when doing so is risky. Is now the time for you to be hero? And what does heroism in this context look like?
In the following guest post, Elizabeth Harman, professor in the Department of Philosophy and Center for Human Values at Princeton University, takes up these and related questions.
This is the second post in the 2025 Summer Guest Post Series.
[Signatures Quilt (detail) by Adeline Harris Sears. Click for details.]
When To Be a Hero
by Elizabeth Harman
Is now the time to be a hero? In this post, I’ll introduce this question and ask for your help in answering it.
Graham Parsons resigned from his job teaching at West Point after thirteen years, because they revoked academic freedom in the classroom. I don’t believe he had another job lined up as he resigned. There was something important at stake, and he took a stand. Hero.
Cynthia Stark wrote publicly about bad changes at University of Utah, no doubt angering the university administration and likely fostering their hostility toward herself and her department. But it was important to say what she said. Stark lost less than Parsons in what she did, but still I say: hero.
It might seem that we can figure out whether now is the time to be a hero by figuring out what morality requires us to do. Are we morally required to be heroes now? Does morality demand that we take a stand at significant cost to ourselves? (Sometimes it does.) This is a harder question now than sometimes. As the United States falls apart, as essential government services and excellent government programs are dismantled, as our checks against corruption are eliminated, as our checks and balances are strained, this is truly a moment that heroism might be demanded of us.
If ICE showed up at your office door and asked you to list every “anti-American” or “anti-Israel” comment you’d ever heard an international student make, you’d be morally required to say nothing. Morality would demand that small act of heroism.
But a lot of heroism isn’t like that. Many of us right now are not morally required to be heroic in opposing the actions of our government. So what does that mean for us? Even after realizing that we don’t have to be heroic, that we wouldn’t be acting wrongly to fail to be heroic, there remains the question of whether to be heroic, and in particular the question of whether at this time we should be heroic. Is now the time to be a hero? It may be. It may be that this particular heroic act before you is the thing to do, in light of all the reasons that face you, even though morality doesn’t demand it and you wouldn’t be violating any duties in failing to do it. “I don’t have to do this, but I should,” is a thought worth entertaining, worth taking seriously. It might apply to you right now.
(My book in progress, When To Be a Hero, argues that sometimes one should do something above and beyond what morality requires, although one doesn’t have to do it and one wouldn’t be doing anything morally wrong in failing to do it.)
As the Federal government aimed its sights on universities, first targeting Columbia, other universities faced choices about how to act. Christopher Eisgruber, the President of Princeton University (where I teach), chose to take a bold stance, publishing an essay in The Atlantic calling out the government actions as deeply wrongheaded and unjustified. Taking a bold and early stance was not morally required, but what Chris did was both heroic and, I think, it was the thing to do. Chris didn’t just do a good thing that was worth doing. In light of the reasons that confronted him, Chris did what he should have done. Was now the time for Chris to be a hero? It was, and he saw that—in a way few other university presidents seemed to.
(Fortunately, since that moment, other universities have stood more firmly in opposition to the Federal government’s efforts. Harvard has refused to be coerced into giving up their independence. Columbia has walked back some of their concessions.)
What are the things we should be doing right now, even if we don’t have to be doing them? This is always a hard question, but in our current moment it is particularly hard for two reasons: our Federal government is acting in unprecedentedly awful ways, and there is a lot of uncertainty about what our situation really is and what differences we are in a position to make.
One question many of us are asking ourselves is How much of a crisis is this? Is fascism taking hold in the U.S.? Is democracy failing? Are we aiding a genocide in Gaza? Is antisemitism dangerously rising in the U.S.? And if this is more of a crisis than many of us have seen before, how differently should we be living our lives? When it’s uncertain both what situation we are in and what we can do about it, what should we do?
The uncertainties and surprises in our situation have made accidental heroes of some people—or have accidentally magnified the heroism of their actions. I’m thinking particularly of U.S. Green Card holders who spoke out against Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza, during last Spring’s campus protests. Put your mind back to one year ago. People who were in the U.S. on visas were aware of their precarious situations; they knew at least that it was dangerous to get arrested. But people who held Green Cards felt secure—certainly secure in their entitlement to speak their minds. Fast forward to now, and a visa has been revoked over an opinion piece in a campus newspaper, a Green Card has been revoked over leading a campus protest. When one turns out to have risked more than one knew, one’s action was more heroic than one realized.
Not knowing what we can do to help, to preserve our democracy, to keep our students safe, might be paralyzing if we are not careful. We might mistakenly think that action is only valuable if it makes a positive difference. I want to share three of my own thoughts about this.
First: Saying the truth about what is going on is always worth doing, even when we don’t know whether it will help and even when there is some reason to think it could hurt. We should say the truth; it is worth spelling out what is happening.
Second: There are strong reasons to join collective action that can make a difference, even if one’s own individual contribution will almost certainly make no difference. This is because there are moral reasons to bring good changes about, even when one does so as one of many joint causes. (Similarly, there are moral reasons against participating in an unjust firing squad, even though one’s individual contribution makes no difference.)
Third: At a time in which horrible, prejudiced, cruel things are being done, and horrible, prejudiced, cruel things are being said, there is a tendency among some of us to close down open discussion and debate—“this is not the time” to engage with those heinous views. This is a bad and misguided tendency. Shutting down debate within academia—abandoning robust academic freedom—is not a good thing to do, so it’s not something we should do. (I’ve written about this is an op-ed, and in an essay in the book Academic Ethics Today, ed. Cahn.) Some say that because the stakes are high, we can’t afford to tolerate awful views. But rather, it’s because the stakes are high that we need serious conversation about these issues.
As the Federal government announces its intention to block Harvard from enrolling international students, what can we U.S. professors do for our own international students? I spoke with a Princeton administrator about this last week and we expressed our shared feelings of being at a loss. We can’t offer reassurance to our students. We have none to offer. Can we imagine our university without its international students? We cannot.
When things are happening, or threatening to happen, that are hard for us to imagine, this poses a real danger to us. If we don’t get our minds around what’s happening, we won’t meet the moment.
What heroism are you witnessing in academia these days? What morally good actions are you seeing people take that they don’t have to take? This post has been about U.S. academics, but I would welcome answers about academics anywhere. What heroism (and morally good action more broadly) do you wish you were seeing? What should you be doing? What should the rest of us in academia be doing?
Loved this. But also, as a hero in the philosophy profession often reminds us, we must call out the underrepresentation of 19th-century continental philosophy in the top 10 departments as well.
“ Some say that because the stakes are high, we can’t afford to tolerate awful views. But rather, it’s because the stakes are high that we need serious conversation about these issues.”
Well said. I found this point, and really the whole post, insightful and inspiring. Makes me want to go out and double down on all the stuff that makes universities worth fighting for.
As for who the heroes are—and at the risk of sounding like I’m pandering—I must say I’m impressed by the dedication of current philosophy graduate students. They’re the only ones who can keep the torch lit, and they’re marching ahead even amidst all this uncertainty and chaos, which seems to me even more daunting than what the field experienced during the financial crisis.
(Not that anyone’s morally required to stick to academia at the expense of other options. I’m just saying: the ones who brave the storm out of love for our field—whether as teachers or researchers—deserve our appreciation.)
Your post made think about Merleau-Ponty’s writings on heroism (I have a paper coming out that summarizes those, but I also strongly recommend Bryan Smyth’s work on this too which is excellent), particularly his essay “Man, The Hero” in Sense and Non-Sense which couldn’t be more relevant today still.
Merleau-Ponty highlights two points that I think are at odds with your thoughts here. First, there’s a massive difference between speculating/talking about heroism and actually doing it. It’s great to attract people’s attention to these political issues but calling on them to be heroes or to hypothesize on what they would do is 1) not an accurate way to know what heroism is actually like and 2) it devalues the philosophical/existential input of actual heroism. I think it also devalues the real heroes too. Asking people how they can be heroes is just disguising training/anticipation with political undertone. I interpreted your idea as putting in the same basket people who took their sweet time to wonder about whether or not they should be heroes and those who just naturally put their heart and soul in their sacrifice without thinking about it. There’s a vast difference between both categories, which I think also accounts for a difference in the moral value that both people exude as well.
His second point, which is tied to the other one, is that heroism is a thing of contingency. People who act heroically do it because they have no other options and this is their first response in the face of contingency. A hero is not necessarily somebody who acts based on a grander scheme of things or for a political reason. It’s somebody who can’t accept the lack of freedom they’re experiencing, who’s pressed against the wall and have to do something right now, and they decide to plunge into that contingency without knowing what’s going to result from that. “Seeing” heroism in academia sounds like grossly blurring the distinctions between revolt, rebellion, heroism, and political action overall. Maybe we could talk about this in term of personal sacrifice but I personally see it as the sacrificing of a priviledge. Let’s not forget academia is a priviledged world. As much as the values of education, science and free speech are fundamental, you cannot easily make it here without being rich. I’m not sure how much of a heroic act it would be to sacrifice a 100k/year job compared to those who died protecting children in a school shooting, for instance, which is the result of America’s direct pro-gun policies and culture. This is where Merleau-Ponty’s insight is useful: according to him we’d be better learning about heroism by actually watching them operate, by letting ourselves experience things instead of speculating, and understand that not everyone feels contingency and collective action in the same way.
It’s true that some heroism occurs quickly, in an emergency situation, with little time to deliberate. And some heroism has life-and-death stakes, both in what is saved and what is risked.
But I don’t think that’s the only kind of heroism there is. Sometimes someone has time to think a lot before risking their life to save others’ lives, for example. And I do think some actions are truly heroic — such as the actions of Parsons, Stark, and Eisgruber, which I mention in the post — although no lives are at stake. These are morally good actions which required bravery and which are examples to us all.
I hate to carp at Graham Parsons who is clearly a lot more courageous than the general run of academics. But there is something even more heroic that he could have done. Rather than resigning he could have stayed in post at West Point while teaching as usual, and defying his superiors to sack him. Then when they sacked him, he could have sued. (I suspect that he did not do this because it would have entailed the loss of his pension rights.) However that may be, I would like to suggest that this is the kind of ‘heroic’ action – staying in position while refusing to comply with immoral orders – that many American academics may be called upon to perform. And the risks of being sacked or otherwise sanctioned will be real. The term ‘heroic’ may be a bit overblown, but such actions would require courage and self-sacrifice. I hope that enough people step up.
It’s not clear to me that staying, getting fired, and suing is more or less heroic than what Graham did, but that’s beside the point.
Publicly speculating that Graham didn’t do “the more heroic thing” for pecuniary reasons seems totally inappropriate to me.
Adam, this is silly. The American Republic is sliding rapidly towards fascism and authoritarianism. Having the liberal institutions of your society subverted is the moral equivalent of an invasion and calls for a similar degree of courage and self-sacrifice in response. Thus in my view, it is the duty of every patriotic American to do their bit to resist this slide. (Easy for me to say from the safety of the other side of the world but that does not mean that I am wrong.) What doing your bit amounts to will depend on circumstances and is, moreover, morally indeterminate, since there may be many actions available to any given individual that could qualify as doing their bit. However, given that I am addressing an audience of academics, one place that the crunch for you is likely to come is if you are asked to obey an immoral (and perhaps illegal) order, censoring your research or teaching in order to comply with the Trumpian agenda. When given such an order, there are four obvious alternatives: 1) compliance; 2) outward compliance accompanied by foot-dragging and subtle subversion; 3) resigning rather than obeying; 4) open defiance with the obvious risk of bullying, sanctions and the sack. (Having been hauled over the coals by the management at my university for showing insufficient ‘respect’ I can testify that this kind of bullying alone can be quite stressful.) Options 3) and 4) should obviously be accompanied by the maximum of publicity in order to be politically effective. Now Parsons chose option 3), a choice which puts him several cuts above what I sadly suspect would be the majority of academics. But option 4) would be more politically effective, since, in sacking him, his West Point employers would have perpetrated an obvious act of oppression, a fact that could have been used against them. It is difficult to pretend that ‘never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents’ (a direct quote from Trump’s inaugural) if the heavy hand of the state is being used to fire people who discuss opinions that the President does not like. So from a purely political point of view, I would say that option 4) is clearly the best, the most effective way that an academic in that situation could do his or her bit for constitution and country. BUT it almost certainly comes at a higher cost. People who resign tend to retain benefits that people who are fired do not. Thus there are prudential reasons why even a courageous and self-sacrificing person might prefer option 3) to option 4) . (It’s a bit like the difference between being willing to serve as an ordinary soldier, with the attendant risks of death and injury, and being willing to serve as a secret agent behind enemy lines, with a heightened risk of death and injury, augmented by the threat of being tortured to death if captured.)
Given the current crisis, these are the kinds of issues that people ought to be discussing, and this can hardly be done without the use of examples. I am happy to celebrate Parsons’ self-sacrifice, but I don’t think it offensive to suggest that there is an even more self-sacrificing course of action that he could have taken but did not, probably for legitimate but prudential reasons.
PS I am beginning to think that framing the issue in terms heroism is a mistake. It suggests that acts of resistance require extraordinary virtue, unattainable by ordinary mortals. What is required (from most people) is not heroism but the everyday courage and self-sacrifice that many people are capable of displaying in a war situation.
Charles, you have no idea why he didn’t do whatever it was you thought it should. Nothing in this lengthy post suggests otherwise. You seem to think I care about what you think Graham should have done. I don’t. I don’t think you should guess that he didn’t do whatever because he was trying to save some money . Maybe you’re exactly right about his motives— I don’t have any insight either. But I think speculating like this about an academic philosopher on here is a bullshit thing to do.
You also raise the question of whether heroes think of themselves as heroic. They often do not, I think, which is an interesting phenomenon. I talk about it in my book (in progress), in a chapter called “What should heroes think of the rest of us?” in which I discuss the phenomenon of heroes refusing to say that others *should* act as they are acting or have acted, and refusing to be judgmental of others for not acting similarly. I think this is a common phenomenon among heroes.
But not all do-gooders are like that. Consider, for example, the Effective Altruists, who give a lot of money to charitable causes and are very happy to say that others should act as they are.
I don’t think this I’m disagreeing with anything you said explicitly (except perhaps when you said one should say the truth even if it could hurt), but I do worry about people thinking the point of this (and I certainly don’t think it’s a point you’re trying to make) is to be heroic for heroism’s sake. Perhaps I’m too consequentialist, but I think one should only be heroic if it’ll actually be helpful to those affected.
To be concrete, let’s say you are a well-connected senior academic and you have the option between (a) writing a blistering Op-Ed in the NYT that’ll call out the morally awful ways in which the current admin is treating international students, with cutting prose, using illustrative parallels from the history of authoritarianism; or (b) or to reach out through a friend of a friend to a senior person in the Trump Department of Education, buy them dinner, and try to convince them, using the Trump admin’s own framework, why it’s essential to allow international students in (let’s say: winning the AI-race against geopolitical rivals).
Let’s stipulate that you can’t do (b) if you do (a). You would be seen as an ideologue and would be persona non grata in those circles.
Clearly, (a) will be perceived to be more heroic than (b). Indeed (b) might be seen as spineless. But plausibly (b) will be more likely to actually help international students. (It might be disputed if (b) will actually be more helpful. But you can substitute some other kind of diplomacy-strategy for (b) and my point will stand.) If so, I think one ought to do (b) over (a). However, if one is thinking in terms of how to be heroic, one might do (a).
So my broader point is this: I think heroism should always play second fiddle to *actually helping*. (Again, not suggesting you’re saying otherwise.) Obviously, if heroism is the most effective way to help then my point is moot.
I think you’re right that many people would see someone’s sitting down for a meal with high-up members of the Trump administration right now as morally heinous. But I agree with you that it can be worth doing right now. If (b) was successful — if one actually managed to get the administration to change its policy — that would be heroic, in my view! (Partly because it’s a heroic feat, a difficult thing to do.)
I mentioned in the post that I think we need to preserve robust academic freedom and allow people to offer and discuss views that are in fact heinous. Similarly, I think that we should keep talking with those in our government whose views and actions are heinous. We can’t pretend they aren’t important — they are shaping our country and our world, they are altering our lives.
A more extreme instance of strategy b) would be Schindler, widely regarded as a hero, who frequently sat down to dinner with leading Nazis and thereby saved a lot of lives.
Interesting! As I read your comment, I wondered whether this sort of rationale ever occurred to Vance. I also wonder whether you think it’s exculpatory of those who collaborate with the Trump Administration under this rationale. I suppose if you’re a consequentialist it’ll matter whether helpful intentions realize good ends. But I think one reason not to be a (b)-type agent in the world is that collaborating with evildoers to mitigate their harms might warp our own moral clarity on the issues, as I think may very well have happened to Vance (to disastrous effect).
”There are strong reasons to join collective action that can make a difference, even if one’s own individual contribution will almost certainly make no difference. This is because there are moral reasons to bring good changes about, even when one does so as one of many joint causes.”
Hmm. I am not convinced. It is of course *possible* that my action is one of several joint causes which on its own would have made no difference. But isn’t it *more likely* that my contribution will make no difference because of causal overdetermination — the same outcome would have occurred regardless of what I did. If so, does that make me a hero? (I believe Parfit had a bit to say about this in the 80s….)
I do think that one has strong reasons to be one of many joint causes of a morally important outcome — even when this is a case of overdetermination, in which various subsets that do not include one’s own action would have been sufficient for the morally important outcome to occur. Note that all of the joint causes can be *genuine causes* of the outcome, even when we are dealing with overdetermination. (Symmetric overdetermining causes are genuine causes.)
Suppose everyone—100%—vote for the same, morally optimal candidate in the next election. You read the polls and know the night before that this is about to happen. It does not matter how you vote, the outcome is causally overdetermined. Do you really have a “strong moral reason” to vote? And is your vote really a “genuine cause”? It seems that your reason to vote would have been *much stronger* if your vote had been essential for getting the candidate elected.
Here‘s a quick argument that we shouldn’t value (known) unnecessary causal contributions:
An evil but trustworthy demon holds a referendum on whether to blow up the world. He explains there are two consequences:
(1) He will destroy the world unless at least 50 people vote against it, and
(2) He will torture 1 puppy for each person who votes against destroying the world.
You have x-ray vision, and as you enter the voting booth, you can see that there have already been the needed 50 votes against destroying the world. What should you do?
Surely you should not vote against destroying the world, for such a vote would (i) do no good, given that sufficient such votes have already been submitted, and (ii) do some harm, leading to additional puppy torture. Here it seems fine to vote for the destruction of the world (knowing that there’s no risk of the vote bringing about that outcome), or at least to spoil one’s ballot or refuse to vote at all.
Now, you might object that puppy torture is a fairly extreme harm, a really significant reason that can outweigh our reasons to causally contribute to preventing the destruction of the world. I think the case still works if you make the cost here much weaker. In any case, preventing the destruction of the world is a much bigger deal regardless, so if the value of causally contributing to an outcome is at all proportional to the value of the outcome to which one is contributing (as it surely should be), then the only way this could possibly be outweighed so easily here is if the value of unnecessary causal contributions is completely negligible (a near-zero portion of the value of the outcome to which one contributes). But it is outweighed here. And so the value of unnecessary causal contributions is completely negligible.
This does of course rely on absolute certainty that 50 people have in fact cast the relevant votes! If we allow some uncertainty as to precisely how many have been cast, as well as some uncertainty about the threshold needed, we probably get closer to the intuitions Elizabeth endorses – less bad to contribute to a few unnecessary puppy tortures than to risk the destruction of the world. (As callous as this sounds, it is basically how a lot of medical testing works, though with lower stakes than the destruction of the world.)
Agreed! Worth getting there for the right reasons, though — which is not fetishizing “being a cause” per se, but rather recognizing that even small chances of making a sufficiently big difference can matter a lot 🙂
Here’s a non-heroic action that could demonstrate that we actually value heroism in practical, not just in theory:
Why don’t we all do what we can to find Graham Parsons, who recently quit West Point in protest, another position in philosophy.
I hope Parsons finds a great job! We can each start helping with this project by reading his published work and discussing it with each other.
Yes, we should reduce the sacrifice incurred by the hero (perhaps thereby removing the need for heroism).
When I taught applied ethics in a professional program, I thought the examples of heroic whistleblowing that I used would inspire students. But they generally took the lesson to be, “Wow! Don’t blow the whistle. You’ll torch your career. Just keep your head down and go along to get along.” I later learned that other professors in the program (not ethics profs) explicitly gave this advice.
We like to think of the hero as an exemplar who encourages others to step up and do what’s right, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it dissuades more people from acting morally once they see the harms suffered by the hero. (Remember that 70s song “Billy, Don’t Be a Hero”: “Don’t be a hero/ Don’t be a fool with your life.”)
Academics should make a special effort to hire other academics who’ve lost their position after taking a heroic stand.
Bold extension which I think plausible but won’t here support: In many cases, they should do so even if they don’t agree with the newly unemployed academic’s stance.
This is helpful. It suggests that perhaps a bigger problem than having too few heroes is the fact that too many faculty (and others in relevant positions) are unwilling to do even very little about a situation they know to be unjust. I have seen with my own eyes faculty members refusing to do even a minimal amount (much less anything heroic) because they didn’t want to risk creating any conflict or rocking the boat. This, despite the fact these were tenured faculty in no danger of losing their jobs or reputations. Ironically, if this is a problem, it will mean that Parsons is less likely to find a sympathetic hiring committee willing to take the risk of doing anything as “controversial” as hiring him. I hope I’m wrong about that.
This seems like a better path than carping about what more he could have done.
Rather than wallow in abstraction and hypotheticals, here’s two examples of actual heroism (which necessarily involves personal risk) by remaining within an institution, to do as much good as one can for as long is one is able.
First, Spanish diplomat Ángel Sanz Briz, posted to Hungary during WWII (recall Franco’s Spain was a fascist ally of Hitler’s regime)-
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/angel-sanz-briz
“On multiple occasions, Hungary’s antisemitic policy escalated to violence and murder. In 1941, Hungary deported over 20,000 Jews to German-occupied Poland (today Ukraine). They then transferred them to Reichskommissariat Ukraine. There, the Nazi authorities and their Ukrainian collaborators murdered the majority of these Jews in a mass shooting operation in Kamenets-Podolsk. In January 1942, Hungarian authorities massacred 1,000 Jews in a Hungarian-annexed region of Yugoslavia.
Conditions grew dire for Hungary’s remaining Jewish population in 1944. In March, Germany occupied Hungary and installed a pro-German government. Germans and their Hungarian collaborators quickly started deporting Jews. Most were sent to their deaths at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Within the span of a year, 500,000 Jews from Hungary would be murdered…
Diplomats and emissaries from neutral countries, such as Raoul Wallenberg of Sweden and Carl Lutz of Switzerland, issued paperwork to Jews for protection or immigration.
Spain’s acting chargé d’affaires in Hungary at the time, Miguel Ángel de Muguiro, was involved in a similar effort. A 1924 Spanish law allowed Sephardic Jews from the former Ottoman Empire to claim Spanish citizenship. Muguiro used this law to issue Jews in Hungary passports. Muguiro also sent detailed reports back to the Spanish Foreign Ministry about Hungary’s persecution of its Jewish population.
In the summer of 1944, Sanz Briz took Muguiro’s place as the Spanish chargé d’affaires in Hungary. Sanz Briz would continue working to save more Jews from deportation…
Sanz Briz gave Spanish papers to Jews attempting to escape to safety. He issued Spanish passports to Hungarian Sephardic Jews and provisional passports to Jews who claimed they had relatives or contacts in Spain. He also issued many letters of diplomatic protection to Jewish individuals. Jews often gave false information to the Spanish legation, but Sanz Briz accepted their claims. With the papers from Sanz Briz, many Jews could show the Hungarian and German authorities that they had the protection of the Spanish government.
Sanz Briz also provided safe houses for Jews in Budapest…
Sanz Briz and his colleagues in the Spanish legation saved between 4,000 and 5,000 Jews in Hungary during the Holocaust.”
As to the moral obligation to tell the truth (also from WWII), which is to say, we can at times have a moral obligation to lie, to act under false pretenses, to obfuscate:
https://time.com/5661142/dutch-resistance-friendship/
“When World War II began on Sept. 1, 1939, Hannie Schaft and the sisters Truus and Freddie Oversteegen were just 18, 16 and 13 years old. But despite their youth, they formed a famous trio in the Dutch resistance: Hannie, studying to be a human-rights lawyer, was the intellectual; Truus was their decisive, down-to-earth leader; and the feminine and fierce Freddie would map out their missions.
They gathered vital information, provided Jewish children with safe houses, stole identification papers, bombed railways and, most perilously, seduced high-ranking Nazi officers, luring them into the woods and killing them.
Hannie Schaft was executed by the Nazis three weeks before the end of the war. This legendary fighter known as the “girl with the red hair” became the icon of female Dutch resistance.”
These are great examples of heroes. They raise the questions: Are actions like these available to us in the U.S. now? Should we be doing things like this?
‘Are actions like these available to us in the U.S. now?’
It strikes me that actions like this are always available, no matter where one resides. It’s a matter of willingness to accept personal risk.
Can any of us provide assistance to migrants and refugees? Of course.
Can any of us collect and share information about ICE agents and their activities to disrupt their actions? Certainly.
Can any of us place ourselves between ICE agents and a place they hope to enter, knowing we face arrest and injury, possibly death? We can, if we so choose.
If any of us work in institutions in a position to thwart or subvert the regime’s efforts, we can take this path rather than resign. For example:
‘Smithsonian rejects Trump’s attempt to fire National Portrait Gallery director.’https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/10/kim-sajet-trump-national-portrait-gallery-director
“The Smithsonian Institution has rebuffed Donald Trump’s attempt to fire the director of its National Portrait Gallery, with the museum’s governing board asserting its independence in a direct challenge to the president.”
The only requirements to act in opposition to a fascist regime are willingness, courage, placing others above self, and imagination.
Sometimes, philosophy professors demonstrate heroism by refusing to act.
Barrows Dunham was dismissed by Temple University in 1953 for refusing to answer questions before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Stanley Moore was dismissed by Reed College in 1954 for the same ‘offence’.
V. Jerauld McGill was dismissed by Hunter College for refusing to answer similar questions before the Rapp-Coudert Committee of the New York State Legislature.
Herbert Phillips was dismissed by the University of Washington in 1948 for refusing to swear a loyalty oath.
Jacob Loewenberg was dismissed by Berkeley in 1950 for a similar refusal.
Morris Judd was let go by the University of Colorado for refusing to answer the question, put by university administrators, about whether he had ever been a Communist.
Forrest Oran Wiggins was dismissed by the University of Minnesota in 1952 after he was accused of being a Communist.
It was easier for admins to ‘disappear’ Judd and Wiggins, non-tenured professors whose contracts were not renewed.
These are great examples of heroism in academia.
Jeremy Fischer resigned from his tenured position at the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) to protest his university’s COVID-19 policies for the coming term.
(Here’s Jeremy’s DN guest post, Sounding the Alarm: 2021-2022 COVID Risks at Unprotected Colleges and Universities, as well as the DN post about his resignation).
Some examples from outside the US:
Mihailo Đurić: philosopher at the University of Belgrade; expelled from the University and sentenced to nine months in prison for criticizing some constitutional amendments.
Li Hai: philosophy student at Peking University; arrested for his role in the Tiananmen protests and expelled from the University. Signed a pro-democracy statement in the mid-90s and was sentenced to nine years in prison.
Ding Mao: philosophy student at Lanzhou University; a leader in the 1989 pro-democracy protests; has spent approximately ten years in prison.
Paul Tillich: one of the first professors to be dismissed in Nazi Germany. He was a Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt at the time.
When discussing the ‘Why Be Moral?’ question with my students, I start with the following example, designed to shake their their somewhat naive faith in the proposition that it pays to be good. It’s 1937 you are a member of the Russian communist party. You have been arrested for Trotskyist deviations. (Even though you were never a Trotskyist you have once spoken up for somebody who was.) You are the last one in a cell containing 30 people that was originally designed for 10. You are lying on the floor next to slop bucket. It is difficult to sleep given the stench. From time to time you’re taken out, interrogated, beaten and tortured; at minimum deprived of the necessary sleep, but sometimes hit over the head with a broken chair leg. Or worse. Your interrogators want two things: for you to confess to imaginary crimes and for you to dob in your supposed co-conspirators. Refusal involves continued torture and the very real risk of death, either by execution or because of your injuries and general debility during the subsequent journey to the Gulag. Under the circumstances living up to a minimum demand of of morally – NOT betraying other people into similar tortures – requires a kind of heroism that most people were unable to manage.
This reinforces part of Elizabeth Harman’s analysis. Sometimes doing the minimally decent thing requires enormous heroism. Stalin’s non-compliant victims were certainly being heroic, but there is a sense which they were NOT going above and beyond.
Since the post asks “when?” to act, I’ll mention something that seems relevant to that, even if I don’t love framing admirable risky resistance as heroism per se.
The point I would add is that acting earlier rather than later is likely to do more good, especially if you can get other people to act with you. The early capitulation of some universities, law offices, politicians and Billionaires allowed the administration to project a kind of inevitability that made it harder for others to resist later. Thankfully not everyone has capitulated (the post has some good academic examples) and seeing others act with some backbone has made it easier for many more to join in. It has also helped some to backpedal on capitulation.
This administration raises the stakes in hopes of getting decent folks to back down. Sometimes the administration itself backs down in the face of someone calling them out for stepping past certain boundaries. It is just better strategic timing to refuse to back down now rather than later. (Obviously this is an other things equal consideration and other things aren’t always equal. But other things equal, now is strategically better than later.)
This is really true. As the Trump administration tries to claim powers to which it isn’t entitled, each squirmish isn’t just about the specific thing at issue — will this law school cave? will this university cave? — it’s also about whether the Trump administration gambit will work. Each time they succeed, it strengthens and emboldens them down this dangerous path.
Liz, I really enjoyed reading this piece. Very thought-provoking stuff, and a good way in to a very important conversation for us to have. I also agree very much with your comment that “Shutting down debate within academia—abandoning robust academic freedom—is not a good thing to do, so it’s not something we should do.” That’s an important thing for people to hear these days, and I’m glad you said it.
Oddly, though, I’ve come to different conclusions — or maybe I should say I find myself on my way to different conclusions — than the ones you reach on many of the big questions you’re posing for us here.
Perhaps a good way into this is the Israel/Palestine issue. Like you, I come from a Jewish background: I’m not a practicing Jew, but I did have a bar mitzvah and my family tends to be quite committed to Jewish causes, including Zionism. It would therefore only be natural for me to have become devoted to Zionism myself… and yet, for a couple of decades, I resisted that tendency (much to the unhappiness of many of my relatives). It is only over the last year — exactly as so many of the people around me have become so strongly *opposed* to Zionism, and when nearly everyone I encounter is more confident than ever that there is nearly nothing to be said on the side of Israel, that I have come to find that very side *more* plausible than I once did.
I imagine that that must seem morally perverse to you (and to most people here), but the reasons are clear to my way of thinking. I had been in a position to hear all sorts of arguments on the side of Israel before, but I had been wary of giving them too much of my attention. The fact that I belong to a demographic gives me no reason to think that views that favor that demographic are true: if anything, it makes me prone to overestimate the strength of the arguments for that demographic. If we all just argue from the side of our own demographic groups against everyone else, where will it get us? I’ve always felt that we have to factor that, and other social pressures, in as we consider the things that affect us. In the same way that people who personally know the accused or the victim in a criminal case need to be kept off the jury, it always seems to me that we should be epistemically humble about matters that affect our demographics, especially when we are surrounded by people who are apt to present things from only the side that favors us.
So, given that I am not exactly a disinterested party and that I have often been barraged with arguments in favor of Israel’s actions (along with dismissals of the opposing side as ‘anti-Semitic’ in cases that felt unfair to me), I felt for a couple of decades that what I needed most in order to be objective was to listen to the Palestinian side of things. Only when I understood that side as well as the Zionist side would I be in a fair position to judge the matter, I thought.
At this point, I am so strongly barraged with the opposing side — the Palestinian side — and usually by people who don’t know the other side at all, that I have felt that I could at last turn more of my attention to the Zionist side. Well, both sides continue to confidently push crude-yet-confident arguments in their own echo chambers, completely ignoring key moral and non-moral facts, apparently because nobody else in the echo chamber has even heard about them. But I’ve now come to feel that I have no grounds for any great fear that my views are biased by my peers, since the peer pressure is pushing me in just the opposite direction (I no longer engage with the shrill Zionists who want to browbeat me into agreement, but the shrill anti-Zionists are in my space wherever I turn). So, at last, I feel confident in exploring these views without feeling much of a risk that anyone is in much of a position to bully me into a premature decision.
I don’t feel this way with all the things I think about. For instance, I continue to be interested in (normative) ethical and meta-ethical questions, and I know people who hold all sorts of views on those matters. But I don’t feel that I’m *bullied* into any positions in normative ethics or meta-ethics. Sure, people feel quite confident that they are right, and they provide strong arguments; but I don’t feel peer pressure there. I don’t feel that people will judge me to be an inferior human being if I disagree with them, or that I’ll be socially excluded for holding this or that meta-ethical theory. That opens up the wonderful possibility of exploring these questions freely, and only coming to a conclusion when it seems that one has been rationally justified.
By contrast, wherever I feel I am being browbeaten into something, or even just that I am in some kind of epistemic bubble rather than an echo chamber, big warning lights turn on in my head and I shut myself off from believing anything. It feels like the right thing to do, epistemically.
So, oddly, the behavior of people in my community seems to put me at a considerable epistemic disadvantage: even if what they’re arguing for turns out to be correct, and even if I come to *believe* that it’s correct, then I won’t be in any position to *know* that it’s correct without far more effort — though I *do* have some chance of coming to know that they’re all mistaken, since that way I won’t have to worry about succumbing to peer pressure!
It wouldn’t be so bad, epistemically, if everyone in academia (and in the dominant culture of well-educated people) had all sorts of different views on these matters. Then, I’d feel confident that I was hearing good arguments for and against all sorts of positions, and would not need to worry about being caught in an echo chamber. But academic culture no longer feels that way to me.
True, it could be that the reason why there is almost no disagreement is simply that we are living at a moment when everything is so morally clear, and where all the non-moral facts point so clearly in one direction, that there is just nothing left for reasonable, well-informed people to disagree about. But if that were the explanation for the intellectual lockstep on so many issues, we would not find a complete neglect of anomalies that threaten to make the stories more complicated — and yet, such anomalies are routinely neglected, I find.
So, getting back at last to your questions:
1. “What should you be doing?”
I am inclined to say: once I have determined the sorts of things that ought to be done, I ought to consider not only which worthy goal is the most important, but which of the worthy goals is currently the most *neglected*. For instance, if a thousand people have decided that it’s time to promote the interests of a hundred hitherto-neglected people, then my joining that particular crusade will add comparatively little good. But if those thousand people are trampling on one innocent person along the way to helping the hundred and I do something to help that one innocent person, then I feel that my contribution would be far better — and if I predictably get called a terrible human being because my looking out for that one innocent person was inconvenient for those trampling by to look to the hundred, then all the more reason to think that it’s a good thing that I looked after that one, since if this is the result, very few other people would have been inclined to do that if I didn’t!
2. “What should the rest of us in academia be doing?”
I have tried to sketch, above, a crude summary of my reasons for thinking that a moral or political monoculture in academia (or elsewhere) makes it impossible for us to know a great many things, including what is right or wrong in this or that situation.
Moreover, I think there is good reason for thinking that the growth of an intellectual monoculture on campus has led to a growing distrust of what we do in academia.
The harms from both those things are more long-term than immediate, but I believe that they are immense and far-reaching. I think that, as serious as many of the big political issues of the day often are, the long-term harm from the loss of the authority (real and perceived) of academia is graver still.
So my answer to your second question is: we should all unite in following up on something you say earlier in this essay, and take pains to make room for a robust discussion of a wide range of views, including those that most of us find dubious, wrong, or even harmful.
In order to make room for people who hold the diverse range of views that we need in order to keep academia credible, I think we will need to abandon much of our shared notion of the good at university. We can and should *dispute* what is good here, and each of us individually should (though for reasons unconnected with who we are as members of the academy, as I see it) try to *be* good people, which may at times require us to do heroic things. But I think that, if the universities are to be fair places of inquiry, then we will probably end up with quite different first-order moral views on many things, and that will make us naturally inclined to disagree on what (for instance) should be tolerated as part of free speech on campus.
Perhaps the best we can do there is to be as principled as we can about our collective norms in academia. If a progressive would be inclined to fight for the right of some group to disrupt usual campus activities in order to protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza, would she also stick to that same standard if the group wanted instead to protest against some *progressive* policy? (Or vice versa, of course).
What we qua academics should do, I say, is commit ourselves to principled policies, not partisan policies, and then do all we can to make sure that we are (correctly) understood that way by the broader public. Qua individuals, we should be open to the possibility of a heroic action — but there’s of course a wide gulf between what is heroic and what is seen as heroic. Oskar Schindler was a hero, but much of what made him a hero is that he did what he did without the benefit of a community that applauded and supported his work. If his peers had applauded him for what he was doing, there would have been much less need for him to engage in heroism!
Thanks again.
So basically instead of another hero you’re gunning for life beyond the Thunderdome?
I don’t see why that reduction tracks what Justin said. Better, I’d say he was gunning for more intellectual humility among academicians before charging ahead under a conviction that we’re being heroic, or supposing our moral convictions ought to be always and everywhere embedded as part of academic culture, save the conviction that we individually and collectively ought to have freedom of inquiry.
Would you say the following is a fair summary, of the theme although not the literal plot, of Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome? — We need more intellectual humility among academicians before charging ahead under a conviction that we’re being heroic or supposing our moral convictions ought to be always and everywhere embedded as part of academic culture, save the conviction that we individually and collectively ought to have freedom of inquiry.
ChatGPT said:
Yes, that’s a fair thematic extrapolation from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. The film’s post-apocalyptic setting, where civilization is reconstituted in unstable and morally ambiguous ways, does resonate with your point:
So your summary works well as a philosophical reading of the film’s underlying caution: that hubris and moral absolutism—even in the name of progress or righteousness—can be just as dangerous as chaos, and that the one conviction worth protecting is the freedom to question, imagine, and inquire.
In that sense, Thunderdome can be read as a metaphor for the academy when it becomes too enamored of its own self-image—as savior, as civilizer—without enough humility to acknowledge its limits or the contingency of its values.
I read Daily nous for comments like this.
This submission has been flagged for LLM-generated content. Please see me after class.
While we’re doing pop culture references, this one is from Community.
TROY: People have been clowning me about this jacket since I got here, but if I take it off to make them happy that just makes me weak, right?
JEFF: Listen, it doesn’t matter if you lose the jacket to please them or keep it to piss them off. Either way, you are doing it for them. That’s what’s weak.
An interesting example the kind of academic ‘heroism’ under discussion is due to Bertrand Russell in 1916. When people were prosecuted for distributing an anti-War pamphlet that he had written, he owned up to it in a letter to the Times entitled Adsum Qui Feci. ‘I wish to make it known that I am the author of this leaflet, and that if anyone is to be prosecuted I am the person primarily responsible.’As a result he was prosecuted, fined and sacked from his Lectureship at Trinity College, Cambridge. And just to be clear, he did not have a lot of money to fall back on, as, by this time, he had given away a large part of his inherited wealth. By the end of the war he was jobless, nearly broke and obliged to live for large stretches time at his brother’s London flat. I think the he would have rejected the term ‘hero’ but courting prosecution and risking the sack surely required a modicum of political courage.
An excellent example of heroism in academia.
And, yes, heroes are often reluctant to see themselves as heroes.
It may be true that heroes are often reluctant to see themselves as heroes (indeed, it strikes me that a tendency not to see oneself as a hero is probably part of what it takes to be a hero), but I doubt that that’s what’s going on in this case. More likely, it seems to me, is that the bar for being a hero in American English is much lower than it is for being a hero relative to other forms of English (in particular, British English). I don’t have hard data here, but my impression is that US media applies the term ‘hero’ to cases that would never warrant the label in other english-speaking countries. (“Fire-fighter a hero for saving child from burning house.”) What BR did was morally courageous, exemplary, laudable etc – but I doubt that it meets the threshold for being heroic by lights of English as it was spoken in Britain then or now.
Quite so. Russell’s initial decision to become an anti-war activist certainly required courage, and courage was required to sustain the role given the enormous public pressure to which he was subject, but it didn’t take much extra in the way of courage to compose the Everett leaflet, and given that people were being prosecuted for distributing it, it would probably have seemed cowardly NOT to have owned up. Russell spent a lot of the War working to help conscientious objectors, most of whom made much bigger sacrifices and faced far bigger risks than he did, including being shot by firing squad and having their health ruined by the harsh conditions of imprisonment or forced labour. Losing their livelihoods and having their careers wrecked was not even the half of it. Under the circumstances, Russell would have been embarrassed to be called a hero. (Russell did go to prison later on in the War, after he had substantially given up on war work, but owing to his upper-class and academic connections – Russell specifically credits the philosopher-statesman Arthur Balfour, then serving as foreign secretary – he did time in the relatively luxurious conditions of the First Division, which allowed him the leisure and the resources to write An Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy.)
But reverting to Tim’s general point, I think he is right that in unAmerican English you have to be rather more courageous and self-sacrificing to be a hero than you do in American English.. This may have something to do with history. Britain during WWII was a country under siege, which meant that doing your ordinary duties in a wide variety of occupations required at least a modicum of courage, since many such occupations had become dangerous to some degree. In America, by contrast, it was only the active-duty servicemen who faced serious risk. In a society where fewer people are called on to display courage and self-sacrific , it is easier to to be impressed by the degree of courage and self-sacrifice that another society might think of as nothing very special.
What’s is packed in to the concept of “being a hero”? The post, and ensuing discussion, tacitly assume that being a hero means doing something personally risky for a perceived greater cause.
That doesn’t yet distinguish being a hero from doing what is supererogatory (are all supererogatory actions heroic?) nor does it say anything about the status of the cause (e.g., were Jan. 6 rioters like Ashli Babitt acting heroically in the moments just before she was killed?). In other words, are there Nazi heroes or must heroes be on “the right side of history”? Is there more to being a hero than doing what one thinks is right no matter the personal cost?
Since being a hero is sometimes a “thick” term, I’d assume the latter but then it seems like we may not be able to sort the heroes from the villains in the thick of morally contentious times like these.
There are times that are not morally contentious?
There may not be any times that are not morally contentious, but there may be times that are morally contentious in different ways than these times are. (I don’t know if that makes it any easier to sort the heroes from the villains.)
You’re raising two important questions.
——-
Is being a hero (a) a matter of risking or sacrificing something significant for the sake of a genuinely good end, or (b) a matter of risking or sacrificing something significant for the sake of an end you yourself take to be good. In my view, it’s definitely (a) and not (b). Babitt is no hero, nor are the Nazis. Brian Weatherson and I have argued that what a person should do, and whether she is blameworthy, wholly depends on the actual moral facts, and not on her beliefs or credences about the moral facts. I think the same is true of heroism — it depends on what morality is actually like, not what one takes it to be like.
(See Brian’s book _Normative Externalism_ and my papers “Does Moral Ignorance Exculpate?”, “The Irrelevance of Moral Uncertainty, and “Ethics is Hard! What Follows? On Moral Ignorance and Blame”.)
——–
How is acting heroically different from acting supererogatorily (= doing something above and beyond what morality requires)? These categories overlap but are distinct. Some supererogatory actions are too small-scale to be heroic. Some heroic actions are morally required.
Thank you for this. Seems an interesting and fruitful project.
I found this bit somewhat curious:
When one turns out to have risked more than one knew, one’s action was more heroic than one realized.
It appears a bit odd in that it seems like one could then take heroic action purely by accident. Say, one believed that strong action was called for, but took a lesser path precisely because it was too risky to take the stronger – but lost a lot anyway. This seems more like the case where the individual was perhaps both a coward and a fool – not an accidental hero. But maybe this is just a distinction between heroic in action and being heroic in character.
Also, I was wondering why you use a non-obligatory “should” instead of “supererogatory”
Anyway, good luck with the book.
Paul Tillich might be one who turned “out to have risked more than one knew.” In their Tillich biography, Wilhelm and Marion Pauck say Tillich’s activities might have derived from naivete — his peers and friends thought he didn’t realize how vulnerable his position was (as Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the University of Frankfurt). Also, he was convinced the Nazis were a short-term phenomenon and would soon be ousted, believing perhaps that any cost incurred by his activism would be short-lived. The suggestion is he didn’t think he could lose his academic position and be barred from German universities.
Purely accidental heroism does seem odd, I think, though on reflection we might endorse its existence. As you say, we can distinguish whether an action itself is heroic (which might be independent of whether the agent knows what they’re doing) from whether the agent gets credit for the heroic act (which does depend on whether they know what they’re doing).
When a heroic action accidentally turns out to be *more* heroic than anticipated, I do think the agent gets extra “credit” for heroism. It’s a kind of moral luck. If you punch someone in anger, and this turns out to kill them, you’re more blameworthy than you should have expected to be; similarly, if your heroic act turns out to risk more than you realized, you may be genuinely more heroic than you expected to be.
There must be some awareness of risk for even the action to be heroic.
Suppose the next election in a stable democracy is, as usual, by secret ballot. I cast my ballot for the opposition party. It turns out that the incumbent government has secret monitors at every voting station. My ballot was duly noted by the authorities, and I’m punished for how I voted.
Would my action have been to any degree heroic? Even if I had not even a remote suspicion that Mark Carney or Keir Starmer or whoever was spying on the voters?
Granted, heroes seldom know how much they’re risking. They act in conditions of great uncertainty, perhaps when ‘all bets are off’, and their awareness of this can make their acts heroic, but there must be at least some awareness of the risk.
I found this discussion confusing. What Christopher Eisgruber did in writing that Atlantic op ed is the minimal baseline of what all university presidents should be doing (Michael Roth of Wesleyan is an even better example). The fact that very few university presidents, in the face of a fascist takeover of the country, are doing what they are *minimally required* to do should not lead us to mistake basic responsibilities of an office (that of a university president) with heroism. I think that is pretty indicative however of what happens in these moments.
As far as academic heroism goes – here is a good example. When the full scale invasion of Ukraine began in February 2022, my colleague Timothy Snyder was teaching two classes at Yale, and an overload – a third class in the Yale Prison Education Initiative, which required him to drive a lengthy amount of time to the prison and back (Snyder also has two young children, and is an involved parent). He added to these three classes a couple of trips to Ukraine during the semester (flight to Warsaw, 17 hour train trip to Kyiv). At the time, very few of us had familiarity with traveling to this particular war zone, so there was that extra fear of unfamiliarity. He also regularly participated in public debate about these and related issues. And he only missed a few classes that semester.
And 100% agree about Graham Parsons, and our community’s collective obligation to him for his heroism.
I hope that Alexei Navalny and Pussy Riot are examples of heroism in your project. If you saw the retrospective exhibit of Pussy Riot that toured a year or so ago, it makes abundantly clear the strength of will and purpose that collective has. Would we should all be so strong.
I also worry that your bar for heroism is too low. We all just need to be doing what we should be doing — not evading responsibility. If that needs to be called heroism, so be it. If institutions somehow incentivize us to do otherwise, that is, to simply remain silent, then we need to be rethinking the structures of our institutions.
Heroism often involves putting not only one’s own interests but also those of others at risk. I’ve often heard students in a professional program say, “I can’t take that risk (of taking an ethical stand against an employer), because I have responsibilities to my family. I can’t risk my ability to support my children.”
University presidents have to balance resisting an authoritarian government with protecting the interests of the institution’s students and employees. However, one would hope that university presidents could consult each other and agree on a coordinated strategy of resistance, one that hedged the risk to any one university.
“Heroism often involves putting not only one’s own interests but also those of others at risk.” Yes!