On Tuesday, U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York posed the same question to the presidents of Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Pennsylvania, proxies all for America’s liberal intellectual elite.
The repeated question for Claudine Gay of Harvard, Liz Magill of Penn and Sally Kornbluth of MIT from the Republican congresswoman, herself a Harvard graduate?
“Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate (insert name of campus) rules on bullying and harassment?
One after another, the presidents refused to answer Stefanik’s yes-or-no question, with Gay in particular dodging it like it was a scalding hot potato flying through Harvard Yard. Caveats abounded: it depends on intensity, to what degree it is directed at individuals, what the circumstances present, yada, yada. At one truly surreal moment, Magill even replied that it would depend if the call morphed into “conduct,” leading Stefanik to ask, incredulously, “actual genocide?”
Harvard President Claudine Gay, left, speaks as University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill listens during a hearing of the House Committee on Education on Capitol Hill, Tuesday, Dec. 5, 2023 in Washington. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein)
The spectacle was a disaster for all three campuses, especially Harvard and Penn, and suggested that the leaders of Harvard and Penn are woefully unfit for the job. At the time of writing, those presidents retain their positions, but if that were to change, we’d hardly be surprised. Or chagrined.
Stefanik set a very effective trap, aggressively going after leaders who enjoy copious amounts of deference and obsequiousness on their own campuses and apparently have spent too long in that bubble. The academics seemed to have been coached by their lawyers to say nothing that might obligate them to have to take action against those rallying for the elimination of the Israel. Therefore it made these leaders appear at least tacitly supportive of that position themselves.
There was, of course, a legal argument for their weaving and dodging: The First Amendment does not contain an exception for calls for genocide, and even antisemites have the right to free speech.
But Stefanik was asking about campus rules of conduct, and the exchange came in the context of these very same presidents previously penalizing those who, say, failed to use a student’s preferred pronouns or didn’t provide “trigger warnings” or posted something the university deemed racist on social media.
Harvard, for one, rescinded admissions offers in several such circumstances and had come out with institutional guns blazing against a whole variety of so-called microaggressions in their classrooms. And yet these universities now were failing to protect their Jewish students because their expansive and expensive setups to ensure diversity, equity and inclusion had, effectively, deemed those students part of the so-called white oppressor class and thus out of their purview.
And to bring that point home, the Republicans lined up several Jewish students to state that they felt “unsafe.” One especially articulate Penn undergraduate marshaled a lot of supporting evidence.
Even those sympathetic to the presidents Tuesday knew in their heart of hearts that these elite campuses had not protected free speech in recent years so much as safeguarded progressive speech that they liked for their own ideological reasons, often using “safety” as a cover. That’s why Robert Zimmer’s disavowal of “safe” rhetorical spaces and his refusal to cancel conservative speakers at the University of Chicago had been so radical — and courageous.
On Tuesday, the late UChicago president’s decision never looked smarter.
Simply put, the Harvard and Penn presidents suddenly discovering the virtues of no-holds-barred free speech only when it came to protecting those calling for an intifada and harassing their own Jewish students felt disingenuous. Stunningly so.
Of course the schools had weapons of protection in their existing arsenals. As Ilya Shapiro noted in The Free Press: “Beating someone up, as has happened at Columbia and Tulane, is assault. Crowding around someone in a threatening manner, like a group of Harvard students — including an editor of the Harvard Law Review — did to an Israeli student who filmed their protest, is commonly known as the crime of ‘menacing.’ A pattern of actions designed to frighten and harass someone, like forcing Jewish students into the Cooper Union library while pounding on the doors and windows, is stalking. Defacing someone’s property by spray-painting swastikas and slogans, as happened at American University, is vandalism.”
The issue Tuesday was not so much that the presidents made reference to conduct, but that it was so hard to believe they would actually enforce their own rules to protect Jewish students. That is what these leaders failed to see.
We’ve had our issues with Stefanik, who has made plenty of mistakes herself. But she had the best day of her young political career Tuesday because she understood the power of the moment.
When she asked, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate the Penn rules on bullying and harassment?,” she knew that all reasonable, decent, compassionate Americans would be screaming, “say yes,” at their phones or computers, even as one of the most educated women in America saw none of the dangers ahead.
And, that simple word, which the presidents failed to say, also happened to be the correct answer.
Editorial by the Chicago Tribune
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