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“Testimony by the leaders of three top universities at a congressional hearing [last] week on antisemitism on college campuses has sparked significant backlash… Critics have condemned their answers to New York Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik's yes/no question during the hearing on whether ‘calling for the genocide of Jews’ violated the schools' codes of conduct. The leaders said in varying ways that the answer would be context specific, and related to whether speech turned into conduct.” Axios
“A Republican-led House committee is launching an investigation into antisemitism at MIT, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania and other elite colleges… ‘After this week's pathetic and morally bankrupt testimony by university presidents when answering my questions, the Education and Workforce Committee is launching an official Congressional investigation,’ Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) said in a statement.” Axios
“The University of Pennsylvania’s president has resigned amid pressure from donors and criticism… The chairman of the Ivy League school’s board of trustees, Scott Bok, also resigned immediately during a trustees meeting Saturday evening.” AP News
The right accuses the college presidents of hypocrisy, and calls for reducing the power of DEI bureaucracies.
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) writes, “What constitutes bullying and harassment at Harvard? A mandatory Title IX training last year warned all undergraduate students that ‘cisheterosexism,’ ‘fatphobia’ and ‘using the wrong pronouns’ qualified as ‘abuse’ and perpetuated ‘violence’ on campus…
“Where was Harvard’s concern for free speech when it disinvited feminist philosopher Devin Buckley from a colloquium on campus last year because of her views on transgender issues? Where was its concern for free speech in 2020 when it revoked conservative activist Kyle Kashuv’s acceptance because of social media posts he made as a 16-year-old, or in 2017 when it revoked admission for 10 incoming freshmen who shared offensive memes on Facebook?”
Elise Stefanik, Wall Street Journal
“Harvard does not, in fact, ‘embrace a commitment to free expression.’ It does not tolerate views that its speech police consider to be ‘objectionable, offensive, hateful.’ And, as the plain language of its own policies makes clear, it does not endure opinions that are contrary to its ‘values.’… Per the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE), Harvard’s score in the Free Speech Rankings is an ‘abysmal’ ‘0.00 out of a possible 100.00.’…
“Far from having finally found religion on the question of open expression, America’s elite universities seem to have developed yet another double standard. When the targets of student opprobrium are favored, they crack down. When the targets are Jews or the perpetrators aren’t wearing red hats, they retreat into platitudes. This will not do. One either believes in radical tolerance or one does not; one cannot advance it and withdraw it when convenient.”
The Editors, National Review
“The rule cannot be that Jews must endure free speech at its most painful, while favored campus constituencies enjoy the warmth of college administrators and the protection of campus speech codes. The status quo is intolerable…
“The best, clearest plan for reform I’ve seen comes from Harvard’s own Steven Pinker, a psychologist. He writes that campuses should enact ‘clear and coherent’ free speech policies. They should adopt a posture of ‘institutional neutrality’ on public controversy…
“But reform can’t be confined to policies. It also has to apply to cultures. As Pinker notes, that means disempowering a diversity, equity and inclusion apparatus that is itself all too often an engine of censorship and extreme political bias. Most importantly, universities need to take affirmative steps to embrace greater viewpoint diversity. Ideological monocultures breed groupthink, intolerance and oppression.”
David French, New York Times
The left defends the substance of the college presidents’ answers, but worries about inconsistencies in their support for free speech.
The left defends the substance of the college presidents’ answers, but worries about inconsistencies in their support for free speech.
“What Stefanik was demanding was the wholesale ban on rhetoric and ideas that Jews find threatening, regardless of context. A university should protect students from being mobbed or having their classes occupied and disrupted. But should it protect them from an op-ed in the student newspaper calling to globalize the intifada? Or a demonstration in an open space demanding ‘From the river to the sea’? That would entail wholesale violations of free speech…
“The presidents’ efforts to deflect every question about genocide of the Jews into a legalistic distinction between speech and conduct may have sounded grating, and Stefanik’s indignant replies may have sounded like moral clarity. But on the whole, they were right to focus on the distinction between speech and conduct, and Stefanik was wrong to sneer at it. A better criticism would be that colleges are failing to protect Jewish students by refusing to enforce rules of conduct. But that is different from, and in some ways the opposite of, the point Stefanik chose to stand on.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“Politically speaking, Gay and the other presidents should have had the presence of mind to say that calling for genocide was vile and disgusting and had no place on their campuses. That's especially the case since they were dealing with a grandstanding jackass like Rep. Elise Stefanik. Then they could have added that although this is hard to accept, even vile anti-semitism is protected free speech unless etc. etc. Apologizing for not doing that is the right thing to do. Nonetheless, it remains the case that Gay's answer was, in fact, the right one.”
Kevin Drum, Jabberwocking
At the same time, many argue that “The presidents of Harvard, MIT, and UPenn were disingenuous when they claimed that their response to anti-Semitism on campus was hamstrung by a commitment to free speech. Who can doubt that they would have been more forthright in condemning calls for the murder of trans people or the lynching of Black Americans, for example, when their own institutions have disinvited speakers for the crime of opposing affirmative action or have pushed out professors for believing that biological sex is real?…
“Universities are now paying the price for those missteps. If they claim to stand for free speech, they must be consistent. What they cannot do is engage in a selective enforcement of rules that effectively gives one form of hatred—namely pro-Hamas and anti-Jewish advocacy—the stamp of university approval while punishing students and faculty members for speech that certainly does not rise to the same standard of hatefulness.”
Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic
The World’s Oldest Living Land Animal, a Tortoise Named Jonathan, Turns 191.
Smithsonian Magazine
