Rep. Elise Stefanik set a clever trap at a House hearing on antisemitism on campus, snaring the presidents of the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard and MIT. The presidents, Liz Magill of Penn, Claudine Gay of Harvard and MIT’s Sally Kornbluth, walked right into it and Magill has now lost her job over her fumbling response.
The question was: “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate [your school] rules on bullying and harassment or code of conduct?”
Their flat-footed answers, with extended explanations and caveats that it depends if such patently antisemitic hate speech (nasty, but protected speech) turns into incitement or threats or action (which are not protected and not permitted) came across as lawyerly, dispassionate and tone deaf. That the academics then tried to restate or refine their answers since the Tuesday hearing did not make it better.
Stefanik asked for “yes,” and the presidents tangled themselves up.
Magill, the only lawyer in the trio (Gay has a doctorate in political science, while Kornbluth holds a Ph.D. in molecular oncology) who clerked for Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and was the dean of Stanford Law School, failed to teach the lesson about free speech properly and had to resign, having lost the confidence of many in the Penn community and beyond.
There is real antisemitism on campus, made worse by the war launched by Hamas on Israel and Jews and Israel’s military response in Gaza. Some idiots here and there may be calling for death to the Jews or genocide. Does that violate a campus speech code? Stefanik would think so, as might most people.
But even such hateful, evil, antisemitic speech is still speech, just as calling for the killing of any people, from Blacks to Asians to gays, is speech. If it becomes a threat or incitement, it is not only bullying and harassment or breach of a code of conduct, but a crime that should be prosecuted under the law. Witness what happened at Cornell when a student made threats against Jews on campus. He was arrested by the FBI.
As disingenuous as Stefanik’s “when did you stop beating your wife” campaign was, it’s worked. The airwaves are blanketed with commentary all but asking why these university presidents embrace antisemitism. The drumbeat for Magill’s ouster grew and grew until she quit Saturday.
Stefanik announced a new House investigation into universities, a clear bid for more airtime on Fox News. It’s disheartening to see Democrats like Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand also take the bait and focus on whether abetting calls for the genocide of Jews is morally correct or not when that was never the question.
