By Noah Rothman
Monday, December 11, 2023
The smirking, morally obtuse, and logically deficient performance the
presidents of some of America’s most prestigious universities turned in at last
week’s House committee hearings has taken its toll. University of Pennsylvania
president Liz Magill and the chairman of the college’s board of trustees have
been forced out of their roles. The walls seem to be closing in
on Harvard University president Claudine Gay, too, though her defenders in
academia are mounting a counterattack.
At least 570 members of the Harvard faculty signed their
names to a petition released on Sunday night, branding the backlash her
congressional testimony produced as a thoughtless act of unenlightened
aggression. Harvard, they wrote, is obliged to “resist political pressures that
are at odds with Harvard’s commitment to academic freedom.”
The objection to the dismissal of these and other college
administrators on the grounds that their tolerance for antisemitic activism on
campuses constitutes little more than deference to constitutionally protected
speech was
best articulated by Lee Kovarsky, an assistant professor of law at the
University of Texas at Austin.
This is a retreat to the rhetorical motte of the First
Amendment. It is not a defense of the arguments proffered by these university
presidents during their testimony before Congress. The arguments raised by
critics of how the academy has responded to the aftermath of 10/7 have little
to do with free speech. Rather, the claim is that institutions of higher
learning have rallied around conduct that constitutes harassment.
Indeed, the withdrawal to the realm of abstraction is
illustrative in that the allegations are concrete. A lawsuit targeting the University of Pennsylvania alleges
that visibly Jewish students were taunted with attacks that may be protected
from retribution from the state but, nevertheless, violate the codes of conduct
that supposedly govern the behavior of students on campus. “You are a dirty
Jew, don’t look at us” and “Keep walking, you dirty little Jew” are threats.
They may not be prosecutable, but they would not be tolerated on college
campuses if their targets were not Jewish. The Education Department’s Office
for Civil Rights didn’t open an investigation into Harvard because the college
was too zealous a steward of free-speech rights. It did so after mobs of
pro-Palestinian demonstrators, including at one point the editor of Harvard
Law Review, physically intimidated and even attacked Jewish students unprovoked.
The Ivies are not alone. Colleges and universities across the country are under
the microscope, as they should be. Jewish students have been advised to stay
away from kosher dining halls — their safety cannot be guaranteed. Jewish
celebrants hid in school libraries as demonstrators brayed “Globalize the
intifada” while they beat at the doors that stood between them and the objects
of their hatred. “I had Jewish blood on my hands,” said one traumatized Tulane
student after she witnessed the beating of a fellow student who objected to
torching Israeli flags.
There is a double standard at work here. Academicians
have been promoting it for decades. For example, writing in defense of
student-led efforts to shout down controversial speakers in 2017, New York
University provost Ulrich Baer observed that speakers who would hide
behind the First Amendment, from which “someone’s humanity” “can be freely
attacked, demeaned, or questioned,” should not be allowed the refuge.
Baer’s admonition reflected the prevailing wisdom among
non-faculty administrators across the board. Colleges have displayed inordinate
sensitivity to speech, which, in a charged political environment, might give
way to violent interactions between students. They even erased the line that
separates speech from violence, deeming speech itself an act of vandalism and
assault. That ethos trickled down to the student body in colleges, which have
become hostile toward “extreme speakers.”
The response from colleges to antisemitic activism
strikes an ugly contrast with the permissive approach to student activism that
we’ve all witnessed (with varying degrees of dismay) for the better part of a
decade. Behind every double standard is, of course, a single standard. In this
case, the double standard is that Jews are not subject to the coddling that
other ethnic and religious minorities on American campuses experience. The
single standard is that whatever constitutes progressive activism at the moment
enjoys the presumption of righteousness.
That’s what has put these college presidents back on
their heels. We’re not seeing an attack on free speech or academic freedom.
There is no principle at all in the dock. Rather, at issue are college
administrators’ efforts to mollify the most threatening elements on campus —
who need an outlet lest they turn against the administrators and faculty who
have coddled them for so long. If the turning of these tables discomfits the
academy, you can certainly see why.
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