By Noah Rothman
Thursday, December 07, 2023
They must have felt good about themselves and their
performance in the moment. The smirking condescension to which the presidents
of Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology treated a House committee this week suggests that the
display of moral vacuity they put on was practiced. We can only imagine the
blood rushing from their faces as they retreated to more private quarters where
they were confronted with the all-but-universal revulsion their testimonies
produced.
Granted every opportunity by their interlocutors to
condemn the antisemitic agitation that has exploded on their campuses — and
many others — since the 10/7 attack that killed and wounded over 5,000
Israelis, foreign nationals, and Jews, the presidents of these institutions
balked. They insisted that calls for “intifada” and “one solution” to the
Jewish question need to be contextualized into something more anodyne. They
maintained that this rhetoric does not constitute a violation of their rather
strict speech codes, that only when words evolve into “action” — e.g. violence
— are they obliged to intervene. And they said it all with a half-smile and a
cocked head that conveyed their contempt for the naïveté of their inquisitors.
It was an illustrative moment. These presidents didn’t
just reveal how insular the ideological hothouses over which they preside had
become. The response their comments produced demonstrated the degree to which
their principles burst into flames when exposed to a broader audience. On that,
we don’t need to speculate. Before Congress, each of these three presidents
steadfastly refused to budge from their unethical defense of anti-Jewish
harassment and abuse on their campuses. Not 24 hours later, however, their
tunes changed dramatically.
“Let me be clear,” read a statement from Harvard
president Claudine Gay, as though someone had previously prevented
her from achieving desirable clarity. “Calls for violence or genocide against
the Jewish community, or any religious or ethnic group are vile, they have no
place at Harvard, and those who threaten our Jewish students will be held to
account.” University of Pennsylvania president Liz
Magill performed a similar about-face. The calls on her campus “for
genocide of Jewish people is a call for some of the most terrible violence
human beings can perpetrate,” she insisted. “It’s evil, plain and simple.”
What changed? Little more than the fact that the
presidents were finally confronted with tangible pushback on their permissive
policies. That must be a new experience. Previously, there were no consequences
associated with retailing highly abstracted justifications for their luxury
prejudices. The vilest language, the worst supremacist rationales, the most
despicable justifications for discriminatory practices targeting whites, males,
heterosexuals, and of course, Jews, weren’t just tolerated — they were celebrated.
Those poor demographics who occupied the lowest rung on
intersectionality’s ladder of oppression were ripe targets. The fashionable
anti-egalitarianism on American campuses was rewarded in the popular culture.
Adherence to faddish bigotries had become a litmus test enforced through
conventions like “diversity statements” and the like. Now, all of a sudden and
for the first time, there are material downsides to this academic exercise —
not just for their institutions but for these presidents personally.
Magill has been condemned by elected officials in her
state across the board — from county officials to Pennsylvania governor Josh
Shapiro. Billionaire donors to her institution are pulling out. The calls for her resignation are growing louder by the
hour. Gay faces a similar backlash. Demands for her resignation are coming not
just from her Republican critics but the left-wing support structure upon which
she relies. “It’s unbelievable that this needs to be said: calls for genocide
are monstrous and antithetical to everything we represent as a country,” said
White House spokesman Andrew Bates in a statement. “Any statements that
advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting.” The
White House has only joined the stampede of well-heeled donors running away
from Harvard’s radioactive president. Their jobs and their status are now on
the line.
These mewling appeals for atonement are edifying. It
turns out that the inviolable principle these university presidents doggedly
defended in their testimony before Congress was no principle at all. It was
just the path of least resistance through the thicket of radicals these
institutions have spent decades cultivating. When faced with consequences for
their advocacy, their advocacy melted away.
The bigotries they retailed were not buttressed by any
deep, abiding belief in the righteousness of their worldview, or they would
still be defending it. There was no grand theory or high-minded ideal at stake
when they went to bat for rank antisemitism. It was only a cowed response to
displays of menacing power on their campuses from students, faculty, and
non-faculty administrators alike. When they were confronted with greater power
— political and commercial power in opposition to their pusillanimity — they
folded. It was only ever about power.
There’s some comfort in that realization. The
lizard-brained biases American universities have ornamented with a
pseudo-academic justification don’t hold up under scrutiny, and those who
subscribe to the prejudice that masquerades as enlightenment on college
campuses have embraced them only out of convenience. These grotesque values are
not closely held.
This is, however, a cold comfort. The backtracking to
which we’ve been privy also exposes how malleable America’s most celebrated
institutional stewards are. These are empty suits. They have specialized only
in navigating the internal politics of their hermetically sealed institutions,
and those politics are so divorced from broader American values that they might
as well be wholly alien.
But at least now we have a fuller view of the scale of
the threat to the American social compact the universities represent. And we
know that their commitment to the supposed values that predominate these
institutions is skin deep. All it takes for them to abandon their commitment to
moral relativism is a real threat to their personal bottom lines. The path
forward is clear.
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