The House subcommittee on Education and the Workforce held a hearing to call on the presidents of Harvard, UPenn, and MIT to answer for the rampant antisemitism engulfing their campuses and threatening their Jewish students.
They used the occasion to advance some familiar GOP positions that will help suppress Gen-Z votes and free speech as well as re-electing Dictator 47. The panelists represented what the GOP thinks is a norm by excluding male university presidents and choosing east coast institutions. What better way to set up an argument by using large elite private universities that coincidentally have women presidents for another GOP snipe hunt.
Campus speech remains as contentious as it should in a democracy but the latest version of right-wing discourse as “anti-wokeness” has returned to its authoritarian roots in private capital’s version of ‘political correctness’ in private higher education. False equivalence returns again like a bad penny, because to be one thing is not always to be another.
The GOP hope for the election year is to bring back “fighting words” to suppress speech as well as encourage votes for ‘the next generation of republican leadership’. They’d love to bring back Reagan’s “bloodbath” in a campus provocation like the ones subsidized by GOP groups in recent years.
The mood on campus these days, he said, “is not pro-Palestinian, it’s antisemitic.”
Private capital is doing what it can to enable right-wing power by confabulating antisemitism with anti-Zionism and ethnic cleansing with genocide. “Moral clarity” gets short shrift when conservative elements politicize protected speech, especially when carefully assembling panels to not represent public higher education institutions and coincidentally have female CEOs. Targets were as carefully chosen as giving Hunter Biden a public hearing in another House hearing. Welcome to (re-)election season.
There are renewed calls for on-campus antigenocidal speech discipline represented by attempts to fund and defund programs by virtue of ideology or party affiliation. Uttering Jihad or intifada, like all language has context, even up to and including that which remains silent. When did you stop beating your spouse. Supporting Palestine is neither antisemitic nor genocidal even when ignoring history itself.
In their opening remarks, and throughout the hearing, Dr. Gay, Ms. Magill and Sally Kornbluth of M.I.T. all said they were appalled by antisemitism and taking action against it on campus. When asked whether they supported the right of Israel to exist, they answered yes, without equivocation.
But on the question of disciplining students for statements about genocide, they tried to give lawyerly responses to a tricky question involving free speech, which supporters of academic freedom said were legally correct.
But to many Jewish students, alumni and donors, who had watched campus pro-Palestinian protests with trepidation and fear, the statements by the university presidents failed to meet the political moment by not speaking clearly and forcefully against antisemitism.
[...]
Much of the criticism landed heavily on Ms. Magill because of an extended back-and-forth with Representative Stefanik.
Ms. Stefanik said that in campus protests, students had chanted support for intifada, an Arabic word that means uprising and that many Jews hear as a call for violence against them.
Ms. Stefanik asked Ms. Magill, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Penn’s rules or code of conduct, yes or no?”
Ms. Magill replied, “If the speech turns into conduct, it can be harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik pressed the issue: “I am asking, specifically: Calling for the genocide of Jews, does that constitute bullying or harassment?”
Ms. Magill, a lawyer who joined Penn last year with a pledge to promote campus free speech, replied, “If it is directed and severe, pervasive, it is harassment.”
Ms. Stefanik responded: “So the answer is yes.”
Ms. Magill said, “It is a context-dependent decision, congresswoman.”
Ms. Stefanik exclaimed: “That’s your testimony today? Calling for the genocide of Jews is depending upon the context?”
www.nytimes.com/...
Attacking the President of UPenn was more likely a result of Trustee Board politics and @POTUS Biden’s association as well as the usual conflict of what counts as liberal education. Its business curriculum reputation may never recover from having Previous Guy as an alum.
Harvard, MIT and the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday faced threats from donors, demands that their presidents resign and a congressional investigation as repercussions mounted over the universities’ responses to antisemitism on campus.
University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill is being asked to resign by the board of Penn's Wharton business school, according to a letter obtained by Axios.
Why it matters: Pressure is mounting on Magill and several other Ivy League leaders, following their widely-panned testimony earlier this week during a congressional hearing on antisemitism.
- Earlier today, Axios reported that a wealthy donor pulled a $100 million gift to the school, citing Magill's appearance in D.C. as a key reason.
What they're saying: Wharton's board of advisors wrote in a letter to Magill that it has held "an unprecedented" eight meetings since its regularly scheduled Nov. 16 meeting, mostly focused on student safety and other community issues related to antisemitism and "hate-based behavior" on Penn's campus.
"[The Board] has been, and remains, deeply concerned about the dangerous and toxic culture on our campus that has been led by a select group of students and faculty and has been permitted by University leadership ...
As a result of the University leadership's stated beliefs and collective failure to act, our board respectfully suggests to you and the Board of Trustees that the University requires new leadership with immediate effect."
News of the letter was first reported by Penn's student newspaper.
Behind the scenes: A source familiar with the situation said that neither Magill nor Board of Trustees Chair Scott Bok attended the Nov. 16 meeting, as they traditionally have done.
- That meeting, which originally was expected to focus on artificial intelligence, instead was dominated by a Dean's discussion of the damage the university's response to the Israel-Hamas war is doing to Wharton.
- The meeting concluded with a series of unanimous resolutions that were included in the letter to Magill.
- Those resolutions primarily focused on changing Penn's code of conduct to, among other things, state that neither students, faculty, nor staff are to "celebrate or advocate for the murder, killing, genocide, or annihilation of any individual classmate or any group of individuals in our community."
www.axios.com/...
I'm not sure it's at all helpful for organizations that have nothing to do with a particular conflict / policy / event to issue statements on that conflict / policy / event. Even less helpful to demand that they do so, or suggest that it's cowardice to not.