In a matter of minutes at the hearing, the jig was up. Claudine Gay (Harvard), Sally Kornbluth (MIT) and Liz Magill (Penn) are either too cowardly or too intellectually feeble to lead great institutions of higher learning.
The White House condemned their answers. “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 spokesperson Andrew Bates, who has previously condemned antisemitic rhetoric from Elon Musk and antisemitic displays on college campuses. “Any statements that advocate for the systematic murder of Jews are dangerous and revolting — and we should all stand firmly against them, on the side of human dignity and the most basic values that unite us as Americans.”
Members of both parties decried the university presidents’ comments. The House committee announced on Thursday, two days after the hearing, that it would investigate university administrations’ handling of campus antisemitism.
Magill has faced scorching criticism from top Democrats in her state and other lawmakers. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. (D-Pa.) called Magill’s comments “offensive,” and said “calling for the genocide of Jews is antisemitic and harassment, full stop.” Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) said Magill’s testimony was “embarrassing for a venerable Pennsylvania university.” And Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.), despite Magill’s apology video, said the Penn president “should still be fired!” “That was an unacceptable statement from the president of Penn,” Shapiro said in response to Magill not condemning calls for genocide. “Frankly, I thought her comments were absolutely shameful. It should not be hard to condemn genocide.”
Some 1,500 students, alumni and donors at Penn called for Magill to resign. The university’s student-run paper, the Daily Pennsylvanian, reported that Penn’s Wharton business school also demanded a change of leadership. (In a letter, the board said it “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 confirmed in your congressional testimony yesterday, the leadership of the University does not share the values of our Board. Nor does it appear to understand the urgency to address the safety of our students on campus and the ongoing reputational damage to the University by the University’s policies and actions.”)
The Anti-Defamation League also weighed in, with a written statement: “This utter failure to show moral clarity at a time when antisemitism is surging on college campuses is dangerous. This is not a question of free speech, but rather a question of whether genocidal calls on campus will be met with consequences. The only acceptable answer is yes. They couldn’t say it. Will your president do so now?” The organization’s CEO, Jonathan Greenblatt tweeted, “Let’s be crystal clear: there is NO ‘context’ in which calling for the genocide of Jews is OK.”
David Wolpe, a prominent rabbi and visiting scholar at Harvard Divinity School, resigned in protest from his position on Harvard’s antisemitism advisory group. He explained that “both events on campus and the painfully inadequate testimony reinforced the idea that I cannot make the sort of difference I had hoped.” He acknowledged that most students “wish only to get an education and a job, not prosecute ideological agendas, and there are many, many honorable, thoughtful and good people at the institution.”
Wolpe then launched into a damning assessment of the mind-set, present not just at universities but also among some left-wing activists and supporters of the Palestinians:
The system at Harvard along with the ideology that grips far too many of the students and faculty, the ideology that works only along axes of oppression and places Jews as oppressors and therefore intrinsically evil, is itself evil. Ignoring Jewish suffering is evil. Belittling or denying the Jewish experience, including unspeakable atrocities, is a vast and continuing catastrophe. Denying Israel the self-determination as a Jewish nation accorded unthinkingly to others is endemic, and evil.
That damning assessment applies as much to university elites as it does to uninformed (or deliberately obtuse) pundits and activists who insist Israel is a “colonizer,” ignoring thousands of years during which Jews resided in Israel, hundreds of years of expulsion and persecution in other countries, and accurate history (e.g., the U.N.’s intention in 1947 to create both Jewish and Arab states), not to mention the predominance of Mizrahi Jews Indigenous to the Middle East in Israel.
If there is a silver lining here, it is that so many political figures and organizations refused to condone by silence the university presidents’ horrifying remarks.
The presidents quickly scrambled to walk back their comments. Regardless of whether these specific presidents survive the public relations debacle, their shoddy public showing confirms a systematic failure of elite universities’ leadership. Their handling of the latest upswing in antisemitism is already under investigation by the Education Department, now at 21 schools, for possible violation of Title VI, which guarantees students’ right to be free of discrimination on the basis of race, color, national identity or “shared ancestry.”
However, if the Education Department’s investigation leads only to a finding of liability or sanctions for individual schools or administrators, the blowback will have been for naught. Now that Americans got a good look at the mind-set of these university leaders, nothing less than a wholesale reexamination of these schools’ curriculum, policies and intellectual orthodoxy will be sufficient to address the problem. And make no mistake: Taxpayers whose money goes to universities (whether in direct support for state schools or via grants, contracts or student aid) have a right to demand their dollars not be used to incubate antisemitism.
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