The results are in. Of the three university Presidents who testified at a December 5th US congressional hearing, one lost her job (Liz Magill, University of Pennsylvania), and two (Sally Kornbluth, MIT, and Claudine Gay, Harvard) received votes of confidence from their boards. Each had provided a lawyerly response to a question posed by Representative Elise Stefanik, who wanted to know, “Does calling for the genocide of Jews violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment?” Instead of explaining that calls for the genocide of Jews are horrific and worthy of the harshest condemnation and would be aggressively investigated to ensure that Jewish and other students are secure and protected, each responded by asserting that it depends on the context of the statement.
The storm that followed was warranted. What matters now, is what happens next. Universities are responsible for providing students with a learning environment where they can freely and safely study, learn new ideas, debate others, and develop their own without fear of coercion or retribution. Over the past decade and more, we have witnessed school after school turn its back on this core obligation and make way for stringent ideologies, that increasingly govern discourse on many campuses. This has resulted in people with alternate points of view being disinvited, shouted down, subjected to relentless social media attacks, and harassed in their dorms. The result has been the development of a campus environment where the exchange of specific ideas can only happen at a high personal cost.
In the wake of October 7th, we watched as institutions like Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT stood by while Jewish students who dared to identify with Israel were subject to these very forms of abuse. Many students talked of fear for their well-being, only to find university administrations who were deaf to their concerns. At campuses like Harvard, there now needs to be a reckoning. What is at stake is the well-being and freedom of Jewish students and the very nature of some of our nation’s most prestigious universities. Will they defend the same purpose for which they were founded, the open pursuit of knowledge, or will they succumb to the orthodoxies of some students and faculty, who are steadily taking on the aspect of mobs, who believe that justice can be found in punishing and suppressing ideas they don’t like?
