The presidents of Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and MIT were royally hammered from all sides after they responded with jargon and gibberish when Elise Stefanik asked whether calling for the genocide of Jews violated school policies and codes of conduct. Their performance was profoundly disappointing. How could they not have anticipated this line of questioning? How could they fail to come better prepared to face a hostile interrogator demanding yes or no answers to questions about complex issues involving speech that demand more than simple yes or no responses? The right to call for genocide of Jews or any other group is not one of those complex issues. If calling for genocide does not violate a university’s policies or code of conduct, something is wrong with those policies and that code of conduct.
Stefanik posed the question to Harvard president Claudine Gay several times with slightly different wording each time. Does it violate Harvard’s rules on bullying and harassment? Does it violate Harvard’s policies? Does it violate Harvard’s code of conduct? Gay responded that it depends on the context, stating at one point, “Antisemitic speech when it crosses into conduct that amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation—that is actionable conduct and we do take action” (Herszenhorn, Yuan, “I Am Sorry,” and other reports).
On December 6, the day after her testimony, Gay clarified her response to Stefanik in a statement released through the university’s social media channels:
There are some who have confused a right to free expression with the idea that Harvard will condone calls for violence against Jewish students. Let me be clear: 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. (Herszenhorn, Yuan)
On Thursday she apologized for her remarks during the exchange with Stefanik in an interview with the Harvard Crimson.
I got caught up in what had become at that point, an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures. What I should have had the presence of mind to do in that moment was return to my guiding truth, which is that calls for violence against our Jewish community—threats to our Jewish students—have no place at Harvard, and will never go unchallenged. (Herszenhorn, Yuan)
The failure of Gay, Penn president Elizabeteh Magill, and MIT president Sally Kornbluth to categorically denounce calls for genocide is, as vice presidential spouse Doug Emhoff said, not acceptable. There is though some context relevant to Gay’s explanation that she “got caught up in what had become…an extended, combative exchange about policies and procedures.”
More complete accounts report that in her remarks Stefanik “appeared to be conflating chants calling for ‘intifada’—a word that in Arabic means uprising, and has been used in reference to both peaceful and violent Palestinian protest—with hypothetical calls for genocide” (Gambino, US university presidents). “Intifada,” “anti-Zionism,” and the slogan “from the river to the sea / Palestine will be free” are used with different meanings by different people and groups. In some contexts they are associated with denial of Israel’s right to exist, commitment to the destruction of Israel, and removal or extermination of Jews. In others, they are expressions of solidarity with the many Palestinians who, like many Israelis, desire an opportunity to live decent lives in peace and dignity, free of fear, whether in a single state alongside Jews or in a separate state, with both alternatives opposed by Netanyahu and the extremists he represents.
Stefanik’s questions about antisemitism and calling for genocide when posed in the abstract should have been answered with a simple, firm yes, these are violations of policies and codes of conduct. The deeper issue as to what constitutes antisemitism and a call for genocide does not appear to have been directly addressed. The presidents became entangled in a mess of jargon and gibberish when they tried to contest the extremely expansive sense of those terms as they were used by Stefanik, who spoke in lockstep with the Israeli government and its accomplices in this country who equate any criticism of Israeli policy and treatment of Palestinians with antisemitism and denial of Israel’s right to exist. By their standard I am antisemitic.
The left’s antisemitism problem is a headliner for the right. The truth is that the country has an antisemitism problem that crosses ideological lines. I was naïve to be surprised by the extent of it. The two wings differ in their responses. Prominent voices within what might be loosely called the liberal establishment can be counted on to condemn antisemitism when it comes from people and groups who are otherwise allies. The White House, Doug Emhoff, Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, and Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe are among a host of liberals who blasted the “lack of moral clarity,” Emhoff’s words, on the part of the university presidents. Their counterparts within the Republican Party are less inclined to call out their own. In a recent and outrageous example from Texas, the state Republican party’s executive committee rejected a proposal to bar party members from associating with known Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, with roughly half of the board trying to prevent a record of their vote from being kept. To be fair, a minority faction within the committee “has called for the party to confront its ties to groups that have recently employed or associated with outspoken white supremacists and extremists” (Downen, Texas GOP).
No one should harbor any illusion that Stefanik’s questions were posed in good faith. Her intent was to smear universities and liberals. She soon followed up with a statement that she wants consequences for the universities with specific aim at funding and diversity, equity, and inclusion offices. She also called for the three presidents to resign. Magill has already done so.
Attacks on the universities play well with the party’s base, convinced that they are hotbeds of socialism, Marxism, critical race theory, and perversity. Antagonism toward the universities is as old as the university itself, and as old as the elitism of scholars. In The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, historian Friedrich Heer writes that like the nobility and the clergy, the intelligentsia, jealous of their university learning and privileges, cut themselves off from the masses and became closed societies. “The universities were also oases of freedom, where all those questions which elsewhere were suppressed and forbidden were discussed with what hostile critics described as brazen impudence.” Aspects of his account have a familiar ring.
The grandeurs and miseries of the European intellectual have their origin in the medieval university, with its almost complete concentration on the education of men’s reason…But there were whole areas it left untouched…Medieval intellectuals often show symptoms of a split personality: their intellects might be highly developed, but their manners were vicious and uncouth, their personalities spiritually immature…The Paris of the intellectuals was Babylon to Jacques de Vitry, as it had been to Bernard of Clairvaux. Bernard exhorted teachers and students to flee from it and save their souls. To other people, however, Paris was…“paradise on earth, the rose of the world, the balm of the universe”…Typically urban, the intellectuals of Paris looked down on everything rustic and provincial, including the peasantry.
We should expect better, we need better, from university representatives than was on display last Tuesday. This does not mean we should sit idly by while Elise Stefanik, Ron DeSantis, and like-minded demagogues orchestrate a purge. The threat they pose to academic freedom and free speech is real. I am not alone in expressing the hope that Claudine Gay and Sally Kornbluth do not bow to pressure to resign and that their institutions stand by them. It is a lot to hope that Tuesday’s debacle will spur authentic reflection and debate about speech, its appropriate limits, and when institutions are permitted, even obliged, to place restrictions on it. Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth could be a part of that discussion.
I cannot say with confidence where I would come down on it all if I were eighteen with Israel’s assaults on Gaza and in the West Bank growing more monstrous by the day. It would be nice to think that I would think more clearly and choose my words more carefully than some of our contemporaries who serve their cause poorly with words and slogans of ambiguous meaning used far too loosely to express support for their cause and to demonize perceived foes. I am by no means assured that I would think as clearly or as well as I would like.
I was fortunate at the age of eighteen to happen into Dr. Mulvaney’s introductory philosophy course spring semester of my freshman year at the University of South Carolina, and after that Dr. Matsen’s classes on the Presocratic philosophers and medieval philosophy and Mr. Mandell’s class on European intellectual history from 1789 to 1914. Of no particular relevance to this essay, I note that the medieval philosophers we read with Dr. Matsen included Ibn Sina (980–1037), also known in the West as Avicenna, born in the city of Bukhara, the great seat of learning in what is now Uzbekistan, and other Islamic scholars who are also part of the European cultural and intellectual tradition. S. Frederick Starr writes about these scholars in his fascinating book Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamarlane. After reading the opening pages of my library copy I ordered a copy of my own from Powell’s, now on its way with a place reserved on my reading stack.
Like other Central Asian scholars, Ibn Sina was a polymath. He made his mark in philosophy, ethics, chemistry, astronomy, music theory, and other fields, and he influenced the European scholastics Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. Writes Starr,
When eventually Ibn Sina’s Canon of Medicine was translated into Latin, it triggered the start of modern medicine in the West and became its Bible: a dozen editions were printed before 1500. Indians used Ibn Sina’s Canon to develop a whole school of medicine that continues today.
As Dr. Matsen liked to say, we stand on the shoulders of giants. Ah, but I digress.
In those university classrooms some fifty years ago I took a few steps along the path toward learning to think critically about beliefs and ideas. It is an ongoing project. Freedom of thought and speech are ideals that run through the intellectual tradition that is our heritage in the West. So too do dogmatism and intolerance, in religious and in secular forms, within the universities and outside them. Our time is not the first when varieties of dogmatism and intolerance appear to be in ascendance. Now is the time to draw on that best part of our traditions and heritage to resist their pull toward a new dark age.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Robert Downen, Texas GOP executive committee rejects proposed ban on associating with Nazi sympathizers and Holocaust deniers, The Texas Tribune, December 2, 2023
Lauren Gambino, US university presidents face firestorm over ‘evasive’ answers on antisemitism, The Guardian, December 7, 2023
Kelly Garrity, ‘The lack of moral clarity is unacceptable’: Emhoff joins criticism of university presidents, Politico, December 7, 2023
Friedrich Heer, The Medieval World: Europe 1100–1350, George Weidenfeld & Nicholson Ltd, 1961; Phoenix paperback edition 1998
Miles J. Herszenhorn, Claire Yuan, ‘I Am Sorry’: Harvard President Gay Addresses Backlash Over Congressional Testimony on Antisemitism, Harvard Crimson, December 8, 2023
Chris Isidore, Matt Egan, Why UPenn President Liz Magill is facing more pressure than other university presidents over antisemitism, CNN, December 8, 2023
National Review editors, University Presidents’ Abhorrent Hypocrisy on Anti-Jewish Speech, National Review, December 6, 2023
NPR staff, Emhoff says 3 college presidents showed a 'lack of moral clarity' on antisemitism, NPR, December 7, 2023
Azi Paybarah and Mariana Alfaro, White House, lawmakers criticize university leaders’ answers on antisemitism, Washington Post, December 6, 2023
April Rubin, Harvard president apologizes over answers in antisemitism hearing, Axios, December 8, 2023
S. Frederick Starr, Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamarlane, Princeton University Press, 2013
Thanks for this piece, David. We talked about it on Sunday, and I came down then and now as you do, though not nearly as eloquently. I would have expected more from these three, but they were in a very stressful and difficult situation. Regardless, I'm not sure what it might have taken to truly satisfy Stefanik.