Why liberals are calling for college presidents to resign

December 10, 2023 • 9:30 am

After the Presidents of Harvard, MIT, and Penn (Claudine Gay, Sally Kornbluth, and Liz Magill, respectively) were grilled by Republican Representatives last week,  calls arose from both Right and Left for all the Presidents to resign, and donors began reneging on giving money to these schools.

The fracas centered largely on whether their campus speech codes forbid calling for genocide of the Jewish people. And those codes may indeed forbid such statements as forms of “hate speech”. But they shouldn’t, for campus speech codes should adhere to the First Amendment. This must be the case for public universities, but Penn, MIT, and Harvard are private universities and can enforce their own regulations.

Nevertheless, all universities, save perhaps religious ones, should have speech codes that conform to the courts’ construal of the First Amendment. The University of Chicago, a private college, has done so for decades.  The Chicago Principles of Free Expression, embodying that commitment, have been adopted by over 100 universities. Sadly, Penn, Harvard, and MIT are not among them. Had our statement been adopted, there would be no question about whether campus speech codes allow calls for genocide of the Jews: they would have because campus speech codes are simply the First Amendment.  And according to that amendment, says reader and lawyer Ken, such calls are allowed “unless the statements were specifically directed at an individual, or a small group  of individuals, or unless the group making the threats were following the Jewish students around (either physically or in cyberspace) repeatedly subjecting them to such threats.”  The correct answer of the professors would then be “It depends.” But that’s how they answered!

If their answer was correct, why did some Representatives, and many on both the Right and Left, still call for the Presidents to resign? There are three reasons.

1.) The Presidents answered in a robotic and noncompassionate way, as if they didn’t expect to have to answer such questions. It didn’t help that the Republican questioners were bullying, demanding simple “yes or no” answers to a complex question. As we see above, sometimes it is against the First Amendment to call for genocide. But the college presidents’ empathy for the slaughtered Jews wasn’t on tap that day.

2.) None of the universities represented by Gay, Magill, and Kornbluth actually adhere to First-Amendment-based speech codes. It thus appears too convenient, and almost antisemitic, for them to suddenly invoke that Amendment when doing so permits calls for Jewish genocide.  You simply can’t put a policy in place right when it’s politically convenient to do so.

3.) All three Universities had a history of punishing more trivial speech, making them look like hypocrites when they allow for speech promoting genocide.  Here’s what the NYT says about this issue:

Yet for many on the right, the careful, evasive answers from three college presidents at Tuesday’s hearing — Ms. Magill, Claudine Gay of Harvard and Sally Kornbluth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — were in stark contrast to those institutions’ long indulgence of left-wing sensitivities around race and gender.

All three institutions have in recent years punished or censored speech or conduct that drew anger from the left. In 2019, Harvard revoked a deanship held by Ronald S. Sullivan Jr., a Black law professor, after students protested his joining the legal team of the former Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein. In 2021, M.I.T. canceled a planned scientific lecture by the star geophysicist Dorian Abbot, pointing to his criticism of affirmative action. The University of Pennsylvania’s law school is seeking to impose sanctions on a tenured professor there, Amy Wax, citing student complaints about her remarks regarding the academic performance of students of color, among other provocations.

. . . “The same administrators now cloaking themselves in the mantle of free speech have been all too willing to censor all kinds of unpopular stuff on their campuses,” said Alex Morey, the foundation’s [The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression] director of campus rights advocacy. “It is such utter hypocrisy.”

That said, I didn’t think that the responses at the hearings were sufficient to raise calls for Gay, Kornbluth, and Magill to resign. Rather, the hearing could serve as a teaching moment, getting the Presidents to ditch their own speech codes and adopt one like Chicago’s. And it should prompt them to further adopt principles of institutional neutrality, like Chicago’s Kalven Report, which prohibits our university from making any ideological, political, or moral pronouncements except in the rare instances that they further the mission of the University to teach and produce knowledge.

My view that the Presidents’ answers weren’t sufficient to call for their resignations was tempered when, shortly after her testimony, Penn’s Liz Magill walked back her adherence to the First Amendment, pronouncing that calls for genocide were “threatening,” as well as constituting “harassment and intimidation”, and should be banned on her campus. Constitutional principles. she said, should be “clarified and evaluated.”  This is abandonment of free speech, and any President committed to curbing free speech shouldn’t be allowed to run a university.

Magill ends her apology above by saying, “we can and we will get this right.”  But the solution is simple. Adopt the Chicago Principles of Free Expression and the Kalven Report, and enforce all violations of them. The University of Chicago hasn’t had the kinds of trouble that Penn, MIT, and Harvard had, and we’ve also lost no donors.

The only other thing I recommend is that, before testifying in Congress, college presidents should undergo mock vetting to ensure that they answer eloquently and properly. This is something that defendants often do with their lawyers before they appear in court.

UPDATE: What’s even worse is that, in fact, as reader Wayne informs me (and which is reported in the NYT), all three Presidents were either prepared by or met with the law firm WilmerHale before the hearings. A lot of University money was wasted in that effort!

But in the end, if the Presidents had stuck to the mantra that so enraged everyone—asserting that calls for genocide of Jews can indeed be legal on campus in certain circumstances (the Presidents even mentioned some of those circumstances, which were distorted by the Representatives)—they shouldn’t be given pink slips. Yes, the answer does depend on context, and a “yes or no” answer is simply inappropriate, like asking someone “Are you still beating your wife?”

Sadly, Liz Magill crumpled under the pressure and has resigned. I predict that neither Gay nor Kornbluth will resign. But they need to get their act together. The solution is simple: just adopt the two Chicago principles and enforce them.

73 thoughts on “Why liberals are calling for college presidents to resign”

  1. As someone who has lived almost his entire life in University communities and was an academic administrator for 10 years of it (University of South Florida and Miami University Ohio), I humbly suggest that there is much more to maintaining a healthy academic community than simply trying to ensure free speech. I could go on and on about the subject, but fortunately, this column in the WaPo summarizes many of the complexities that have to be dealt with by all involved. I heartily recommend that everyone read it and reflect on it. Article is “gifted”, so paywall should not be a problem.

    https://wapo.st/4ahnVn8

    1. Sorry, but that article’s solution to the problem is RESTRICT HATE SPEECH. But who is going to be the arbiter of hate speech? Is contesting that George Floyd was murdered (as Glenn Loury now argues) “hate speech”? Is saying that affirmative action is wrong “hate speech”? The fact is that almost any speech that offends someone can be considered hate speech. And that is why adhering to First Amendment speech codes, restricted as construed by the courts, is the only way to go.

    2. According to that WaPo article:

      This is because the value of free speech has been elevated to a near-sacred level on university campuses. As a result, universities have had to tolerate hate speech — even hate speech calling for violence against ethnic or religious minorities.

      I’m happy to be corrected, but I don’t believe that is true. Speech on campus – and in class – has been heavily policed in US academic institutions and there are too many egregious examples to list. (The Hamline Islamic art fiasco is a prime example, involving both academic freedom and free speech.)

      I appreciate that Liz Magill had only been in post for a year, but surely that would have been enough time to clearly signal her intentions with regard to free speech on campus. It’s the apparent hypocrisy of suddenly insisting that First Amendment rights are to be the guiding principle when it’s Jews on the receiving end of the hate that did for her, as far as I can see?

  2. I agree that universities should adopt the Chicago principles. But these presidents are suffering the consequences of thirty+ years of Critical Theory on campus. The resignation, IMO, did not come because of inept presentations or how easily these presidents walked into an obvious trap.

    Donor money is evaporating faster than an ice cube in Death Valley.

  4. The normally very sane Matthew Syed in the (UK) Sunday Times has a take on this. In the article, he suggests that the issue is that the presidents were in fear of the reaction back at their universities. Basically they were in dread of being bullied.

    “As one [academic] put it: “I learnt along with every other student to walk on eggshells for fear I may say the wrong thing.””

    The link to the article is here:

    https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/grovelling-to-wokeism-has-tipped-our-universities-into-an-ethical-void-0dxjpb9w7

  5. Larry Summers was forced out, at least partially and perhaps mostly, when the faculty were outraged at him publicly describing the male variability hypothesis (that men are more variable than women on many dimensions and, e.g., end up running more Fortune 500 companies but also end up more likely to be homeless).

    Gay’s (Harvard Pres) transgressions are vastly more egregious, including failing to protect faculty like Carole Hooven, who was driven out of Harvard by a mob of mostly grad students drunk on DEI. Her sin? Stating that sex was biological and binary. So when she gets to Congress, she is all “context matters, it depends on if it targets individuals”? Yes, that IS actually the right policy, but her abject failure to implement is a firing offense, if you believe that a foundational pillar of the academy is academic freedom.

    Same deal for Sally Kornbluth (MIT Pres). The firing offense is basically lying (or, at least, deeply disingenuous) before Congress about having the same “context” policy, and failing to step in during Dorian Abbott’s deplatforming.

    Fire them both.

    The core problem is that much of the left seems to be getting the entirely wrong lesson from all this (“We must restrict speech even more to protect Jews!” rather than “The best way to protect everyone, including but not restricted to Jews” is to implement robust protections for liberal democratic norms around speech, academic freedom and due process).

    I definitely support firing them though I am not at all confident that any of this will end well and it seems to be going in the wrong direction.

    1. I agree, they should be fired. If their defence of free speech, as stated to Congress, was actually their university’s policy, then they should be fired for having failed abysmally to uphold that policy over multiple years and multiple instances.

    2. These Presidents are, I think, new hires, and they are apparently being punished, in your lights, for things that happened before their reign. I think they should be given a chance to reform things.

      1. You’re nicer than I am, Mr. Coyne. The three university presidents’ dissembling and clumsy answers that afternoon indicate that all are too short on moral clarity, much less application of our constitution, to lead those important institutions of learning. They gave every appearance of having come the same gene pool as those who have “led” these universities the last 15 years which, in my opinion, makes them fundamentally incapable of instituting such reform …because at their core they don’t believe it is needed. Fire them all and rebuild with new leadership.

        1. We disagree. Gay should never have been hired, but she was one of the admins instrumental in having Roland Fryer temporarily banished. She could have attempted to rehire Carole Hooven, or at least spent her energies shoring up academic freedom rather than DEI, which it seems she was hired to do.

          Magill should have immediately recognized that Wax’s comments were protected speech and canceled the “investigations” into whether her tenure should be revoked.

          Kornbluth should have immediately recognized MIT’s free speech/academic freedom crisis and either elevated the existing ad hoc faculty academic freedom committee to a standing, officially recognized one, or created one.

          Fire them all for the academic version of “dereliction of duty.”

          1. If they do all go, I hope that American academia has learned a salutary lesson and that this signals the end of the overweening policing of language, but only of those who don’t agree with EDI orthodoxy, that has developed in recent years.

  6. Unfortunately, there is also a requirement to keep an environment that “feels threatening” to “protected groups”.

  7. The “robotic and non compassionate” method of answering seems to be part of a pattern which might be summarized as a refusal to expand and explain — preferably by giving examples. Even a complex and nuanced subject can usually be condensed into simpler ideas and expressed to outsiders. Indeed, experts who deal with the public usually have quick versions of basic definitions and concepts in their field prepared in advance, anticipating questions like “what’s a Black Hole?” Scientists don’t sniff and demand that the questioner “do their homework”(unless that actually was the homework.)

    I’m thinking not only of a more informative answer to “do campus speech codes forbid calling for genocide?” but to something like “what is a woman?” If “it depends,” then what does it depend on? Examples? I bet the people at FIRE could and would have answered the first question briefly and adequately, though I doubt experts on Gender Theory either could or would have done the same for the second.

    It just seems to me that this tendency to sit back and give minimal responses comes at least in part out of the idea that the world is divided into Good people and Bad. Skeptics are never asking “in good faith” because they have a challenging as opposed to receptive attitude. Thus, they don’t deserve a response, and must be seen as not deserving a response. Stonewall them. We’re not here to do your work for you. Look it up.

    1. This comment was a huge revelation to me.
      I remember discussing excerpts from Matt Walsh’s “What is a woman” and asking why the various academics and clinicians being interviewed were being so obviously evasive and rather ridiculous.
      However complex the issue apparently was, surely a simple TLDR for the layman could be given.

      I realize now that this must have been a woke group because that was the precise “answer” I received – Matt Walsh was “asking in bad faith” and hence no answer was required.

      Sounds extremely religious cultish to me !

  8. I agree with Morey and our host the real problem is the many recent instances of suppressed speech on other issues. That’s why the three presidents could not simply answer “No” to Stefanic’s question about anti-Semitism: they knew there would be awkward follow-up questions about gender (Carole Hooven) and race (Roland Fryer, Amy Wax) where the presidents would have to answer “Yes” and advertise their own hypocrisy.

    I suspect part of the reason other leaders at Penn called for Magill to resign is simple embarrassment at being pantsed by a low-rent demagogue like Stefanik. Especially after Magill wasted a ton of Penn’s money on consultants to prep her for her disastrous testimony.

    “Lawyers for WilmerHale sat in the front row at the hearing on Tuesday. They included Alyssa DaCunha, who leads the firm’s congressional investigations and crisis management practices, and Felicia Ellsworth, the vice chair of the firm’s litigation and controversy department.”
    https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/08/business/dealbook/wilmerhale-penn-harvard-mit-antisemitism-hearing.html

    I felt (again) like such a peasant when I learned that there is a legal services niche called “congressional investigations and crisis management”.

    1. “….pantsed by a low rent demagogue like Stefanik”. What a great turn of phrase. Perhaps I might borrow it sometime? And I did not know either that one could spend thousands of dollars on testimony prep. Surely the in-house availability of deans, law school profs, and even senior STEM profs with experience in testifying on the Hill should suffice.

      1. “Low-rent demagogue” is a fine phrase,….as long as you finish it with “who pantsed an Ivy League university president.”

    2. ‘I felt (again) like such a peasant when I learned that there is a legal services niche called “congressional investigations and crisis management”.’

      I’m not surprised at the existence of such a niche. From my observation it is a bloody ordeal to have to testify before congressional narcissistic tyros and bullies (like, e.g., Stefanik and her Dem counterpart Debbie “It’s MY Time!” Wasserman Schultz, and of course Philistine popinjays and banty roosters like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Lindsey Graham, Jim Jordan and Matt Goetz).

      It’s hard to answer eloquently and properly when one is repeatedly interrupted and talked over, and beholden to an egotistical congressperson’s need to performatively bloviate to the universe. Witnesses are in a no-win situation where “Roolz” of civility are sparse.

      Witnesses’ superiors/employers require them to maintain their serenity for the sake of public relations/politics, especially witnesses working for a presidential administration. Hence the resulting “robotic” responses and efforts to keep the lid on the emotional pressure cooker in response to provocative and fatuous comments.

      If I were a witness thus put upon, I would appreciate some practical advice. (On the other hand, one might be as well-advised to rather take a Valium and/or a shot of Johnny Walker single malt scotch to settle down oneself, provided that it did not also too much loosen the tongue. ;))

      Regardless of whether one agrees with any given position of George Galloway, he was not similarly constrained in his response to questions/accusations from congressional omniscients, video of which is easily found on Youtube. Maybe witnesses should talk to congressional inquisitors like the inquisitors talk to witnesses. Or are members of Congress entitled to a deference and consideration they are not inclined to give witnesses?

  9. I guess I have a different sensibility as a Canadian. I think that calling for the genocide of any group is hate speech that is inherently threatening and harmful to the targeted group on campus. It should be against the code of conduct as a matter of basic human decency, as well as to provide a (literally) safe learning environment for all. All of the actual genocides that I know anything about have been preceded by hateful speech that infected the minds of the people who heard it. I’m not concerned about genocides erupting on campuses but I gather that there have already been threats of physical violence against Jewish students.

    1. Threats of physical violence are illegal.

      The problem with deciding what “hate speech” consists of, is, of course, very slippery, as I’ve outlined above. If speech doesn’t promote imminent and predictable violence, it is legal under the First Amendment. And it has benefits, too, as Mill outlines in “On Liberty.” At the very least it exposes what people believe rather than keeping it hidden, and it also allows us to hone our arguments against our enemies.

      This is why the ACLU defended the Nazis marching through the Jewish town of Skokie Illinois some years ago, and why that demonstration was legal.

      1. Not provoking imminent and predictable violence seems different to me from the quotation from Ken in the third paragraph of the main post.

        1. The imminent incitement to violence standard applies to generally inflammatory speech. See Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969).

          There are other types of verbal conduct, such as harassment and stalking, that are unlawful when directed at a specific individual. See this paper for a more thorough discussion.

      2. Certainly one good thing that has come out of the discourse surrounding the tragic events in Israel is that the antisemitism, hypocrisy and deeply flawed ideology that has overtaken campuses in both of our countries has been revealed to the general population.

      3. I was pondering this, and wondered if the harm aspect could be revisited.
        We know that calling for the genocide of Jews has resulted in direct harm – in the past. Nazi-ism harmed the jews in the past – so Nazi’s marching now..? So we have historical antecedents that speak to the creeping harm such speech leads to.
        Now – it is obvious what the faults are with this as well (no need to prosecute the case here, I could pick it apart too!)…all I am doing is trying to approach the also obvious flaw in ‘calling for the genocide of jews’ is NOT immediately harmful (seemingly, the clearest proof is actual violence committed on Jews – which seems a bit late).
        And I also mean in a broader free speech context beyond just the USA.

        Just thoughts. So hard – and I am a fairly hard-line Millsian. I am only cognizant of the need to not rely on definitions, but to constantly challenge them.
        In the absence of any progress on the topic, I would err on allowing general obnoxious/disgusting speech. Perhaps the issue is a combination of allowing ‘free speech’ versus the ‘right to protest’ (and where and how THIS right is exercised). Maybe the intersection of these is where we identify hateful motive and intent…
        Maybe a person is antsemtic and voice this. Maybe two people do. But maybe when a hundred, a thousand, people do it at once, it crosses a threshold of intimidation and intended harm…

        Sure – I’ll find a solution that my boy Mill didn’t think of!

    2. Canadian laws criminalizing hate speech (or anything else) don’t apply on American university campuses (or anywhere else), Lianne. There are actually three different laws in the Canadian Criminal Code: hate speech, advocating genocide, and denying or minimizing the Holocaust, the last being snuck into an omnibus budget bill a few years ago. Can you spell “slippery slope”? In case you can’t, consider that there is a segment of the Canadian Liberal government that wants to make it a crime to “deny” the historical “fact” of the Indian Residential Schools “genocide”, which is actually a hoax. It is already a crime to “promote” conversion therapy for transgender or homosexual people. Not just to do it or to advertise it, but to “promote” it. What does that mean? Depends, like all “rights” in Canada, on what a judge thinks. The government brags that its law against conversion therapy is the most far-reaching in the world. No doubt it is.

      Our American friends ought not to go down that road.

      1. I didn’t intend to suggest the application of Canadian laws. I was thinking about university/college codes of conduct for students and staff which are generally approved by their boards of governors.
        I agree that speech laws can go too far, but I don’t have an issue with laws against speech that is likely to cause violence against an individual, group or the public in general such as advocating genocide or terrorism.
        There are pros and cons to both the Canadian and the US approaches.

        1. As I understand it, the speech code of a public (state) university in America cannot prohibit speech that the state itself cannot, i.e., the First Amendment rules absolutely no matter what its board of governors says. If a private university pledges to operate as if it were bound by the 1A — by no means all do — then its governors also cannot be more restrictive than if the same speech was said off campus by a member of the public. It is free to reneg on that pledge to its students and staff or apply it selectively if it wishes to. Codes of conduct are another matter.

          We can agree to disagree on whether what Canada calls hate speech should be illegal or whether Parliament should have the power to make it illegal. But I do have to point out that you are begging the question when you say, “laws against speech that is likely to cause violence”. That is precisely the point of argument: whether what is called hate speech is, indeed, likely to breach the peace. (FWIW, Canada’s hate speech law criminalizes speech that the speaker intends to arouse hate against a definable group, not just whether it is “likely” to cause violence. That latter speech is illegal in the U.S. too.) Wikipedia has a run-down of Canadian hate-speech jurisprudence.

          Canada does not criminalize the glorification (in speech) of terrorism. Some European countries do.

          Canada’s universities, nearly all public in the American sense, are believed to be a Charter-free zone where our watered-down and leaky version of the U.S. First Amendment doesn’t apply. University presidents routinely shut down speech events or fire professors that/who are thought to frustrate the goal of indigenous reconciliation and decolonization or some other DEI vision (which almost all universities have pledged themselves to as a integral part of their corporate brand, er, mission.) There are two cases making their way through the legal system as we speak. Canada’s universities don’t really want free speech that upsets anyone with a chip on his shoulder and are happy to hide behind hate speech laws and human rights commissions.

          The world regards Canadians as “nice”. I was at an event last week where a free-speech law professor on a panel argued that the Canadian administrative state has weaponized “niceness” by preventing people from saying things that aren’t “nice.”

          1. I don’t approve of the cancellations that Canadian universities have perpetrated on ideological grounds. I’m a liberal but I would have suspended the students who rudely shut down Jordan Peterson with their noise-making at McMaster University in 2017. Universities should be places for civil debate and discourse. No one has the right not to be offended, but in my opinion calls for genocide against a targeted group are something different and inherently threatening and dangerous.

  10. As Lee Jussim points out in #5, all three presidents should be fired for being both disingenuous and clumsy at it. They were caught babbling “context” about calls to exterminate the Jewish population of Israel, while their own institutions visibly impose penalties on anyone who denies the virtue of DEI bureaucracies. Had they explained that making DEI officials feel safe is the paramount academic value, that would at least have represented logical consistency. Alternatively, they might have explained that logical consistency is no longer an academic value in their institutions.

  11. The most common complaint I hear is the double standard. If they hold up freedom of speech for this situation, they have to apply freedom of speech consistently, which they have not.

  12. Quote from the post:

    “But in the end, if the Presidents had stuck to the mantra that so enraged everyone—asserting that calls for genocide of Jews can indeed be legal on campus in certain circumstances (the Presidents even mentioned some of those circumstances, which were distorted by the Representatives)—they shouldn’t be given pink slips. Yes, the answer does depend on context, and a “yes or no” answer is simply inappropriate, like asking someone “Are you still beating your wife?”

    First, I listened to the full hearing. Most of the questions posed to the administrators were fair – even if impressed in a belligerent/bullying manner. I also think the administrators did their best (were sincere) in their responses while -at the same time- giving off an air of tone-deaf-clueless-elitism.

    The legal aspect represents (only) one aspect of the challenge faced by the administrators. Blatant hypocrisy -in analogous prior contexts- and millions being withdrawn in funding/donations influence -and will continue influence- the forcing function governing potential resignations. I don’t support the “pink-slip solution” either, primarily because it’s not a solution.

    Albeit, and more importantly, the issue goes beyond any nuanced and/or abstract analysis of “what constitutes free speech” and/or “what is legal”.

    The question Rep. Stefanik asked (repeatedly) related to *code of conduct/policy*, not free-speech. I’m not a constitutional scholar, ergo, am not able to to dissect the issue from a “first amendment” and/or “workplace safety” perspective. It’s unclear to me if context-driven “legal” speech -when aggregated- is indeed protected. Isolated instances of “river to the sea” and “jihad” and “globalize the antifada”, are very likely protected speech, but the accumulative effect of such speech must be considered. It’s not clear to me how an aggregated scenario will be considered by a court of law.

    The sentiment expressed in the post (the quote above) neglects to address the issue at the nub. The question -at the hearing- that received disproportionate(?) attention was about code-of-conduct. Not free speech (I recommend listening to the full hearing). Real people (students) have to live with harassment, hiding their identities, hiding in libraries, being unable to study, removing emblems of their “jewishness” from their dorm-rooms and being terrified to attend classes; also, being harangued -by fellow students- who say that Israel has no right to exist, and that Hamas’ progrom was a legitimate response to apartheid and settler-colonialism.

    It’s hard to imagine that the code-of-conduct of any school (or workplace) is duty-bound to honor first amendment protections against speech that is chronically/repeatedly harassing – leading to defeating the purpose (mission) of the school; i.e. to deliver education in a safe environment.

    Here is an interesting article on
    ** The Intersection of Free Speech and Harassment Rules**
    from the American Bar Association:
    https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/human_rights_vol38_2011/fall2011/the_intersection_of_free_speech_and_harassment_rules/

    Quote:
    “To assess whether there is a violation of a harassment policy, three critical elements must all be present:

    1) Targeting of a protected class (gender, race, religion, etc.);
    2) Unwelcomeness of harassing behavior or verbal, written, and/or online conduct; and
    3) Deprivation of educational access, opportunities, rights, and/or peaceful enjoyment therefrom.

    Public school and college policies must focus more effectively on the third element.”
    =======================

    And here are testimonies from jewish students at MIT, Harvard, UPenn and NYU: it’s hard to believe that these testimonies do not satisfy any “universal” definition of harassment.
    https://youtu.be/F1B9lIhXAb0?si=d3q9XdH5ao7WziSk

    2. Thanks, Rosemary. I appreciate the points your raised.

      Hostile environments are invoked all the time at universities. A few side comments or jokes can be used as evidence of a hostile environment. Lab leaders can be disciplined if several female scientists share that jokes were made by lab mates that went unpunished by a lab leader, as this could be evidence of creating a hostile environment for women, especially if a more-serious allegation (even if false) is thrown in.

      I know that a department chair (won’t say where) was removed because a woman in his lab claimed he looked at her in a way that made her uneasy. He never touched or said a word to hit on her. All facts. He was removed for his eye movements.

      So, if students, who are also university employees (and many are), are subjected to Slack messages with antisemitic rhetoric, witness their peers tearing down posters of the hostages, and know that buildings where Hillel students gather are urinated on, then watching admins refuse to condemn pro-Hamas gatherings and pro-Hamas open letters could certainly feel like a hostile environment, especially since this has been going on for months. How is this different than women on campuses reporting jokes that make them feel uneasy and claiming those constitute a “hostile environment”?

      But then this sort of thing spirals out of control with microaggressions and any minor thing being used to claim victimhood.

      Just raising my confusion and cognitive dissonance — not arguing whether exposure to persistent and pervasive antisemitic rhetoric, which is occurring on college campuses, constitutes a hostile environment.

      1. Thank you Roz. You raise good points.

        The challenge is to separate “the wheat from the chaff” by installing an objective body to make the distinction? Easier said than done of course. A mildly offensive off color remark or “looking at someone the wrong way” (ridiculous really), doesn’t deserve the boot. But, I appreciate the difficulty here. It all depends on the judge, and biases inherent in the judge’s world view. If the judge is Claudine Gay, are all bets off? Will selective “jurisprudence” apply?

        Last night I read more about Ronald Fryer and the role Claudine Gay played in his eviction from Harvard. Not nice, not fair, twisted. Gay harbors authoritarian traits that need investigating by the board.

        Re: this; quote:
        “So, if students, who are also university employees (and many are), are subjected to Slack messages with antisemitic rhetoric, witness their peers tearing down posters of the hostages, and know that buildings where Hillel students gather are urinated on, then watching admins refuse to condemn pro-Hamas gatherings and pro-Hamas open letters could certainly feel like a hostile environment, especially since this has been going on for months. How is this different than women on campuses reporting jokes that make them feel uneasy and claiming those constitute a “hostile environment”?

        Fearing for one’s life and physical safety after Oct 7 — doesn’t that carry more weight than off-color jokes? Particularly in an aggregated scenario? I suppose one can claim (falsely) that one’s life is in danger, but we have real-world evidence of what Hamas and Hamas’ sympathizers can unleash. Terror. Isn’t there a clear “category” distinction that applies to unambiguous, chronic antisemitism vs “looking at someone the wrong way”.

        Repeated chants of “From the river to the see” vs winking at someone? Maybe Claudine Gay is confused, but I am not. 🙂

        Having said all of the above, I see how the distinction can become murky and quickly.

  13. It is very depressing that they would resign/get fired. IMHO it would help to see the ideology on display, to better understand the ideology which needs to be cured.

    It is true that faculty and students were, frankly, f’ed over due to the ideology in power.

    I am reminded of retribution, I guess from the judicial/punitive philosophy, I guess – though I can see how retribution does not apply.

    So I must listen in here to insight.

    It is sad either way, IMHO.

    BTW there’s a letter by the President of Harvard that was posted on eXtwitter – worth a read.

  14. I’m at Harvard. There are petitions and an email circling for Gay’s resignation or dismissal. I haven’t signed the petition or sent the email. The email was spread over and over again on Twitter by an embittered former Harvard-law student with a link that opens directly up into a fully composed email that goes to all of Harvard’s board and deans. This is the link if you want to see the text, but be careful because you can’t read it without it opening your email box: https: //t.co/7mz7xHdXLn (Notice that I’ve separated the “https:” from the rest to prevent you from accidentally opening the link.)

    As I wrote to a friend yesterday: “I haven’t signed [sent] it, though I’m tempted to. Gay’s pairing of antisemitism and islamophobia disgusts me to my core and strikes me as disingenuous DEI. Our universities are not being overrun with islamophobia, which is an insipid word (no religion deserves respect). She hasn’t been in office long, but she has been in leadership roles for quite some time. I’m also disgusted by the fact that I have more than 2x more publications than she does. So, clearly, she is a DEI hire herself. And yet I don’t think demonizing her fixes anything. It does increase my bitterness about how hard it is to find a job when if I just virtue-signaled enough to the right people…

    Maybe firing her and the others will initiate an era of adoption of neutrality and free expression on campuses. But it’s more likely to lead to more DEI without a radical educational reform occurring. So, I’m torn. On the one hand, her responses to congress were legally correct legalese. But they were also a disastrous debacle and utter failure of leadership that tanked Harvard’s reputation for their hypocrisy. It was a teaching moment. She missed it. I’m not optimistic enough to think she’s capable of doing what it would take to lead over time, which would anger the woke crowd who hired her. I think I saw something that accused her of contributing to cancellations. So, maybe it is best that she’s gone. But again, that is unlikely to fix this. It will just look like the latest episode of cancellation. Is it? I feel sympathy for her. But she has also said things like “my truth,” which signal to me she is likely unreformable within the matter of time needed to lead effectively. Strong arguments for adopting Kavlen principles since if universities don’t, then what choice do people have other than to play by the current rules? The current rules implement speech codes by political whim, and under this, it’s cancel or get cancelled. If she isn’t fired or doesn’t resign, then it would be due to people’s sympathy. Why does she deserve it and not Carole Hooven, Tyler VanderWheele, and others were actually fired? Is it because she’s nice and black? I get the loyalty. So I haven’t signed. I haven’t because I think it’s a teaching moment if a point can be made out of the fact that reform is needed, which doesn’t involve creating more DEI.”

    My friend, also at Harvard, wrote back saying they hadn’t signed either, coming down on the side of not calling for her to resign but that Googling her potential involvement in what happened to Roland Fryer might tip me over the line. Indeed, it nearly does. But my entire time at Harvard has been a DEI horror show. I get so many emails each week about DEI that I automatically delete everything from Faculty Affairs, as it is woke ideology 99% of the time.

    So, my thoughts are that this is a teaching moment. The DEI bureaucracy at Harvard is thick. Many people could easily step into Pres. Gay’s role and act exactly if not worse than she has. If we (meaning those who understand the need for educating on the need for adoption of institutional neutrality and free expression) don’t get that message out there to the right people, yes, the moment will be lost and most likely used just to double down on DEI and increase speech restrictions.

    I oppose the selective and hypocritical use of institutional neutrality going on now. Harvard and other universities ought to acknowledge their abysmal biases and track records and then formally adopt Kalven principles.

    2. “But it’s more likely to lead to more DEI without a radical educational reform occurring.”

      Exactly by design – create problems, have solutions ready to “solve” the problems that maintain power :

      “And so the dialectic progresses.”

      -Delgado and Stefancic, 2017

      Dialectical Epistemic Inversion.

      … actually, that IS the “radical” model – of total control on the basis of the secret self-knowledge – gnosis, revealed by the wizards’ circle.

      A substantial return to Enlightenment values and classical liberalism would be another – better – option.

      “Radical” is for Saul Alinsky.

      1. @ThyroidPlanet, oh, well, I can’t say I disagree with you about how “radical” gets used.

        Speaking of similar language issues (i.e., gnosis and all-things euphemism treadmilly), I saw this tweet by Douglas Murray:

        “I see that at the NYTimes ‘Intifada’ has now joined ‘Jihad’ as a semi-mystical term. Impossible to say what it means. Like ‘woman’.”

        https://x.com/DouglasKMurray/status/1733793698696360433?s=20

        So, I agree that by “radical” the last things we need are more language games.

        1. I understood your meaning, and know you understand “radical” – I just wanted to expand/riff on that a bit.

          Cheers

          1. 🙂 The riffing was helpful. It made me think about why I’d chosen “radical.” Clearly, I can’t ignore the influence DEI, CRT, “intersectional” lingo has had on me. Like, why didn’t a different term come to me? Also, I didn’t know about Saul Alinsky, who die six years before I was born, nor his role in social-justice activism. Just looked at his wikipedia page, which uses “radical” 43 times. Thanks 😉

    3. Claudine Gay and Ketanji Brown Jackson are both “DEI hires”. Diversity may be great and good, but not this way.

      I Googled Ronald Fryer + Claudine Gay and came across this “wild” piece of writing:

      The Curious Case of Claudine Gay:
      ======================
      https://www.karlstack.com/p/the-curious-case-of-claudine-gay
      “The reason Gay is so aggressively covering for Enos is that he works in the same niche subfield of “racial threat theory” like her; they cite each other in their papers extensively. Despite this conflict of interest, Gay did not recuse herself from investigating Enos. Rather, she used the opportunity to aggressively cover up his research misconduct. She knows that if his papers are proven to be fake, then her papers will also be proven to be fake — even more fake than they have already proven to be (more on this later). If he goes down, she goes down.”

      And on Bari Weiss’ substack: re: Fryer.
      https://www.thefp.com/p/harvards-war-against-its-superstar

      And Bill Ackman:
      https://twitter.com/BillAckman/status/1733698542315675961

  15. Roz in #14: ” I get so many emails each week about DEI that I automatically delete everything from Faculty Affairs, as it is woke ideology 99% of the time.” A distinguished member of another institution wrote to me about having stopped attending faculty meetings because of the time wasted on woke gobbledegook at these sessions. A nationwide survey might find many, many faculty members who respond in similar fashion to the DEIshchina of the last 7 years. Remarkable to observe that this cultural devolution took only 7 years.

  16. I’m probably going to end up feeling like an idiot, but I’m going to give my two cents.

    Commenter Lianne Byram wrote “I guess I have a different sensibility as a Canadian.”

    Well, I guess I have a different sensibility as a Frenchman.

    It is my understanding that words can trigger acts. Calls for genocides can trigger genocides.

    Personnally, calls for a genocide of the Jews terrify me.

    How can I say this ? Words are acts.

    I understand that what I just wrote runs against something that is sacred to most Americans, and, apparently, to Pr Coyne himself. Sorry for the offense, if any.

  17. Another sensible article of relevance to this thread:

    “What went unsaid at the congressional hearings on antisemitism on college campuses” by Jonathan Zimmerman.

    https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/free-speech-upenn-liz-magill-congress-hearing-antisemitism-college-campuses-20231207.html?s=09

    Trenchant quote:

    “Likewise, Harvard president Claudine Gay dissembled when GOP legislators pressed her about the lack of political diversity at her university. Citing a survey by the Harvard campus newspaper, the lawmakers noted that just 1% of the faculty identifies as conservative.

    Gay replied that she didn’t know if the survey was accurate, and that the university doesn’t keep records on the political leanings of its professors. But there’s a wealth of research demonstrating that university faculty are mostly liberal. You might think that skew is a problem, or you might not. But questioning its existence is dishonest. Period.”

    Yes, the dishonesty. The d*mn, pervasive dishonesty. The double standards. The legalese to lie. The bullsh*t. That’s what universities are known for now. And those three presidents put it on full display. Why? They were utterly unprepared to talk to Republicans because in daily university life, they don’t talk to Republicans! So, they were smug when addressed forcibly and aggressively by the congressional questioners. Perhaps had the university presidents not contributed to cultures at universities in which nearly all speech that smells of rightwardness of Progressiva, they’d have had practice dialoging on intense topics and wouldn’t have dissimulated as they did, making a mockery of academia. Being technically correct on the matter of the First Amendment on campuses, even when bullied into responding yes or no, just came off as lying, given, ironically, the CONTEXT of ignoring their track records on the First Amendment.

    Lord, this is also why people elected Tr*mp. In fact, this university theatre will help his campaign.

    1. The three stuck to the technical interpretation of the 1st amendment even after Stefanik played musical chairs and couched her question in the context of “code of conduct”. That last line of questioning got them in trouble. I think Stefanik deliberately veered away from the 1st amendment – she had referred to it in an initial line of questioning during the same hearing.

      It’s tone deaf to repeat that “it depends on the context”, when asked specifically about ‘code of conduct’ in light of the immediate past; credible evidence presented by the jewish students, aggregated incidents inspiring fear and/or terror – just prior to the hearing – and hundreds of thousands of “Hamas supporters” marching on the streets.

      The technical interpretation did not work – nor should it have. They were not sitting for an exam on the 1st amendment, they were at a public hearing, and are college administrators responsible for the safety of all students, not just some (selective justice). The responses should have been couched differently, respecting the 1st amendment *and* demonstrating -deeper- empathy for jewish students in light of Oct 7. Again, the question that got them in trouble referred to “code of conduct”, not the 1st amendment.

      Agree re: Trump.

    1. Interesting. Yes, it appears that she is ideologically committed to an inappropriate degree given her position.

    2. I rather think that she was appointed BECAUSE of those bona fides. I have lost lock on it, but she made a video of herself in the first day or two after her appointment as President was announced and itwas very clear to me how she saw the job. She has been fully consistent. She is exactly what someone of influence on the Board or the Corporation wanted.

      2. There are rumours from those in the know at Harvard that, in the run-up to her appointment, the Harvard DEI office effectively said (just as Biden did re the Supreme Court) “it has to be a black woman”.

      3. To take up the baton at the end of your comment, Jim, as much as we are castigating these three presidents, all of them were appointed by boards that should also be under scrutiny, indeed, under closer scrutiny, for their roles in fostering the cultures of their respective schools and of endorsing the policies and performances (using this term in its strict business sense) of their administrators.

  19. I have posted too much on this thread today. But I will leave one more article for Ceiling Cat and others, as it is beautifully written and humble, and addresses a way forward. Well-worth reading.

    Last comment from me today.

    “We’ve lost the talent for mutual respect on campus. Here’s how we get it back.”

    By Danielle Allen:

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/12/10/antisemitism-campus-culture-harvard-penn-mit-hearing-path-forward/?pwapi_token=eyJ0eXAiOiJKV1QiLCJhbGciOiJIUzI1NiJ9.eyJyZWFzb24iOiJnaWZ0IiwibmJmIjoxNzAyMTg0NDAwLCJpc3MiOiJzdWJzY3JpcHRpb25zIiwiZXhwIjoxNzAzNTY2Nzk5LCJpYXQiOjE3MDIxODQ0MDAsImp0aSI6IjMxYjIwNTkzLTM2ZTEtNDE1OC05MjcyLWU5Nzc4ZDc1NzEwYyIsInVybCI6Imh0dHBzOi8vd3d3Lndhc2hpbmd0b25wb3N0LmNvbS9vcGluaW9ucy8yMDIzLzEyLzEwL2FudGlzZW1pdGlzbS1jYW1wdXMtY3VsdHVyZS1oYXJ2YXJkLXBlbm4tbWl0LWhlYXJpbmctcGF0aC1mb3J3YXJkLyJ9.8z4L5mMrC0JriuccfhmStbXcssLStJFDKowf0kw-fKw

  20. I agree with these three excellent articles (https://davidlat.substack.com/p/against-free-speech-hypocrisy, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/12/harvard-mit-upenn-free-speech-congressional-hearings/676278/ (might be paywalled-I’ll gift it to PCC(E) if he wants it, https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/12/09/theyre-all-censors-now/) The hypocrisy here is everywhere- the College Presidents who only support free speech when it comes to far-leftists (or Islamist reactionaries in disguise, as many Hamas supporters unquestionably are), and the Republicans who rightly decry cancel culture while themselves supporting censorship (and whose denunciations of anti-Semitism are often insincere -many of them, after all, think that Jews and all other non-Christians are headed for hellfire.) What would be truly great is if there was some kind of Ivy League convention in which all the universities acknowledged their mistakes and signed the Chicago principles in public. But that will never happen.

  23. Don’t rock the boat but if you do, be sure to CYA.. such an absence of genuine, pricipled thinking It’s tiresome watching the same patterns play themselves out.

  24. The memo cited by Elissa (#18) shows that Claudine Gay’s paramount qualification for the US top academic office was not simply being a WOC. Beyond that, and doubtless more important, was that her academic resumé was in the field of DEI and little else. A similar background in DEI is characteristic of the current president of Hamline College, and of Meredith Raimondo, the past vice-president of Oberlin who did such sterling work for the college in the Gibson’s Bakery affair. Ascending from the DEI clerisy to top ranks in US academia will perhaps soon be as normal as the pathway from priesthood to the College of Cardinals is in the other Church.

  25. “As we see above, sometimes it is against the First Amendment to call for genocide.”

    Private speech is never “against the First Amendment,” because the First Amendment is a set of restrictions on government power. Private speech can violate a law that is held by the Supreme Court to be permitted by the First Amendment, but it can never violate the First Amendment.

    Private speech should be described as protected or not protected by the First Amendment, rather than permitted or forbidden. This may seem like a semantic quibble, but I think that the latter framing can lead to some genuine misunderstandings.

  26. During my working career (I’m safely retired now), every company I ever worked for had conduct policies that were far more restrictive than constitutional free speech protections. Publicly criticize or embarrass the company? Gone. Tell off your boss? Gone. Insult or harass employees? Gone. (And these days, as Roz mentioned, simply looking at a woman the “wrong” way gets called harassment.) You didn’t get the pleasure of resigning, either. You had 30 minutes to pack up your stuff and were escorted out the door by building security.

    Complain all you want about your constitutional rights, but if the company considered you a liability, you were out. This is not the irresistible force of government arresting you.

    A university environment, where people are similarly supposed to be working cooperatively toward a shared goal of education (despite what the DEI officials want to accomplish), cannot function if some people are interfering in what others are doing or harassing them as they go about their day. That includes calling for their execution.

    Any such organization must have a conduct policy that states at least that everyone will respect the basic humanity of others and the operation of the school. Civility must not be disparaged as a fault of “whiteness”.

    For any university president not to ensure that there is such a policy, to claim to be unaware of it after more than a day or two on the job, or not to ensure that it is enforced is grounds for being fired for cause.

    This is not a free-speech issue. Kalven principles do not cover it. It is not about what is legal. It is about the purpose of a university.

    1. Absolutely. It’s not a 1st amendment issue, the questions that got “the three” into trouble related to code of conduct. Indirectly, the mission of the university.

  28. I think that calls for genocide shouldn’t be tolerated in institutions that routinely ruin people’s careers over pronouns or cartoons.

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